On a repeat of QI i saw the other day, Stephen Fry said that an Alsation couldn’t join the Spanish army (could have been the Portugese) as it only had an IQ of 60, and the minimum of IQ needed to join was 70 (i think the numbers are correct, forgive me if not but they aren’t too important right now…).
What i was wondering however, is how is an animals IQ tested?
What would a cats IQ be? Is it higher? Is that why cats can be trusted to come and go through the cat flap as they please, whilst a dog is likely to go get itself run over? Could a cat join the Spanish army?
‘Alsatian’ can also conceivably be taken to mean a person from Alsace, a region in France adjacent to Germany (and historically often disputed between the two). So I guess there’s a pun in there somewhere; perhaps some more context would help.
While it is difficult to compare the notion of IQ across species, it’s not that difficult to compare individuals of a given species providing that the species in question has enough intelligence to measure in the first place.
If I recall, the original ranking was based on how long it took a dog to learn a particular task. The stupid breeds took much much longer. Obviously there is some overlap among all breeds since intelligence is largely genetic and no population of dogs is a perfectly identical genetic pool.
The notion that we can’t measure intelligence, or that it’s not very useful, (hinted at in posts above), is silly. While it’s not a perfect proxy for how functional one is in society, you don’t want your chemotherapy regimens being decided by someone low on the IQ scale, and folks low on the IQ scale are not the ones who brought us MP3 players and the Hoover Dam.
Officially, Germany, though the people overwhelmingly wanted to be French again and so probably didn’t fight that enthusiastically. I don’t know which army their dogs joined. It was returned to France in 1919 under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles.
