Why not? Dogs come in every variation possible-small, large, soft coat, wirey coat. So how many generations would it take to breed a canine genius?
Supposedly, Border Collies and Jack Russels ARE the geniuses of the dog world, but no dog’s brain is wired for speech (and other things, as well), so Sweet Polly Purebread is SOL.
Intelligence (in some form) is a breeding characteristic, but not so much as other more readily measurable traits. An ability to perceive and act upon human emotions and communication may be the driving force in the evolution of domestic dogs, and general intelligence is an important factor in any wild predator.
The question here is not whether you could breed more intelligent dogs but how much more intelligence could you breed into dogs. Possibly it’s hit its limit already in various shepherd dogs like the Border Collie. Intensive breeding doesn’t seem likely to increase the brain size or change the brain configuration of dogs, though I suppose you wouldn’t know for sure until it was tried. The widely disparate form of dog breeds now started with characteristics of dogs that bred freely which were then reinforced. If you start with the most intelligent dogs now you might breed something hitting a new high on some kind of dog intelligence score but that doesn’t mean you’ll go off the charts and begin to approach human level intelligence.
This calls for speculation, but can any breeders comment on temper and disposition and trainability? I’m guessing that this has been significantly selected in the breeding process already, so maybe not much room to go forward with standard breeding.
BTW. I’m talking docility here- I’m not looking for Cujo, here.
I read somewhere that humans and dogs have been interacting for 20,000+ years. Not all of that interaction involved selective breeding, but you can imagine that docile animals were allowed to stick around around while more aggressive animals were frightened off or eaten.
Some people rightly claim that humans didn’t train dogs so much as dogs trained humans. My dog is a purebred PRT (Parson Russell Terrier) and is way too smart for his own good.
I think the problem would become, how do you quantify a dog’s intelligence. Dogs are already quite smart at dog stuff. If we selectively bred dogs that we think are smart, we might just end up with dogs that are good at learning tricks. We might not end up with smart dogs as much as we would have dogs that are better at understanding what we are trying to get them to do.
Dogs are bred to have a strong desire to hunt birds and only birds. I have had bird dogs that would sit in their kennel watching the sky for birds. I had one dog that would follow airplanes to the airport which is about 12 miles away.
As for intelligence i suspect you would have to be very selective about the type of intelligence you were looking for and then be able to readily identify it.I don’t see why not. Just for example, racing greyhounds are primarily bred for a magical balance between sprint speed and stamina. But they are also secondarily bred to be biddable and easy to handle. They’re frequently given physical inspections before and/or after races and training sessions, so they’re used to having their legs stretched out in front or behind to check range of motion, having their mouths and teeth checked, etc. Vets love them because they’re so easy to work with. That’s why they have that marvellous easy-going disposition. I think it’s interesting that race horses are so high strung and pissy, but race dogs are so mellow and sweet.
Trainability is a different thing and actually contains many aspects of intelligence. Some breeds like collies learn things quickly and are very eager to please. Other breeds, like my greyhounds, are smart but have a “what’s in it for me” mentality and are harder to train because of that.
For a mutt, you seem pretty smart, except for your spelling of Purebred and Russells. Not bad, though, for a canine.
I don’t have a GQ-quality answer to the OP, but intelligence seems to be harder to breed than other aspects. For example, it has done wonders for humans, in terms of becoming the most dominant predator ever, and yet no other animal has come close to your (human) level of intelligence.
It’s even tougher to breed in a chocolate bar.
When we were raising guide dogs there was a distinct difference between them in terms of intelligence. We had a pet border collie mix who was a genius dog. We bought him a treat machine which gave a treat when the dog paws a little bar. He solved that in under a second. When one of our guide dog puppy Labs got career changed we put it in front of him. He never figured it out, even when our pet dog showed him how it worked.
So I suspect we’ve bred for intelligence already, though there are limits.
OK, I was whooshed for almost 50 years with Polly, give a dog a bone and clue me in.
From what I understand, we have bred a lot of the intelligence out of dogs. Their cranial capacity has shrunken from their wolf ancestors…according to a PBS program on dogs.
An older acquaintance once said he was sure his German Shepherd had a vocabulary of 25 or more words it could understand. (Like “go fetch my slippers”)
The problem with forced breeding for a characteristic is it typically comes at the expense of other attributes. A radio show I heard once on heritage breeds and modern farming mentioned that modern oversized pigs are meat factories but so stupid that the sow has to be restrained in a cage to prevent her rolling over on her piglets, whereas heritage breed pigs are as smart as dogs. Many purebreds - dogs and horses - are notorious for being “high strung”. Some dog breeds are notorious for hip problems. Modern high-producing milk cows are also remarkably stupid, inbred animals.
The thing is that breeding over very long times for intelligence gives the breeding cycle a chance to also weed out other deleterious characteristics, while accumulating mutations for “smart”. Forced breeding would generally end up including a very small incestuous pool of “smart” genes with whatever genetic baggage comes along.
That’s the other issue - you could only breed as smart as the gene pool allows. Evolution is generally an accumulated series of beneficial mutations. Smart genes don’t “pop up” because we’re looking for them. The happen as mistakes in coding, and so each improvement is selection from thousands of rolls of the dice. That takes time.
At least two other animals have gotten quite close indeed: H. neanderthalis and H. florensiensis. If you mean just non-Homo animals, then the proper point of comparison is not any one of us three species, but of whatever our most recent common ancestor is. And it’s worth noting that both of the other sapient human species went extinct from the same cause: Competition with us.
True, I hadn’t thought of those. It may illustrate my point, though. Intelligence is such a powerful tool that it helped humans out-compete other Homos (uhhh…) and take over the world. Other useful adaptations (sight and flight, for example) get reinvented over and over again. If intelligence were easy to come by (that is, easy to breed into a species), you’d think that other non-Homo animals would have gone that route.
I know that evolution is undirected, but it does seem to repeat itself with certain traits. Why not with intelligence? My guess is that it must just be hard to do. Which tells me that the answer to the OP is, no, you’ll never breed a dog that can play Go Fish.
Just interbreed them with coyotes or wolves. Both species are vastly more intelligent than dogs. The only thing dogs can do better than them is read human expressions and react appropriately.
There is a reason why large agile carnivores who live in our houses have to be dumbed down.
From what I understand dogs werent intentionally dumbed down. Since they no longer had to hunt or survive in the wild and because they were fed and protected by humans they didnt need the extra brain capacity. Think of them as canine Gen Xers. 
Understand that any trait - strength, running speed, intelligence, good eyesight, sense of smell… all come with a price.
An animal that is smart and fast will lose out to a dumber animal that is much faster, as long as that latter animal is smart enough to catch the prey it runs down. Carrying extra brain power will not be productive and will slow a cheetah down. Same for dog or human muscles. Or brains. Both need protein to function well, do not do well in times of less food. (Our brains allegedly consume 1/3 of the calories we take in). Evolution will fine-tune an animal for the niche it occupies, it does best at getting food in that niche.
A dog or wolf need only be as smart as necessary to hunt, stalk, and run down their food in cooperative packs. So current genes produce a dog/wolf with a certain range of intelligence. You can perhaps select for the upper end of that range, but they don’t get progressively smarter beyond that.
What evolution does, is that if the creature benefits from more intelligence for the ecological niche it occupies, then any mutations that add to that intelligence will survive and thrive and become common in the species over time. To get to our level of intelligence via selection would require millennia of waiting for the appropriate mutations to arise and then recognizing and breeding for them.
I have a border collie mix, and he’s very smart. He knows at least 60 commands (that’s 60 that I have written down) and understands human body language so that we don’t even need to give him a lot of commands. He’s also quite biddable, in the sense that he wants to please us. He’s also quite good at getting what he wants.
I do think he has a sense of time. I go out the door in the morning, come home in the afternoon, and he’s happy, but not all that frantically happy. I go out of state for three weeks, and when I come home he is delirious.
Also, a year ago we lost one of our cats. Last week the other cat had surgery and was gone for a day and a half. When he came home and got out of his carrier my dog carried on just exactly as if this were one of my friends he hadn’t seen in a long time. He was happy to see the cat! This was a total surprise because I didn’t even think they were friends. But I digress.
The reason dogs don’t appear as smart as wild canines is that their long association with humans has turned them into perpetual adolescents. Wolves and coyotes grow up, because it’s that or die. Dogs can become feral, but they’re still a pack of adolescents, basically. (Or maybe they really have been dumbed down on purpose; but I think it was just a consequence of their reliance on humans.)
H. neanderthalensis and H. floresiensis, both commonly misspelled.
But we don’t know a whole hell of a lot about the intelligence of H. floresiensis in order to differentiate it from other, earlier species of Homo most of which could be lumped under the terms H. erectus or H. heidelbergensis or other terms often used to designate early members of our genus, post-habilis.