Okay, that’s close. Yes, he wanted to stay on the couch. But that was the first time he screamed like that. He was annoyed that he got hauled off the couch. (He was a greyhound, a breed generally recognized as being sensitive. I’ve seen more than one of them, when yelled at sharply for doing something wrong, give the yeller the most wounded, offended look.)
Can you provide a citation? I’m not asking you to prove a negative, but can you pull anything out of the primate ASL research where the researchers have concluded this? It seems to me that some of the more recent primate ASL studies have gotten very close, if not accomplished this. I do remember reading that in one of them that keeps a breeding colony, the chimpanzees were actually teaching each other ASL. That’s not fluency that you were talking about, but it shows a very high level of intelligence and possibly fluency. I’m not interested enough in primate studies to really follow them that closely, though.
You never met Cheyenne, a German Shepherd that my mother in law had. She was never taught even basic obedience, but was a scary smart dog. She communicated very clearly in body language. But more to the point, here’s an anecdote: once when hubby was visiting, she engaged him in a game of fetch in the living room. While he chatted with his mom, he’d toss a ball into the other room, the dog would fetch it and bring it back. After three or four retrievals, the ball was soggy and gross. Hubby told her “go and get the other ball”. She took the soggy ball over to her toy box and got a dry one and took it to him.
Oversimplified because you’re ignoring the issue of maturity. A 4 year old human is not equipped for survival on her own. Also you don’t say how old the dog is that you’re comparing to her. If you’re talking about the mature equivalent of a 4 year old child, say a one month old puppy, then they’d both perish together. If you are thinking of an adult dog, then Sally should also be an adult.
There is evidence (some, but it’s building) that various species ARE capable of cognition (various species), planning ahead (wolves), remembering (elephants), and designing and constructing things (birds). I think the key in your argument is the bolded part. Can you elaborate on that, given my examples? What extent is needed, do you think?
Because they’ve learned that that look makes the person relent and maybe pet them or reward them in some way. Or that’s the look that tells their leader that they submit and would rather not be punished. I’m not saying dogs can’t figure out what to do to get a result they want; I dispute calling it emotion or wisdom.
This, and the fact that there is a difference between pain and suffering, still don’t make me think it’s perfectly fine to inflict pain on an animal unnecessarily. But it is a world of difference between that and hurting a human.
Sorry I don’t have time right now to find the latest research, but a quick perusal of Wikipedia finds this info on three of the more famous cases.
Washoe learned approximately 350 words of ASL.
Nim Chimpsky learned 125 signs.
*Koko understands approximately 1,000 ASL signs and 2,000 English words. Although the gorilla learned a large number of signs she never understood grammar or symbolic speech, and hasn’t displayed any cognition beyond that of a 2-3 year old child.
There may well be better, more recent results, and I’ll try to find those when I have more time. But the point is that these examples show that (at least in these cases) several decades of training didn’t improve their language skills beyond that of a toddler. And my overall point is that these animals possess a much higher intelligence than would be indicated by their human language skills, which is contrary to Wolfpup’s continuum idea that posits only one type of intelligence. Clearly these animals do not exhibit the level of human intelligence required to master ASL.
*I hesitate to include Koko, because the integrity of her training is highly questionable, and I don’t want to get into that here. Suffice it to say, the results reported by her trainer might best be characterized as the upper bound of her trainer’s imagination.
She sounds like an amazing animal.
If you’ll read back in the post, you’ll see that the original comparison was between 4-year old Sally and a “dog [that] had been exposed to human language daily for ten years.” Again my point is that the doll test is not a fair assessment of the dog’s intelligence.
The examples you gave can all be attributed to instinct and the type of intelligence that those animals have evolved. The ‘extent’ to which I was referring might be exemplified by the planning, design, and construction of a nuclear power plant.
Is it? When I ask my dog if he “wants to go to the park” or “wants to go for a walk”, what is all the jumping around at the door all about? Or how about when his favorite human friend comes to visit? He’ll rush to the door as he always does, and when he sees who it is, the excitement is even more frantic, and after a few moments of joyful jumping, he’ll rush away to the back of the house, and come running back with his favorite squeaky toy, the one with the handle that you use to play tug-of-war, and present it to his buddy, squeaking away like there’s no tomorrow. What’s that all about? And when I tell him that he’s a bad dog, and he slinks slowly away to his room (yes, he has a room :)) what’s that about?
This is not the kind of observation that I or anyone can support with a scientific citation. It’s something that you come to know with experience. I will quote here just a couple of excerpts from an article that was written by Bill Branon sometime in the mid-90s, originally in the San Diego Union-Tribune and reprinted in many other newspapers. I wish I could post the the whole thing, but these short excerpts convey the spirit of what I’m saying. It’s about a German Shepherd named Charka, born, to quote a doctor at the time, with “the worst case of hip dysplasia I’ve ever seen”.
But … “you just had to see this dog,” Branon continues:
She could open closets and bring out slippers or jogging shoes, whatever was on the boss’s schedule. She could push open screen doors with her nose to deliver an old tennis ball or a rock she thought we should have. She knew where the chow bag and treats were hidden, and she would intently indicate where these treasures were cached when it was time to eat. Because her legs were compromised, she learned to experience the joy of running by lying on her back and running in the air – tail wagging, head moving side to side, jaws grabbing at passing cuffs and shoes and hands until she stopped, out of breath, eyes sparkling, tail thumping the rug in the afterglow of her exercise.
Charka had a vocabulary of more than 40 words – all the usual ones like “car”, “ball”, “walk”, “go out”, etc. and some very specialized ones: “ticket” (those tear-out cards stuck between the pages of magazines which she would weed out and destroy because she had. watched me do the same), and “who’s coming” (when she would go to the window, determine stranger or family and go to the appropriate entry).
This is how her life ended:
When we took Charka into our family in her early years, we owned an elderly male mixed-breed dog named Sam who had a special rubber ball he carried everywhere. The day Sam died and was about to be covered in his backyard grave, Charka came over and looked down at him. She went off behind the house and retrieved that ball, came back to us, and dropped the ball into the grave with Sam. She lay down on those funny legs of hers and looked at us. I don’t know what she was thinking, if she was thinking at all. I only write what she did.
I put these words to paper to relate what I believe to be a valid observation about animals, something that should be said to you and for your pets. A wise and compassionate vet put it best: “She will tell you when it’s time.”
Animals know. And they will let you know, if you care enough to listen. To grasp straws in the name of compassion, to subject an animal to empty procedure, to let love decimate reality is wrong. Hear them. Let them make it easier for you.
On the afternoon of the day she died, Charka suffered a type of spasm that had first occurred three weeks earlier. In the course of these episodes, severe lower-body contractions caused her stomach to displace laterally, resulting in a compressed spleen and rapid, trapped-air bloating of the stomach itself. On the occasion of the first attack, the attending vet said it was an extremely painful situation, one usually fatal. Charka recovered from that first episode and had partially recovered from the second by the time we got her to the emergency animal hospital on that final night.
As Charka lay on her chest on the examination table, while the vet explained the surgical choices to my wife, I looked into Charka’s eyes. She looked right at me. She didn’t cock her head to one side in that inquisitive, what-do-we-do next mode that German shepherds pull on you when there is a playful choice to be made – a ball to be thrown or a new word to be fathomed.
Those eyes were the eyes of the ages, of evolution, of a species that doesn’t regard death in the intellectual subjective as do we. Those eyes said it was time. She put a paw on my wrist. And I was swept to a sad but privileged place.
Yes, it is.
So what? Unlike explanations, for astrophysical phenomena or anything else, intelligence is functionally defined and empirically observed. If we agree on what behaviors would constitute intelligence, and we observe them, then it’s intelligence by definition.
I don’t disagree with anything you said there or anywhere else in that post. I just have no idea why you think it contradicts anything I said about intelligence being a continuum, and human intelligence being different only in degree from that of other animals. The fact that other animals are closer to nature and their intelligence is indeed in many ways adapted to their natural worlds makes it all the more remarkable that we can elicit completely unrelated advanced behaviors that conform to human norms.
Maybe you should ask yourself how come we seem to have adapted these kinds of cognitive skills that have “no evolutionary advantage” and that “comes with significant disadvantages” at just about exactly the same time that we stopped evolving physical skills like strength and speed, and lost the marvelous ability to hang from tree branches by our toes. We were more skewed along one evolutionary pathway than most other animals, but most have evolved along multiple pathways at the same time. “Differences of degree”. Keep repeating that to yourself.
Any number of things may appear to be the result of intelligence while they’re really just a lack of understanding on the part of the observer. See Clever Hans.
Let’s think of this intelligence continuum as a tall mountain with Uncle Cecil standing at the top. The average human is some ways down the slope, and 4-year old Sally is closer to the bottom. Judging strictly by the “Put the doll on the table” test, the 10-year old dog would be somewhere below Sally. Remember that the only reason the dog failed the test was a lack of intelligence, there were no physical limitations that would have prevented the dog from putting the doll on the table. In order to find a human capable of surviving in the woods, we need to find Survivor Person, about halfway between Sally and Average Person. This means that to find a dog with high enough intelligence to survive in the woods, we’ll also have to go to the level of Survivor Person. Since the average dog is below Sally, any dog as high as Survivor Person has to be super intelligent for a dog. The only conclusion we can draw is that nearly every dog would die in the woods.
A more reasonable analogy would be that intelligence is a different mountain for every animal. Humans are spread out on the slopes of Cecil Mountain, dogs are on an adjacent mountain (where Average Dog is at an elevation comparable to Survivor Person), chimps have their own mountain, etc. Each animal (including humans) stays on their own mountain. Some animals can do things that are more natural to other mountains, they just can’t do them as well.
I’ve already explained my belief as to how humans evolved higher intelligence and complex speech concurrently. The rest of this paragraph just seems to be incoherent.
I don’t have any particular argument with this but based on my personal experience with animals and all my reading, I think the only thing that separates the human “mountain” from other species’ mountains are language skills. Basically my intuition tells me that Wolfpup is probably right about his continuum of intelligence theory, but the inability to communicate makes us seem much more different than we are. Keep in mind that the ability to communicate is not just applying words to thought, but there is a huge cultural component as well. Even within human society, there are cultures that have no words (so they have no concept for it) for various things that other cultures do have words/concepts for. I can’t think of a good example at the moment, but… maybe how there are different words for different kinds (e.g. familial, motherly, romantic, etc.) of love in other languages, but in English we only have “love”?
Also, humans for a very long time have been searching for reasons why we’re superior to animals. At various points in history it was believed that the thing that separated us (read: made us better) from animals was:
a) we had opposable thumbs… until someone noticed that primates and racoons do too.
b) the size of our brain in relation to our body… until someone studied elephants
c) the ability to make and use tools… until someone observed primates fishing for termites and crows making toys to play with
b) we had language… until someone noticed that various species communicate within their social groups (and this research is ongoing, we’ve only recently identifed that dolphins and some species of birds have individual labels (in other words, names) used to identify and/or call each other.
I think this is going to continue, with us stating some characteristic that we have uniquely and someone else documenting that it’s not unique to our species after all.
That connection between language and intelligence is exactly what I was saying earlier. Only I think it’s more than just making us seem different. I believe that higher intelligence and complex language are interdependent. Without higher intelligence, complex speech wouldn’t be very useful, and vice versa.
A human child learns to speak mostly from listening to others speak. Even children who can’t speak, still learn to understand the language and can be taught to read when they’re old enough. So if animals have the same intelligence as humans, shouldn’t the ones raised with human families be able to understand human language to a very high level? You shouldn’t have to train them with one-word commands; Sit, Stay, Fetch. In fact, why couldn’t you teach them to read?
The idea that animals have the same kind of intelligence as humans, only a different degree, seems to be elitist. Instead of looking at a gorilla as a smart, magnificent animal, we see a big dumb ape that can’t learn any more than a two-year-old; likewise a dog that has to be taught short, specific phrases. If you have a continuum, then every animal would occupy a specific place on that continuum. Are all animals really at the bottom of the mountain?
This has been an enjoyable discussion, and it’s obvious that nobody is on the verge of changing their position. ***Why won’t you people listen to me?!?! ***(Just kidding)
Some dogs have learned to understand human language at a very high level. Not “design the next electric car” level of course, but well enough for average social communications. For example Cheyenne who I mentioned earlier in the thread. Dogs seem to be a step above other species because they seem better able to intuitively understand human moods, facial expressions and body language. Researchers are studying this now. I’ve noticed it with my hounds. Although I grew up in a rural environment surrounded by dogs, cats, and farm animals, I considered myself more of a “cat person”. Then we adopted our dogs and they’ve blown my mind with how intuitive and easy our relationship is. The cat behaves as if we’re large, odd animals that live in the house with her and do bizarre things but feed and pet her. She’s sociable enough to follow us around and seek affection, but there’s zero actual communication. The dogs behave as if there was no species difference, they communicate with us using body language and things we do don’t seem to befuddle them. I can point at food on the floor and they’ll look and get it, I can beckon for them to come to me and they will. If I act like I’m having fun or curious about something, they’ll join me in the fun or to see what I’m curious about.
We lucked on a good trainer when we got the first dog, I think. She taught us that dogs learn sign language much more easily than verbal commands, so she had us teach our dogs hand signals and then later tie the behavior to words. That was a great foundation because it made us be more aware of giving them contradictory signals and also made us more observant of their body language. (Ever see someone chasing a loose dog, calling it to come in a very angry tone of voice? That’s a good example of contradictory communication: the command says come, the chase and tone of voice says to run away.)
Sometimes I think language is an obstacle between us and animals for that reason. I’ve noticed that the better pet owners are sensitive enough to pick up on the nuances of the animal’s mood and behavior and so get along better, while the crappy owners are oblivious and don’t understand why the animals do things (and the animal thinks his owner is a confusing mess).
I think this attitude that you describe is one way people fight claims that animals are inferior to humans, which is REALLY elitist. By pointing out that they are just as intelligent as we are is a way to “level the playing field” so that we can at least discuss the issue. I know that I’ve gotten into arguments in the past with people who basically see animals as objects that don’t deserve any more consideration than a daffodil. For those people, animals aren’t just at the bottom of the mountain, they’re downright disposable, put here for us to blow our noses on and then throw away.
Bad example. Hans was indeed clever, albeit not in the way envisioned. More emotional intelligence than purely intellectual, but still a type of intelligence.
