I meant variation, not “vatiation”
Diogenes, check out Oliver the chimp. There are many other webpages detailing him.
I only came in to talk about Jim the Wonder Dog, but it seems that I was beaten to it.
I just tried Googling up some cites on dog/kid human langague comprehension. What I got suggests that “The average dog can communicate like a child of two and the superdog, like a child of 21/2. In other words, they can be taught to understand as many as 200 words.” That article goes on to suggest that much of that communication depend on body language, tone, and of course training. Human children, though, learn more and more words at an incredible rate. The two-and-a-half-year-old who understands 200 words will comprehend 8000 at the age of five.
Sure it does.
Jim looked to Van Arsdale for his cue. Van Arsdale gave no clue. Jim scanned the crowd until he saw the interested spectator, who understood French, who tensed up visibly (visibly to Jim), unconsciously fluttered a hand in the direction of his pocket, and sucked in his breath as Jim approached.
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*Originally posted by Gary T *
And from here: http://www.roadsideamerica.com/pet/jim.html
"Jim and Sam soon found themselves hauled before a combined session of the state legislature in Jefferson City, where a test had been devised to debunk the dog. In order to preclude any secret signaling, a Morse code message was tapped out (Sam didn’t understand Morse code) instructing Jim to walk to a certain member. Jim did it. The senators and representatives sat dumbfounded as Jim then picked out people with various traits, including the gentleman “ladies speak of as tall and handsome” and the politician that was playing cards instead of paying attention."
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Instead of looking to Sam for his cues, Jim watched whoever was tapping out the code, and also others present who understood Morse.
Jim went to the man who tensed up the most as he approached, although I suspect that he could have watched Sam. Sam obviously knew that someone in the group wore a red sweater; otherwise, he would not have said something so specific. And my guesses here are assuming that these incidents really went down exactly as described and were not exaggerated over the years.
In the last frame of the slideshow accompanying this article, why is the dog being choked?
At what task? At conjugating verbs, which your average human six year old can do with some competence, they would be a dismal failure.
The point is that intelligence is not a single thing with ants at one end of the spectrum and humans at the other. Human intelligence is something completely different from dog intelligence, and both are completely different from chimpanzee intelligence. It is a valid question to ask what facilities they each have in common (there are some), but pointless to expect that a chimp of any intelligence would be equivalent to a human of any intelligence, because they won’t ever be.
That’s not being choked, that looks like the beginning of a petting motion. (See the previous frame.) The dog clearly has an “I’m being scratched and I’m in heaven” look on his face.
My understanding of the comparison between an animal and a child of a certain age is that it’s based on problem-solving logic, not on things that would be species-specific (like reading and speaking for a child, or scenting and tracking for a dog).
There are certain logical milestones that children reach at certain ages. I forget what they are, but the tests consist of hiding toys under blankets and such. For example, below a certain age, if you hide a toy under a blanket in plain view of the baby, he won’t think to look for the toy under the blanket-- he pretty much thinks it doesn’t exist. At a later age, you can hide the toy under a blanket and move it under a second blanket, in plain sight, and he’ll look for it under the first blanket even though he saw it go under the second.
I couldn’t help thinking of this stuff when I watched my cat playing with a ping-pong ball. He chased it down the hallway and saw it go into a large boot that was lying on its side. He looked into the boot, lay down and reached in with a paw, but couldn’t find it (it had gone all the way into the toe). Then he caught sight of the mate to the boot, which was standing up a few inches away (not touching the first boot), and stuck his head inside presumably to see if the ball would have gone into one boot and come out the other…
Yeah, who says it’s the dog’s problem? They seem to have no trouble understanding us.
Yet our best and brightest minds have been trying to have meaningful interaction with cetaceans and the higher apes for some time, and–highly disputed results aside–have largely failed.
Obviously, we humans are on the “special” end of the ape, dolphin, and dog bell curves.
This makes a terrible lot of sense. However, human children leave dogs in the dust very quickly indeed. I forget how old a baby is when it can first recognize itself in the mirror. Do dogs ever make that connection?