eating does seem to be serious (if not terminal) species supremicism.
I’ve objectified thousands of women, and eaten a fair percentage, but I never digested them and used them for amino acids…
I don’t think we can even pretend to have a serious debate if we’re using terms like “species supremacism.” Anyway, this isn’t the first time I’ve read that dogs are comparable to small children in terms of intelligence, so it doesn’t really change anything for me. Even before I was a vegetarian I wouldn’t have eaten a dog, and I don’t think intelligence has ever played a role in that debate. Pigs are supposed to be quite intelligent.
We can still eat Hot dogs, right?
Not especially surprising to me, as I can state that I’ve known several standard poodles capable of a similar task. “Get the soccer ball.” “Try the bedroom.” “Where’s Mommy? Bring her back here.” “Hey, get the fluffy ball. Give it to Ripley.”
On the other hand, this is what you’d call a periodic swing. Back in the 70s, they were insisting dogs had no self-awareness and were pure automatons.
Did you just compare training a dog with object-oriented programming?
Visual Dog Studio ++
I have a Border Collie, which is the same breed as the dog in the study (and perhaps the smartest of all dog breeds), and I can attest to their high intelligence. Our dog routinely learns new tricks after showing her once or twice. If I say, “Go get your toy”, she’ll run around the house until she finds her current favorite, and bring it to me. If I say, “Where’s Smith?”, she’ll run off and find my daughter. If I say, “Get your ball”, she’ll run around looking for the ball, ignoring her other toys. And that just scratches the surface. We talk to her like a human, and she responds. If we’re leaving, and say, “See you later, Katie”, she’ll just lie down and watch us go. If we don’t say anything, she’ll run to the back door, sit, and watch us. If we say, “you want to go with us?” she goes berserk with joy. I talk with her all the time. If she’s pestering me while I’m typing (generally by just staring at me - Border Collies do that), I’ll say “Would you go lie down please?” - and she will.
I’m sure much of this is pure action-response conditioning. She hears the words “lie down” in the sentence, and that’s all she needs to know. But sometimes her level of understanding is uncanny.
She’s also a great problem solver. The other day I left a bag of chips on the kitchen counter, sealed with a spring-loaded sealer. When i came home, the chip bag was in the living room, sealer removed and sitting neatly beside it. The bag wasn’t ripped open, but the chips were gone. We traced out what happened by following faint dog prints and knocked-over stuff. Our kitchen has an ‘eating bar’. Her dog crate is on the other side of the bar. The chips were across the kitchen, but the counter goes all the way around. The dog jumped on her crate, over the eating bar, and she walked the entire length of the counter to get to the chips. She picked them up, walked back, jumped back down onto her crate, and took them to the living room. Then she pried the sealer off with her teeth, jammed her nose in the bag, and had lunch. Smart dog. Too smart, apparently.
But the king of animal intelligence is still Alex the Parrot. He’s learning to read.
Eh, rats can do similar things and nobody cares. Probably cuz they’re “ew gross”.
Anyway, if a person eats dogs I don’t think this discovery will change much for them 
. As Marley said, pigs are just as smart and that doesn’t stop people from eating nice crispy bacon.
Intelligence doesn’t really matter.
Language is much more than just naming things, even being able to abstract a name to a class of things instead of a particular thing. Dogs can’t use negation, ask questions, understand counterfactuals, hypotheticals, or fictional statements. They can’t talk about the past or about events outside of their vicinity. They can’t apply known syntax to new words or create novel utterances in order to do all those things. These aspects of language are trivial for even very young children and you don’t even have to teach them to do it. You just talk in front of them and sometimes to them.
I’m a vegetarian anyway.
Border collies are, at least according to ‘The Intelligence of Dogs’, the smartest breed. Poodles come in second.
And I can tell you that my dog can watch something on TV, come to a conclusion, and ask questions about it when things are ‘wrong’. He likes nature shows. Especially involving bears. (He has also discovered how to use the remote. Not well, but he can turn the TV on about half the time. The other half he accidentally shuts the cable box off.) So, it’s a show about bears. Forest, bear going back and forth. Then in the distance, a blind opens, and a researcher steps out into the woods. The dog runs to the screen, sniffs at the man industriously, and acts upset that he is present. It seemed obvious that he felt the man did not belong in the story.
He’s also recognized a uncle at Westminster’s. (Poodle that won a few years back.) We’re watching it. Poodles come and go. Dogs come and go. All of a sudden, standard poodle comes out, and he charges the TV and, well, paws on either side and tries to climb in. Not sure that he recognized it as the uncle, but the family resemblance was strong.
He’ll also tell us if he’s yammering about a squirrel, heron, cat, dog, rabbit, or deer, if we ask him, by becoming noticably more excited at the correct word, with about a ninety percent accuracy.
Intelligent, yes. Communicates, sure. Understands language… not even close. It doesn’t matter how smart the dog is, it doesn’t matter how smart any non-human animal is. Language is not a skill that derives from general intelligence. Humans have evolved both physiology and specialized mental modules that give us our language ability and no other animals have it, not even the other primates who are “closest” to us in evolutionary terms.
if the dog is the compiler, maybe…
I remember watching sheep ranchers and their border collies put through the paces with a herd of sheep at local fairs when I was in Oz.
It was like watching magic. It wasn’t a Pavlov thingie with the dog doing only was it was ordered to do. The dog was trained to think and act depending upon the changing conditions. Herding sheep is almost as bad as herding cats and the top finishers did it with ease, with limited to no direction from their human counterparts.
Anyone who has been around dogs long enough knows that the communication is beyond mere mimic and Pavlov salivating. Research is finally quantifying what many have known for generations.
there are a variety of observed interactions between dogs and humans that argue for a very high level of interspecies understanding
Of course, no post from the king of the visigoths would be complete without the appearance of the fabled
…CROWN OF FOIL!!!..
[foil crown on]
one problem plaguing these experiments is that the data flow is confounded (imho) by subliminal (for humans, at least) scent transactions, and, [crown on and antenna up] magnetic flux interactions (which are probably subliminal for the dog too)
[antenna down, foil crown off]=
Thus what we take for reasoning may be the outcome of, you should pardon the expression, quasi telepathic transactions, or partly so.
I refer for support to the curious fact that your dog knows you will be home before you get there.
maybe he smells you (occam says, open this door.)
maybe he senses a disturbance in the force
maybe he reads the mind of a human in the house who has the time matrix understanding to respond to the clock
maybe the dog responds to the clock, ie, shadows
well, now we are in the territory where the rubber meets the road.
if they can use language and reason, can they impose the kind of organizationn on the universe that separates :me from not me?
If so, can they contemplate their own death?
If yes, don’t eat’em
it’s bad juju.
I guess what has me freadked is that this inner programming job of theirs is occurring in the absence of hands with which to sign oor hominid palattes.
so how do they bootstrap themselves over the Great Gorge of Chomsky, and through the enchanted forest of Bowlby??
If you dont mind the odd bit of spinal and brain tissue that was blasted off the downer cow carcass, sure…
I was being arch, but there is an unmistakable, indeed a frank, odor of exploitation when one species preys upon another. I’m not trying to rock the boat, I’m just sayin’…
I think this is a likely explanation. Assuming it’s valuable for an animal to know the time of day, at least in relation to night/daylight (“better not range too far - it’s almost dark and I have to get back to the den”, or “I’ve been out long enough - the puppies should be hungry”), then it wouldn’t be surprising that some animals have developed a pretty good sense of time, cued by things like shadow lengths, quality of light, perhaps changing sound cues (the road outside the house gets busier around suppertime, etc). They might not know they are ‘telling time’, but they are compelled to start thinking about their master at the right time, for a reason they don’t understand.
Border collies are freaky intelligent. I worked at a kennel several years ago, and I will never forget the day I had to bathe two border collies who lived together. The bathtub was only big enough to fit one dog, and because it was waist high, most dogs had to be lifted into it.
I washed one dog while the other sat on the floor next to me. When I was finished with the first one, I casually said, “Alright, get out.” The dog, which hadn’t been the least bit ansy throughout the process, leapt out of the tub. The other dog then hopped in and looked at me as if to say, “Let’s get this show on the road, child”. I was floored.
I have no problem believing dogs understand language.
I think we’re going to be hearing a lot of unnerving stories about animal intelligence in the near future. It’s especially troubling for me, as (not to put too fine a point on it) kill animals in a routine basis to conduct science experiments. I’ve never been enthusiastic about it, but I expected to get more used to it as time went on. Instead, I’ve become more and more uncomfortable with animal research, though I have no doubts about its appropriateness in the grander scheme. It’s a personal distaste I just have to deal with.
I have a cat that I’ve raised since kittenhood, and while he’s a little freak, I really do consider him to be my friend, and I really do think he’s got some rudiments of intelligence. He does understand words, he responds to them in context, and he’s very good at solving problems. One time, I watched flabbergasted as he tried to turn a doorknob to get out of a room. I’m not kidding: He stood up on his little hind legs, whilst using his front paws, one on either side of the doorknob, to twist it. In all seriousness, he almost got it to work, but gave up after about a minute. I wished like crazy at that moment that I had latches instead of doorknobs, because I’m sure he would have figured it out well enough to use them, clearly just by watching me.
On the subject of this very story, NPR ran a piece yesterday, in which, additionally to the brainy Border Collie, they had a woman instruct a bonobo to put pine-needles into a refrigerator. The chimp did as she was told, despite the absurdity of the request, and despite the fact she had never done that before. Her trainers claim she can even discuss human conversations she has overheard, with clear (albeit rudimentary) understanding. It’s really quite astonishing. It seems that while these animals don’t often use their brains to communicate very linguistically, they harbor that capacity, and if taught properly and at a young age, can display cognitive skills we previously thought impossible.