Based on an explanation I heard from a hunter describing sabuesos as “the dumbest dogs ever, actually the dumbest animals ever, those idiots make sheep look smart”, that particular breed tends to produce dogs which are
a bitch to train (they can eventually be trained to pee outside, but “sit” is too long a word, making transporting them to the hunting grounds a problem),
have the attention span of a mayfly,
actually, they seem to suffer from canine ADHD,
will go haring after the wrong kind of prey 90% of the time.
He preferred a mongrel with a middling nose to a sabueso with the best nose in the world, he said, because the ratty-looking mongrel will be able to comprehend “oooh, if I sit down when the car moves, I don’t hit myself against its doors!”
Mind you, sometimes I see very-stupid owners: the ones who don’t understand that “sit” works best when aided by a hand on the puppy’s ass, the ones who take the dog for a walk and go a lot faster than their little guy is comfortable with (and what do you mean “I need to pee!”? You pee when and where I say!)…
I had to give away a 16 week old $250 Schipperke pup. Couldn’t keep it in the yard. It would escape within 10 min in the yard. I have these folding child gates to close off the kitchen. I’d leave her in the kitchen and she got out every time. She climbed the frigging gate. This was a small dog that stood 12 inches high climbing a three foot tall gate.
She would have been roadkill before long. So I gave her to someone that had a newer, better & taller chain link fence.
I’ve owned several dogs and thats the only one that wouldn’t stay inside the fence.
Good on you for rescuing! At the risk of a hijack, I’ll suggest something that worked for us when we rescued a foot-shy, abused dog. Sadie would flinch and “go to ground” if I stumbled or if I stepped off the curb and my shoe sole slapped the ground. What helped her was that we’d take off our shoes while watching TV in the evening and gently pet her with our feet. She’s not completely over flinching if we make a loud noise but she’s made massive progress on not being afraid of feet.
Our current dog, Duchess, is the stupidest dog we have ever owned. Not really her fault - she’s a Boston Terrier, and previously we have had dachshunds and dobermans.
She is good natured, eager to please, and very easy to train but she has never spontaneously had an idea in her life. What can you say about a dog who doesn’t even try to steal food?
I dated a girl who named her dog “Stupid”. He was.
Dave Barry has written often about the stupidity of his dogs and those belonging to people he knows (To be fair, he also wrote about the stupidity of dog owners ).
For animals renowned as highly intelligent (and with plenty of excellent examples in real life and in fiction), dogs often “fail to live up to the hype”.
I hear this sometimes about cats, too. But more often, cats seem to be smarterthan p[eople think they ought to be. I don’t know if this is due to cats actually being smart, or to lower expectations.
You know, I once read a horror story about a (human’s) hand that was Possessed By A Demon. I didn’t know that dogs could have paws that were similarly possessed.
I’ve never had a cat surprise me with its intelligence, although lots of times they’ve surprised me with their stupidity. Cats are overall less intelligent than dogs. But they have that inscrutability thing going, which allows humans to project all sorts of nonsense into their motivations. Endless source of entertainment for cat lovers, apparently.
People do this with dogs all the time too (ascribe motivations they couldn’t possibly have); I find it annoying. I’m not attached to the stuff people make up about their cats.
Come over to our house and watch Hermnes playing with his balloon. I don’t need to project anything to see him doing it, and he’s constantly coming up with new “tricks”
I once had a cat that figured out how to let herself out of a double-latched cage. The vet couldn’t believe that a cat could do that; she figured that the latches hadn’t been properly latched. She put Graham back in and closed the door, put both latches back on, and watched her open one, hold it open and then open the other, letting herself out. Over the 10 years or so I had her, she demonstrated again and again that she could connect dots in her mind to figure things out. Graham was the smartest cat I’ve personally ever known.
Trainability isn’t the best metric, because that also depends on how eager to please the dog is. A lot of people say that golden retrievers are smart, for instance, but really, that’s mostly just that they’re really eager to please: A golden, when it senses a human wants something, will keep trying and trying until it gets it. But for actually working things out on its own terms, not a human’s, most of the goldens I’ve met have been complete morons.
One simple measure I’ve found, that divides dogs into two camps, is whether the dog can untangle its own leash. All dogs occasionally get themselves wound around a pole or the like, but the smart dogs can figure out that to untangle, they need to go back around the pole in the other direction. Dumb dogs will just keep on going around the same way and make it worse.
One of the smartest cats I ever knew loved to chase his tail, usually in the (dry) bath. I think it was having the reflection going on as well that made it extra entertaining. He definitely knew it entertained me as well. One time when I was really down (following a bereavement) he came up for attention while I was sitting on the loo. When I didn’t respond he jumped straight into the bath and did the tail chasing thing – it did cheer me up too. He was a cat of great grace and dignity who wasn’t afraid to play the clown.