I have a lab who’s very bright in a lot of ways, but the leash-around-the-tree thing is still beyond her. :rolleyes: And my other dog? You ever hear the expression “couldn’t pour piss out of a boot with the instructions written on the heel?” :smack:
My father in law owned a golden retriever who was so mentally deficient that it became irritating; the dog could not understand commands, would get stuck in things like chairs and plumbing he could not fit through, couldn’t remember things dogs usually remember, etc. I’ve owned and known a great many dogs, that that dog, while a nice, gentle dog, was retarded - vastly stupider than any other dog I’ve ever known. It was very noticable. He was simply born deficient.
Exactly. One can’t call an animal “stupid” just because it’s programmed differently than we are, or has less capacity to learn from experience. (And with regard to the latter, just think of how popular books are on astrology or sure-fire methods of winning at lotto before you overrate our own capacity to evaluate non-productive strategies.)
In bird terms, we are extraordinarily “stupid” in our inability to navigate using polarized light or magnetic fields. To a dog, we are hopelessly “retarded” with regard to our ability to distiguish between individuals by smell.
My beloved Pookie rides the short bus. Even so, he is an amazingly awesome cat. As I’ve said in other posts, he’s the most unconditional, zen creature I’ve ever encountered. It doesn’t matter if you’re another cat, a dog, a toddler, or even a wall or inanimte object…he will love you and give you kisses. “Magic Pookie Kisses”, but I digress… 
Oh yeah…he also masturbates. 
He was found in the middle of a snowy parking lot in Columbus, Ohio when he was a few weeks old. The lady who brought him into the veterinary teaching hospital where I worked thought he was dead at first, but he moved a bit when she picked up his little body, so she brought him in. She didn’t have any money, so he was enrolled in the hospital’s Good Samaritan program, paid for by the vet school. Once the “good sam”'s are patched up, they are offered up for adoption to hospital students and staff, who are pretty much self-selected pet-loving, bleeding-heart suckers, myself included.
When he came in, he was half-dead, anaemic, dehydrated and starving, and probably suffering from an infection and high fever. Any of these things may have contributed to his characteristic lack of coordination, poor eyesight/depth perception, and often comical motor skills. He also has seizures. Alternatively, these afflictions may have been responsible for him being abandoned in the first place. The cause and effect details are murky in his case, but without human intervention, he wouldn’t have lasted longer than a few more hours, regardless.
He is a 100% indoor housecat, with occasional supervised jaunts out in the yard. One time, however, he managed to slip out the door and was missing for two whole days. He is extremely dear to me, so I was a mess. I was doubtful he could make it in the big bad world, let alone find his way home.
You know those little toy cars that can sense the edge of the table top and change direction? That is how he navigates through life. He’ll walk in a straight line untill he encounters an obstacle, reorient, and head off in another straight line. No way in hell he could get home that way, or so I thought. Somehow he showed up around 3am one night, leaping up against the door and sliding down by his claws, extremely eager to get back to his cozy life of being fawned over. No idea where he was or what he was doing, he still hasn’t told me.
In long-winded anecdotal summary, critters are certainly born with defects, but anything that makes them too different puts them at risk of being eliminated.
One of the possible exceptions to that rule that comes to mind would be elephant cow herds. The matriarchal bonding behavior that the express will often result in the herd rallying around the weak/sick/different, instead of leaving them behind. But depending on the situation, that still may be insufficient to prevent death.
My neighbor growing up had two retarded cats (one male, one female). I dont’ know how mentally deficient they were, but physically they both had something that resembled cerebral palsy, and had little control over their limbs. They could get to where they wanted to go, but it took a lot of jerking around and falling to get there. They were perfectly sweet cats, however my neighbor did not get them spayed / neutered for several reasons - basically, she was afraid they would pop the stitches and not be able to heal properly, and was also hoping that they either were already sterile because of their illness, or that they phsyically wouldn’t be able to have sex because of their lack of control over their limbs (her other cats were fixed, so this wasn’t a worry).
Anyhow, they somehow managed to have a little of six kittens. Two died, though they lived a few weeks and seemed fine at the time (no sign of the “cerebral palsy” type movements). The rest lived to be perfectly healthy, intelligent cats, who the mother was able to nurse with a little help from my neighbor (basically, help the kittens get ahold of a nipple on a cat who can’t stay still).
Once the kittens were weaned, she got both cats fixed, and kept the four kittens (yes, she had many, many cats).
Heh, I was going to invite him over to see my two cats. One bright and smart, the other…well, he’s loveable and all but lets just say I wouldn’t want to test his mental skills in the wild.
If you have ever spent much time around sheep you know that the simple answer is that they could not possibly be any more “retarded”. Dumb, dumb animals.
Or worse yet, kill them at birth?
It is quite possible that you can blame humans for that. Many characteristics that we have selected for in generation after generation of domesticated stock are being proven to be genetically linked to characteristics that are not necessarily desireable.
I’d also hazard a guess that some of their “retarted…dumb, dumb” habits were selected for behaviorally because it made them easier for humans to herd and manage.
I used to be a dogtrainer, and I trained one dog–an inbred Blue Merle Collie–who I *swear * was retarded. He was the only dog I’ve ever given up on and declared untrainable. He just could never get it; he’d just stare at me with these vacant eyes, no matter how many times or approaches I tried, then he’d go lie down and stare into space. Put me off pure breeds for life.
Now there’s something you don’t see every day. You have got to expand on this one!!!
While I agree with your statement, I’m comparing my head-butting robin with the other thousands of wild birds that travel through my yard every year. The rest of the bird population somehow knows that their reflection in the window is not a threat. Why would one robin behave so differently?
The rest of the bird population no more “knows” that a reflection isn’t another bird than your robin does. He just happens to have a territory in the area, and his foraging mode (hopping around on the grass) happens to bring him into a position where he can easily see his reflection directly facing him. The other birds either don’t have territories in the area, or are hopping around in the branches where they can’t see their reflections easily, or at least not in an orientation where it appears to be a territorial rival.
This is very frequent behavior in birds. Your robin is in no way unusual. A few months ago I saw a blackbird that had been challenging and fighting with another “bird” in the side-view mirror of a car for several days, according to the car’s owner.
If I haven’t made the bed yet, and the sheet and blanket are rumpled, he’ll sometimes hop up on the bed and start “kneading”, “making muffins”, whatever your phrase of choice is for that throw-back to kittenhood.
Once his motor starts going, his back legs join in the fun and he basically makes muffins with all for feet. Then he starts nuzzling into the blanket lump and gets just the right angle for the pelvic thrust that really drives him insa-yay-yane. The urge seems to be pretty random and only occasional. Most of the time he just makes a G-rated muffin or two, purrs a bit, then takes one of his 100 daily naps.
He’s fixed, so there aren’t really any further fireworks, but that doesn’t seem to make it any less enjoyable for him. He is usually silent as a mouse, rarely meowing at all, but when I happen to hear him mrrrrrrrrrowing from across the house, I think, “Oh yeah…I forgot to make the bed.”
[/hijack]
I think the question has been answered pretty well. Essentially, nature selects survivors. On the other end of the spectrum, however (and I fear this may hijack this thread) I read in the Chicago Tribune this morning about a study in Science that details the apparent dog-brilliance of a German border collie. This dog seems to be able to do “fast mapping,” which has only been thought to be present in humans. This is where the individual more or less instantly learns a new term. This dog was put in a room with its master. The master told the dog to go into another room and fetch an object. It was also able to select that object that it had never seen, by process of elimination. A month later, it still knew that object. This is a bright dog. And I imagine we would find a lot more reports of SMART animals than we would of “retarded” ones. The smart ones survive at a higher rate.
GAACCKK. I have a pure white ex-feral alley cat that humps the afghans on the sofa. He grunts a little, but that’s about it. Far worse, though, was the beloved Siamese we used to have, Gomez.
He had a genuine fetish as the vet called it…for my clothes. Purple and pink, to be specific. If I left my clothes on the floor, or even left the door to the basement open so he could get down into the laundry room, he’d find one of his favorites, drag it upstairs and go to town on it. But the really nasty thing, was that he liked for me to watch him. Yes, he insisted that he have an audience, preferably me.
He had this very distinctive “yelp” that he’d make when he was clenching a particularly desirable piece of clothing (or a used towel if he could find nothing else) and he’d come looking for me, clenching his “mate” in his teeth and dragging it up the stairs between his legs. You could hear that unmistakeable call from anywhere in the house. He was almost silent, otherwise, for a Siamese that’s unusual. I never heard him meow. He’d wail almost like a baby if he saw kids outside, wanting to play (he was not allowed outdoors).
But the little bugger would wake me up in the morning, with the familiar humpy-scratchy-humpy-scritchy sound of his hairy pelvis making cat-blanks on my laundry. If he’d just do his thing where ever he was, in relative privacy, I wouldn’t know it and I’d ignore it. But he had to come find me and do it!!!
The vet said fetishes were fairly common in dogs, but he had never heard of it in cats, before Gomez. Apparently they are not color blind as we thought, but simply don’t care about color…unless it gets their rocks off, evidently. He was neutered at the standard age of 6 months, but he was catjacking from about a month, maybe earlier (he was a rescue).
It was definitely motivation to keep my clothes picked up and put away, and the drawers tightly shut. As long as he didn’t try to hump my clothes with me still in them… :eek:
My parents had a clinic cat with a similar beginning to your Pookie. Fat Jack, as he became known, was found as a kitten-cicle on the side of the road during the winter. Someone brought him in to my dad’s clinic, dad thawed him out, and we kept him as a clinic cat.
This cat was dumb. Actually, he had some facial features very similar to those with DS. Really wide forehead, large eyes with epicanthal folds, etc. Fat Jack was so dumb, he didn’t know how to retract his claws. He’d get stuck in the carpet and stand there, perfectly complacent, until someone wandered along to unhook him. He’d get stuck in clothing. When he’d reach up and pat your leg for attention, he’d get stuck, and sit there with his arm stretched up in the air, waiting for you to notice and unhook him. This cat had zero fear. He’d come strolling into the waiting room with a large, snarling dog lunging at him, stroll right by, and hop up into the dog owner’s lap, oblivious to the fact that the dog owner is desperately trying to restrain their cat-eating hound.
He didn’t know how to bathe himself. We’d toss him in the sink and hose him off every couple weeks or so. He didn’t mind.
He’d wander into people’s cars and ride home with them. On a fairly regular basis, we’d have a client leave, and get a phone call twenty minutes later saying they were on their way back with our cat, who had been found on the back floor of their car.
We found out later that he had a double life. Two families! He’d been going down the street and getting fed by this nice lady for a year or so. We discovered this when she brought him in for his shots 
I have seen both the dumbest and the smartest dogs be either purebred or mixed breed (mutts). And I don’t even need to refer to the amazing border collie in Germany; I have known both Great Danes and German shepherds who by far exceeded what anyone would think a dog could understand or do.
Among the brilliant dogs I’ve known was a full inbred (parents were brother and sister) Dane. Of course, Butz was the crowning achievement of 30 years of stockbreeding, at the time his breeder-owner produced him. I had the good fortune to meet him in person when he was ten years old. Other than being extremely grey in the muzzle, he was still physically sound and was also in full posession of his wits.
The moral is, don’t breed too close on animals unless (1) you really do know what you’re doing, and (2) are prepared to cull. Most people can’t imagine culling the animals they breed, and I can understand that. However, you’ve got no business breeding animals if you’re doing it for fun, or for money. The only good reason to breed animals is because you want to “improve” the breed, love what you’re doing, have studied how to breed, and are willing to make hard decisions. You’ll break your heart, probably many times, but you have the chance to make a contribution.
As to the OP’s question, animals that are dumber than average for their species do not survive in the wild (as others have mentioned). Indeed, it is in the interest of their species that they not survive, in case the problem is hereditary.
I see retarded animals. They don’t know they’re retarded.
I seem to remember years ago reading an account of some researchers who observed a female chimp in the wild give birth to an infant that seemed to have some of the physical characteristics of Down’s Syndrome. The infant only lived a short time and the researchers never found the body, they just saw the mother alone one day and never saw the baby again.
Given the chromosomal similarity between chimps and humans it isn’t entirely out of the question that something similar to Down’s Syndrome might show up from time to time but be strongly selected against in the wild.
Since I don’t have more details this isn’t really helpful I know.