Are Dogs smarter than Apes?

[HydrogenBond]

I have always assumed apes are at the top of the pile with respect to animal intelligence. But dogs appear to have accumulative intelligence features which add up higher than apes. The analogy is the ape can do physics but the dogs can do all the other subjects for a higher GPA.

 

One of the premium intelligence features of dogs is a dog can learn commands in any human language. They have linguistics skills. They can also filter through accents. One can raise a breed in Japan, send a pup to England and it will pick learn English. Send it from there, to southern America and they can adapt to the southern accent. They can even learn sign language. They can be taught to assist the blind, walking through busy city streets. Dogs are much better at working in teams. The number of skills that dogs can learn is very expansive.

[freeztar]

To answer the question, IMHO, I don't think so.

 

It goes back to the whole question of what intelligence means outside our human derived definition.

 

I think animals have innate intelligence.

Check out this thread:

http://hypography.com/forums/philosophy-humanities/14224-animal-intelligence.html

[modest]

I've heard that chimps don't understand pointing. You can point at something all day and the chimp will just look at your finger. Dogs are very good with pointing. They are also good with language (verbal and body).

 

When I was a kid my dog could pick the word 'walk' out of any conversation. If someone said "Sally walked down to the store to get some milk", our dog would lift his ears up to see if that 'walk' was intended for him. To be clever we would spell "are you going to take the D-O-G for a W-A-L-K?"

 

That only worked so long until he understood how to spell w-a-l-k. It really is amazing. But, it's hard to compare intelligence between animals I think. What test could do so? A bird can make a nest while a 3-year-old human could not. Does this make the bird smarter than the 3-year-old. Clearly not. I think any conceivable test is going to have problems like this making it near impossible to really judge just how intelligent a species is.

 

// edit

here's a source on the dog/chimp pointing thing:

The Domestication of Social Cognition in Dogs

 

-modest

[Moontanman]

I have always assumed apes are at the top of the pile with respect to animal intelligence. But dogs appear to have accumulative intelligence features which add up higher than apes. The analogy is the ape can do physics but the dogs can do all the other subjects for a higher GPA.

 

One of the premium intelligence features of dogs is a dog can learn commands in any human language. They have linguistics skills. They can also filter through accents. One can raise a breed in Japan, send a pup to England and it will pick learn English. Send it from there, to southern America and they can adapt to the southern accent. They can even learn sign language. They can be taught to assist the blind, walking through busy city streets. Dogs are much better at working in teams. The number of skills that dogs can learn is very expansive.

 

Maybe the dogs are just more cooperative? I know that more cooperative a dog is the more intellegent it is perceived to be. Some dogs aren't stupid they just don't play that! Maybe apes sit arouind and say to each other (in what way apes communicate with each other) "Look at the suck up dog! What's he going to do next the family laundry? Not me man I have my pride!" dogs' do have knack of decyphering human body language, maybe thoudands of years with life or death depending on being able to figure out what the human is gooing to do next has paid off?

[Jay-qu]

YouTube - Monkey Teasing A Dog http://youtube.com/watch?v=RWrLWw7lrMg

 

Dogs learn via positive reinforcement, always acting under the premise they may get a nice doggy treat for their efforts.

[Moontanman]

 

Dogs learn via positive reinforcement, always acting under the premise they may get a nice doggy treat for their efforts.

 

Not my dogs! they would ignore the stupid ape until he was close and still enough then eat him. No wait that would be my alligators:doh:

[Boerseun]

Although it might be a case of comparing Granny Smiths with Valencias, I do believe that apes are smarter than dogs.

 

And a simple reason for this is that in mammals, a very broad measuring rod for intelligence is the time spent in childhood, playing. Playing reinforces memory paths through mimicking behaviour seen in adults. Young boys play with their mechanically based toys (cars, mecchano sets, constructor sets, etc.) for years on end, girls (in general) play with their tiny tea sets, dolls, doll-houses etc, for many years. Apes, also, spend quite a few years in childhood, whilst dogs are mature in less than a year - although play will continue beyond that in youthful dogs.

 

This has all to do with brain development into the adult phase. Once adulthood is reached and the memory paths well established, play will taper off, and the individual can get on with the business of Life.

 

The dumbest mammals are those who reach adulthood the quickest. An Eland calf might walk within minutes from birth, and be quite independent in weeks. But they are very dumb.

 

I think why the perception of dogs being more clever than apes might persist, is that dogs are removed from their role models (their parents) very early on, sometimes even before they're properly weaned, and then introduced into a human household. They will then learn from humans, and fall in with their pack and their authority structure. Very few people have raised apes from the same age. Seeing an adult ape raised by their natural parents is seeing an individual ape who only had other apes to mimick, and their social structure might be a little different to what you or your dog is used to.

 

Dogs in the natural state, having grown to adulthood with only other dogs to follow and mimick, is what you'd find in a wolfpack. Wolves and dogs are one and the same, the one grown up in a human social hierarchy, the other not.

 

So, in order for you to truly assess the relative intelligence of dogs and apes, I think you should ask the opinion of someone who've raised both from babies. And I think in that case, the dog will come off a far second-best.

[Ahmabeliever]

I'd like to see a range of ape antics before I gave apes my vote of confidence, I have no real experience except hearing them kick up a ruckus every morning in the zoo across the way.

 

Dogs can be pretty darned smart.

 

Working dogs that round stock via whistled commands.

Dogs that save their owners.

Dogs that have 'homing beacons' and travel vast distance to get there.

Long term memory - ie burying bones.

 

Work for reward may be a trained response but it's also 'typical' human behaviour.

 

I see duck dogs fetch for hours with no reward and they love it. Of course they know a meal comes later. Fox terriers catching rabbits and not mauling them but a quick kill and hand them to the owner.

 

I've read around here somewhere's pertaining to evolution... that a large brain requires more time to develop. What is an apes life span compared to a dogs?

 

I want to go quiz the zookeepers now.

[modest]

Boerseun,

 

I agree with the theme of your post and in particular with the time spent learning = intelligence guideline.

 

However, after reading the link I gave above I do not believe dogs seem capable of understanding people better because they are reared by humans. That quality in a dog is not learned.

 

I think why the perception of dogs being more clever than apes might persist, is that dogs are removed from their role models (their parents) very early on, sometimes even before they're properly weaned, and then introduced into a human household. They will then learn from humans, and fall in with their pack and their authority structure.

 

The study found that dogs were much better than apes at understanding human social and communicative cues. For example, researchers hid food in one container of two out of the animal's sight. When the animal returned it was allowed to choose one. The experimenter gave the dog and ape different cues like looking at or pointing to the correct choice. The cues were lost on the chimps many of whom scored no better than chance. [edit... they were able to rule out the dog smelling the food as possible]

 

Contrary to your explanation above, puppies of only a few weeks performed very well while domesticated apes did not.

 

Dogs in the natural state, having grown to adulthood with only other dogs to follow and mimick, is what you'd find in a wolfpack. Wolves and dogs are one and the same, the one grown up in a human social hierarchy, the other not.

 

In the study, domesticated wolves did much worse than dogs and often no better than chance at following human cues. This trait seems to be something unique to dogs. Also, the puppies that were reared in a kennel with very limited human interaction (only interaction with other dogs) did just as well as puppies reared with a human family.

 

The conclusion of the study:

 

These studies demonstrate that (i) domestic dogs are more skillful than chimpanzees (one of humans’ two closest extant primate relatives) at using human social cues to find hidden food in the object choice paradigm; (ii) domestic dogs are also more skillful than wolves, their closest extant relative, at using human social cues to find hidden food in the object choice

paradigm; and (iii) dog puppies’ use of human social cues in the object choice

paradigm is quite skillful and does not vary by age or by their rearing history with humans.

 

-modest

[Boerseun]

Interesting topic!

 

I don't think it's coincidental that humans favour dogs as their "best friends" and pets of choice, when us humans are the animals with the most facial muscles in the animal kingdom, and dogs rate second. We can, indeed, exchange information quite effectively using visual cues alone. Dogs, as well, are the only animals to "smile" in the human sense, with the mouth-ends curling upward in a friendly smile, akin to humans, and curling downward in threat, anger, or general unhappiness. The eyebrows are much more accentuated in dogs than in wolves, and I presume that over the thousands of years humans have been artificially selecting dogs for breeding, these traits have been selected over the more natural "non-humanlike" traits, because they made the dogs more "human-like".

 

Apes, on the other hand, also have effective communication methods using facial cues, but not very human-like. For instance, chimps, smile in the human fashion, i.e. curling the mouth-ends upward, but in threat - as opposed to the friendly action implied by a human smile. This might sound rather funny, but when a human smiles at a chimp, the chimp will experience it as a rather explicit threat. The dog, however, won't - the dog "smiles" the same way. When observing a bunch of chimps in a zoo cage pounding each other and "smiling", they might not necessarily be playing - they are threatening each other.

 

Dogs might be seen as more intelligent, because we recognise their social cues (which they've picked up from us, after all, having been artificially inserted into their genepool by us pesky humans), and will find a smiling ape strange, when his next action is to attack.

 

But when it comes to problem solving, I think apes outclass dogs by a few orders of magnitude. I have unfortunately not read your link yet, but from personal experience, having lived in Africa with monkeys and apes quite regularly trashing our homes in search of food, I can tell you that even the most elaborate monkey deterrent is quickly and cleverly circumvented by monkeys, when the payoff is a handsome bunch of fruit.

 

Unfortunately, there are so many yard-sticks for intelligence, subjective all, that reaching a satisfying conclusion in this discussion will be hard. But it is very interesting, nonetheless.

[modest]

But when it comes to problem solving, I think apes outclass dogs by a few orders of magnitude. I have unfortunately not read your link yet, but from personal experience, having lived in Africa with monkeys and apes quite regularly trashing our homes in search of food, I can tell you that even the most elaborate monkey deterrent is quickly and cleverly circumvented by monkeys, when the payoff is a handsome bunch of fruit.

 

I agree, and I think problem-solving is a much better indicator of intelligence than reading and responding to human cues.

 

I wonder if cats are on the same evolutionary trend - and if it will happen as fast. In a few thousand years will a person be able to give a cat a dirty look and have the cat understand it's in trouble? Then what animal will we select this trait in next... Foxes maybe? I wouldn't mind having a domesticated fox.

 

Unfortunately, there are so many yard-sticks for intelligence, subjective all, that reaching a satisfying conclusion in this discussion will be hard. But it is very interesting, nonetheless.

 

Yep. One milestone of intelligence that I like is self-recognition in a mirror. I believe humans, great apes, and dolphins are the only animals that can do this. I'm not sure how a sense of self is related to intelligence, but it just intuitively seems like it should be. If you put a mark on a dogs face, it won't examine it in the mirror. Apes and dolphins will.

 

-modest

[HydrogenBond]

It is hard to compare intelligence using a single test or one could unknowingly stack the deck to get the result you want. It would have to be an intelligence decathlon using a wide variety of testing including tests that stack each deck but in a fair way.

 

One thing not mentioned about dogs is they can teach other animals, using reinforcement. This easiest to see are herding dogs. Another example, dogs can learn from humans, how to get their owners to cater to them. One might get the impression the dog learned from the human how to be the boss, if that is what the human requires of the dog. I have seen where a dog has a particular treat in mind. After reinforcement, the owner starts to learn. Dogs can adapt even if that adaptation requires catering to human neurosis. This means they can not only learn cause and affect but also irrational commands that ebb and flow. After all that they are still happy to see the owner. They teach humans unconditional love, loyalty, which are complex abstractions.

[Boerseun]

They teach humans unconditional love, loyalty, which are complex abstractions.

I don't quite think so. They might be merely "sucking up" to the Alpha Dog, in this case, you. And you might interpret it as all the complex emotions described above. That's why I'm of the opinion that we humans might attribute way too much intelligence to canines, merely because their actions looks familiar in the human sense, but their motivations are rarely considered.

[Not half- but whole!]

One must remember that canine are probably the first domesticated animal. There have been many generations of dogs that were working for their human/protohuman. They got rewards, ie food and shelter, if they did their job well. Very early on this genetically predisposed those that were good on reading human gesture, language, etc. The dog had to pay attention to man to get its rewards. Those that were good at it were kept and those that weren't were probably eaten. Evolution at work. This is why the respond to human cues so well. The main problem with a dog "not listening" is that it is probably paying attention to other cues that you may be providing.

 

Apes were never domesticated. The did not depend on a human for sustenance. There was no evolutionary pressure to develop human interpretive skills.

[annahouck]

I certainly agree! dogs are really smarter than apes. They are fast learner! Look at this video, this will tell how smart dogs are! [spamlink removed]

[Rade]

Chimps have been taught to use sign language to communicate with humans. Not aware of any dog with this ability.

[C1ay]

Well this is admittedly a late reply to an old thread bumped by spam but I'll add my 2¢ since no one in the thread mentioned that humans are effectively hairless apes and dogs are certainly not smarter than we are :evil: