Born to Bark

by Stanley Coren

  Wiz was a gentle soul. His idea of a perfect day was to snuggle up to me or Joan when we were sitting on the sofa and to rest quietly. In obedience competition he exerted no more effort than was required. If he had to jump a 13-inch barrier, he would launch himself over it so that he cleared it by at most a quarter of an inch, as opposed to Flint, who would hurl himself far above it as if to inform anybody watching that he also could have jumped 24 inches just as easily.

  A great deal of my psychological research involves trying to understand what makes one human different from another in his behavior. For that reason I have often studied groups of people who had different characteristics, such as left-handed people versus right-handers, people who sleep a lot versus those who sleep little, individuals whose births had complications, and people whose vision or hearing is different from the norm. These and other apparently minor differences often have significant effects on the way that people behave, their personalities, learning abilities, and even how long they might live.

  Dogs’ different temperaments also affect how they learn. Teaching Wizard to retrieve was no easier than teaching Flint. While cocker, springer, Brittany or field spaniels all have a hunting and retrieving instinct, toy spaniels like the Cavalier King Charles do not. The term spaniel does not relate to hunting. The span in spaniel comes from the word Spain; the dogs were identified as Spanish dogs even though none of the breeds originated in that country. The term was applied to them because, at the time, people believed that the most romantic people in the world came from Spain and so, because most spaniels are so gentle and kissy, they were equated with Spanish lovers. I often would hear the soft voice that I had given to Wizard explain to me why he was resting while Flint was frantically scrambling around the house on some mission, “I suppose that someone has to be on guard; however, I am a lover, not a hunter or a fighter. It’s a tough job being sweet all of the time, but I’m willing to work at it.”

  Flint’s true nature was probably best displayed when I decided to try to teach him to track, with some faint hope that he might earn a tracking title. As a dog sport, tracking involves the dog leading his handler over a scent trail that can be a quarter mile long or longer, and can have several turns with several places where it is crossed by distracting false scents. A highly recommended tracking instructor named Gary lived about a half hour’s drive south of the city, so I decided to enroll Flint in one of his classes, held early on Sunday mornings. I took with me a borrowed harness from Barbara Baker and a new 20-foot long tracking leash, as well as a plastic bag containing a few hot dogs thinly sliced into penny-sized disks. Flint had watched me slicing them and so was hopeful when I took them with us in the car.

  To begin the training I had to walk a track across a grassy field while Flint waited in the car. The trail was marked with flags so that we nasally weak humans would know where it was. As I walked, I dropped small slices of wiener every few feet along the track. The dog was to start by following its owner’s scent, and could pick up these treats if he stayed on course.

  Flint caught on quickly. A happy voice announced, “Ahh … You dropped some hot dog slices. Now all I have to do is to follow your scent and I’ll find them all! Watch me sniff. Here’s another bit. Hey, this is fun!”

  “Stan, did you say something?” Gary asked. “After you tell him to ‘Find it!’ you should just let him do the tracking. Talking to him might just distract him.”

  I was not sure that Gary would understand why I was talking to myself in my dog’s voice, so I stopped.

  The following Sunday morning the class assembled at another field. This one was overgrown with very long grass and weeds. Once again we tramped out a trail, each with two right-angle turns marked by flags. Again we seeded the path with wiener slices, set a bit more widely apart this time.

  I hooked the leash to Flint’s harness, and he was giving his little excitement dance with his front paws. “It’s the hot dog game. I follow your scent and find all of the treats that you dropped again!”

  This session started well enough. I gave Flint my scent by pointing down to a patch of ground that I had tramped down well, and waiting until he sniffed it. Then, at the command of “Find it!” he dashed off down my trail, scooping up the wiener slices that were spaced roughly five or six feet apart down the track. We couldn’t have been on the trail for more than three or four minutes when a field rat appeared on the track right in front of Flint, apparently attracted to the bits of hot dog. Flint’s brain went immediately into vermin hunter mode, and he charged at the gray-brown rodent, which dashed into the high grass with Flint after him. It was only a short chase. I felt the leash go slack, then jerk a couple of times, and when I finally reached my dog he was standing over a large, fat, and very dead rat. Flint’s tail was wagging excitedly. “All applaud the great hunter!” announced a silly voice.

  This incident really ended any hopes that I might have had of seeing Flint earn a tracking degree. The hunter instinct had been awakened in him, and now his mind was dominated by the idea that the tall grass might contain prey for him to stalk and kill. When I brought him back to the trail that we were supposed to be training on, he completely ignored my scent and was casting back from side to side in an attempt to spring anything else that might be alive in the dense cover. If he happened to cross the track in a place where there was a bit of wiener, he would snatch it off the ground and eat it but he would not return to the trail. Unfortunately, after 10 minutes of frustration while I tried to get him focused on tracking again, he once more plunged into the underbrush and again ran after something. I never knew what it was, since Flint hit the end of the leash before he could catch it, but this second chase confirmed in his mind that his task here was to hunt, not to track, and that ample numbers of vermin were present that could serve as his quarry.

  Any chance of progress that day was lost, so I reeled Flint in, explained the situation to Gary, and suggested that it would be best for me to stop training for this session. I hoped that, given a week’s time, Flint would return to the promising tracking behavior that he had shown the first day. It was not to be. The following week Flint again completely ignored my scent and all instructions pertaining to tracking. Instead, like a true hunting terrier, he began to cast from side to side through the high grass and suddenly froze in position and pushed his nose toward the ground. He clearly had picked up a scent, but not from my trail. He dashed some 15 feet forward following some kind of scent, and then began to dig frantically. A moment later he raised his head, gave a sideways snap, and showed me he’d caught a mole—now quite dead. This was the end of any hope of controlled tracking behavior for Flint. He was already dashing about looking for something new to hunt when I dragged him back to my side and explained to Gary that I doubted that it was worth our while to continue. Gary suggested that if I wanted to try again I was welcome, but Flint was convinced that any high grass was a hunting range, so I knew that this was a lost cause.

  Perhaps one of the most telling differences between Flint and Wiz was their relationship to toys. Flint really did not play with toys except as part of interacting socially or stimulating his hunter instincts. If a toy was tossed to him he would chase it and when he caught it he would try to kill it (especially if it made a noise when it bounced or he bit into it), first by shaking it vigorously then by ripping it apart if he could. Toys that had appendages, like dolls with heads, arms, and legs, he simply dismembered.

  This set of behaviors always made me laugh. “I am the hunter—the king of terriers. Watch me destroy my prey! I am Flint the Ripper!” he would tell me.

  Joannie would hear this and sigh, “Please pick up the bits of stuffing from the toy when the king of terriers tears it apart,” she would ask. “You know it’s a waste of money buying plush toys for him and then letting him destroy them.”

  “That’s why I only buy used toys,” I said. I had found a store run by a local charity that had a big bin of used plush toys that sold for two or four for a dollar
(depending upon their size), so that watching Flint destroy them in his game of “serial killer” caused little economic pain.

  Wizard, however, was different. He did not play with toys, but rather collected them. If you tossed a toy for him, he would run after it, but when he reached it he would often turn around and return to me without retrieving it, or sometimes he would simply lie down on top of it. Certain toys, however, developed a special meaning for him and he would pick them up and walk off with them. There were around a dozen of these, including a small white wooly sheep, teddy bears of different sizes, a sable-colored rabbit, a green fuzzy dinosaur, and a small moose that was missing one antler (probably due to an earlier encounter with Flint). Wiz stashed these in a small pile in the corner of my office and would sleep on that heap when I was working, occasionally rearranging them or nosing one gently.

  Flint and Wiz differed in their relationship to toys.

  The importance of those toys for Wiz was clear from the fact that he would defend them from Flint. Wiz never confronted Flint over anything other than those toys. One confrontation was particularly interesting. Flint one day walked over to the pile of toys and lifted up Wizzer’s fluffy white sheep. Wiz had just entered the room when he saw this and gave a single bark, startling both me and Flint because Wiz virtually never barked. Flint dropped the toy and Wiz raced to his possessions and stood over them staring directly into Flint’s eyes in a direct threat.

  I turned from my work and watched, fully expecting to hear a challenging growl from Flint and perhaps a threatening snap. But the two dogs just stood there—eyes locked on each other for many long seconds, until Flint, the “Great Fighter,” “King of the Terriers,” and “Killer of Toys,” turned and with a stiff-legged walk, left the room. As Flint moved away, Wizard, the “Flop-Eared Love Sponge,” lay down on the toys and silently watched. “I don’t ask for much,” said Wizard’s quiet voice, “but these are mine!”

  Whatever passed between the dogs was significant, because although Flint would occasionally look in the direction of Wiz’s possessions, he never again tried to walk off with any of them.

  It was when I became sick again that I learned another difference between my dogs. Since acquiring the major infection that nearly killed me and contributed to the end of my first marriage, I have been left with an immune system that occasionally goes on strike. When it decides to close down operations, I get sick, often with a systemic infection of some sort. These infections can be quite severe and often worry my doctor again, but fortunately heavy-duty courses of antibiotics have managed to keep me alive until my immune system felt guilty and returned to its normal function. Whenever it is not working at full capacity, however, I can be rendered nonfunctional and can be in prolonged pain and discomfort.

  This time the infection mainly affected on my respiratory system, and my breathing was labored. Fluid built up, so I coughed a lot. University classes were not in session, so I did not have to try to be a hero and stagger onto campus to give my lectures. Instead, I took my medication, drank lots of fluids, and tried to get as much sleep as possible to give my immune system a kick start.

  Flint and Wiz both noticed my condition because of the disruption of their routine and usual walks. They both also seemed to sense my distress and, in their own ways, responded to it.

  I was lying in bed, propped up by pillows, since that seemed to make breathing easier. I was dozing off again when something cold nudged my hand. I looked over the side of the bed, and there was Flint. He banged his nose against my hand several times, and when I finally made eye contact with him, he made a few quick steps toward the bedroom door. When I didn’t respond, he repeated the process, this time adding a bark.

  “Come on, lazy person. Out of bed! You’ve got dogs to entertain!” The words stayed in my head since I couldn’t even muster enough energy to supply a voice for my dog at that moment. Flint tried once more with more vigorous barking. Finally, he jumped onto the bed and stared directly at me, then looked toward the door of the bedroom. “Up and at it! Stop being sick!” the silent voice said.

  When I still did not move except to weakly pat his head, Flint slowly curved around my inert body and walked to the foot of the bed. He turned to face me and then lay down with his head on my ankle and gave a loud, dramatic sigh.

  While all of this was going on, Wizard simply stood and watched, adding his comment in the form of a longing look toward the door. I wished that I had enough energy to respond to my dogs, but I simply felt too fatigued to do anything. I closed my eyes and must have drifted off to sleep.

  Sometime later I was awakened by the sound of Joan coming up the stairs. I opened my eyes to see her come into the room.

  “I thought that you were going to rest today,” she said in a slightly disapproving voice.

  “I am resting,” I croaked in response.

  “Then what is all of this?” she gestured toward me and the bed.

  I looked down. Flint was still lying at my feet. Wiz had come onto the bed as well and was lying in the crook of my arm where he liked to sleep if he could get away with it. However, resting next to me and on top of my chest and stomach was a collection of plush toys. A wooly sheep, several teddy bears, a fuzzy green dinosaur, a moose that was missing one antler …

  I looked into Wizard’s big eyes. “They make me feel better. Maybe it will work for you too,” his quiet voice said in my head.

  CHAPTER 22

  THE INTELLIGENCE OF DOGS

  My interest in the differences in the behavior and abilities of the various breeds of dogs has been ongoing for most of my life, although others have shared my fascination. Anyone who owns or loves dogs is bound to go on about the merits and intelligence of some breeds and the limitations of others. I’ve long collected comments that various people have made about the intelligence of different dog breeds, including TV newsman Peter Jennings’s comment on the Malamute: “Their brain [is] like a piece of river rock”; veterinarian Michael Fox’s comment on Irish setters: “They’re so dumb that they get lost on the end of their leash”; author E. B. White on the dachshund: “Someday, if I ever get a chance, I shall write a book, or warning, on the character and temperament of the dachshund and why he can’t be trained and shouldn’t be. I would rather train a striped zebra to balance an Indian club than induce a dachshund to heed my slightest command”; or the comment on a TV show by a Los Angeles dog trainer to a woman who wanted to train her West Highland white terrier: “There’s not much you can do with a terrier, ma’am.”

  I had been thinking of systematically ranking dog breeds by their intelligence for a long time, but even starting to define what we mean by intelligence in dogs turned out to be complicated. Eventually, my research showed that there are actually three different types or aspects of dog intelligence.

  I labeled the first type of canine intelligence instinctive intelligence, which is simply what the dog was bred to do. Thus, retrievers retrieve, herding dogs herd, pointers point, terriers hunt small furry things, and some companion dogs (like Wizard) are bred to love and be empathetic.

  The second type of dog intelligence is adaptive intelligence. It represents the dog’s ability to solve problems and how well he learns, remembers, and benefits from his experiences. This can vary even in a single breed of dogs, so you might find that some Labrador retrievers are brilliant and clever and that some are no brighter than cows. To determine the adaptive intelligence of a dog, you have to test the individual dog. It took me about a year to develop a set of tests for adaptive intelligence in dogs. This is actually a very short time in terms of most research projects, but the work went quickly because I had a shortcut: namely a number of tests that had been designed to measure the intelligence and mental development of young human children, which I adapted and modified for dogs. From these tests it became clear that, in many ways, the average dog’s mind is equivalent to that of a human child age two to two-and-a-half years. That one insight explains a lot about dog behavior.

>   The final form of dog intelligence is working and obedience intelligence, which is what the dog can learn to do—the dog’s trainability. In humans, this would be the equivalent of how well you do in school.

  I had wanted to use the test that I had developed to measure the intelligence of the various dog breeds and combine this with another measure of trainability. Unfortunately, with around 160 breeds registered with the American Kennel Club, the need to test 10 or so of each type would be prohibitively expensive in costs and time.

  Fortunately, there were people who already had the information that I needed—namely the people who judge dog obedience competitions. These dog judges are trained to observe and evaluate how dogs perform under controlled conditions. It is not unusual for a judge to spend 10 to 20 hours on any given weekend judging and scoring dogs of various breeds. Because of their extensive experience watching and evaluating dogs, they were bound to have accumulated knowledge about the relative performance of various dog breeds.

  To gather data from this group of professionals I first obtained the lists of judges from the American and Canadian kennel clubs and then sent out questionnaires to every dog obedience judge in North America. The questionnaire was fairly long and complicated, and asked the judges to rate each of the dog breeds on several aspects of their intelligence and which specific breeds they would rate as the 10 most intelligent and the 10 least intelligent breeds. To my amazement, 208 experts—approximately half of all the obedience judges listed in North America—responded to my request. Of these, 199 provided complete information in all sections of the questionnaire. In addition, about one-quarter of the judges added letters and notes, many of which contained insights into the way dogs think. Some even added extra statistical data that helped me adjust the placement of particular breeds. Finally, after my preliminary analyses, I telephoned about two dozen of the obedience judges for follow-up interviews that allowed me to clarify some issues and sharpen my interpretation of the data.