Is Your Dog Smarter Than a Two Year Old?

Sit, stay, fetch! If you've spent even a small amount of time training your dog, chances are he responds to these basic commands. But what if your dog could understand as much as your two-year-old child? Chaser, a Border Collie recently featured on 60 Minutes, has not only mastered the average 300 word vocabulary of most toddlers, but she has gone above and beyond, learning a whopping 1,000 unique words.

How Much Do Cats and Dogs Really Understand?

With so much more left to learn about cat and dog intelligence, there are plenty of questions about how their minds work, not the least of which is, "How much do they really understand about how humans communicate?" Brian Hare, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University, has recently turned his scientific research from humans to dogs. He believes that Chaser represents a breakthrough in the study of canine cognition. According to Hare, Chaser is learning through social inference, a trait that very few animals possess. To illustrate how social inference works, Hare will hide a ball under one of two cups and point to the correct cup. Dogs, just like young toddlers, will then infer that the ball is under the cup being pointed to and retrieve it correctly. This might seem like a simple task, but as Hare's own research has shown, even Bonobo apes, mankind's closest genetic relatives, are incapable of inferential reasoning.

Different Kinds of Cat & Dog Intelligence

While Chaser's abilities represent a huge step in the understanding of the canine brain, it's difficult not to wonder if he is simply an anomaly. After all, most dogs don't appear to understand 1,000 words or even 100. Chaser lends her extraordinary abilities to the huge amount of time and energy her owner spent working with her to develop her vocabulary. As John Pilley tells Anderson Cooper on 60 Minutes, plenty of dogs have the potential to display higher levels of intelligence — if their owners take the time to work with them.

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