> Dogs are not stupid and they are always very eager to learn and decode what you want them to.
Yeah, many are so clever that they very convincingly pretend they don't know what you want. My dog sometimes does this when he doesn't want to go back home. Being smart and obedient are two orthogonal things.
This dog and the whole process of teaching is fascinating because it highlights how much we depend on verbal communications and easily discount other types.
> I've clicker trained my cats to sit and also to follow my finger.
Dogs are so invested in human approval that even abuse can be an effective training 'method' much of the time. As you likely know, before scientific training methods started gaining popularity, this was the predominant tradition for training dogs. And in an anthropocentric way and from a position of utter ignorance, that somehow became the cultural standard. If you can't yell at or pinch or shove an animal and still have it be interested in pleasing you, it's 'not intelligent'.
It's absolutely absurd. It's not fair to dogs or to other animals, and erases the massive, fundamental similarity in the way dogs, cats, and other creatures of all kinds actually learn. All because humans struggle to separate the notion of intelligence from being interested in or useful to ourselves.
>>The reason a dog brings the toy to the human is because they know that the human is better at throwing and the dog is better at fetching. Teamwork, y'see.
Honestly I always thought that the dog was just being diligent and making sure that its humans did his daily exercise routine by throwing a toy.
> not so smart that it's getting bored or trying to figure out how to escape.
This could be understood as if the most intelligent dogs were always bored or trying to escape. To clarify: intelligent dogs do need more stimulation, this is very true. But as long as they get it, they're happy.
>I laughed to think that HUMAN'S analysis of whether a dolphin is intelligent is whether WE can understand their language.
>Using that logic, it seems my dog is more intelligent than me: He can understand some of my language as well as his own, whereas I can only understand my own.
That's a false equivalence, as well as untrue.
It takes intentional effort on our part for a dog to learn even a small subset of our vocabulary. When dogs learn our language, they only learn the few words that we make an effort to teach them, and these typically correspond directly to an action we demand of them in exchange for a reward. Dogs cannot pass this knowledge amongst themselves, each dog has to be taught by a human individually.
Dogs have made no specific effort to teach me, at least none that they managed to make recognizable to me, yet I can tell when they are excited, hurt, angry, &c, but mostly because a subset of body language and vocal attitude are instinctive or socially universal to most mammals (shouting and sharp poses convey aggression, for example).
I believe I understand more dog body language than dogs understand human body language. There is no human equivalent of a wagging tail, yet I understand that. There is no dog equivalent of a pointing finger, and they do not understand it: dogs will look at your finger instead of where you point.
"Forget all that. Judged against where AI was 20-25 years ago, when I was a student, a dog is now holding meaningful conversations in English. And people are complaining that the dog isn’t a very eloquent orator, that it often makes grammatical errors and has to start again, that it took heroic effort to train it, and that it’s unclear how much the dog really understands."
> "The way they do it is the dog grabs the rat in it's mouth and shakes its head wildly."
my dog is a terrier/spitz mix and shows this behavior in play (from the terrier side, the spitz side just makes her pretty =). she'll grab a stick or other small item and shake it wildly while bucking about. most people think it's hilarious until i tell them why she does it. =D
> I believe that such dogs do exist, but they are rare.
it may as well be that every dog senses it, and it is our ability to communicate with and understand the dog rarely reaches the level necessary for the information to be actually communicated.
> Animals with very limited language capabilities have the ability to run their own lives, and to some extent manipulate their environment.
This makes me think of the ongoing effort by some people to train their pets to use talking buttons to communicate. These include the animals occasionally trying to convey relatively complicated ideas with simple sets of words, like "play help" ("I'm bored, come entertain me") [1] and "dog settle" ("make that dog outside stop being annoying") [2].
>They have an amazing sense for picking up territory cues from their owners.
Seems to me like something a powerful sense of smell would make trivial. A dog can instantly detect the points past which its human pack members never venture.
> For example dogs don’t really seem to recognize single syllable words well if at all.
I'm pretty sure most dogs understand "no" (and the equivalent word in other languages is often 1 syllable). I haven't done anything approaching a study, but I've trained many dogs in my life and my experience disagrees with you. Some other common words they know really well include: treat, sit, off, here - basically anything you teach them.
Maybe, but I (selfishly) believe old dogs can learn new tricks. Leaving off the first sentence of your comment would convey the same meaning while keeping any well-earned crotchetiness hidden from view.
> I do something similar, when trying to localize the source of some odd sound, though I do more rotations around the vertical axis, and less around a horizontal ones.
But the dog in the article is doing the behavior after the sound is finished. There is nothing more to hear.
The dog is clearly processing the noun and preparing to go search for the objective and retrieve it.
Old dogs love mental stimulation, and many of them can indeed learn new tricks.
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