My Dog Is Smarter Than Your Honor Student

Admittedly insignificant article here about some researcher who has studied how dogs think and, after administering tests meant to assess human infant intelligence, ranked the breeds (no doubt to have all the practicioners of anthropomorphism rush to his site to see where their own beloved "Binky" ranks--kind of like I did).

Look, I love dogs. Had three of them up to about a year and a half ago. As one of nature's great injustices demands, we humans tend to outlive our dogs by more than half a century, and two of my loyal companions are no longer with me. That's okay, I had a blast while they were around. Virtually every day I spent with them guaranteed that I would, at their behest, conversely (1) tear my hair out and (2) laugh my ass off. As an avid waterfowler, I always envisioned I would have a grand champion Chessie or Lab. Somehow, I ended up with three Dachshunds. Wiener dogs. Dogs that are half a dog high and a dog and a half long.

I try very hard to avoid the natural proclivity of dog-owners to attribute human characteristics to their beloved 4-legged friends (3 legged if your dog's name happens to be "Lucky"). But, this article reminded me of one of those moments where my favorite dog, Sammie, left me wondering, just how smart are these little critters? Dachshunds LOVE to dig. Sammie was no exception, going "to ground" whenever his ubersense of smell told him there was something breathing somewhere between the earth's surface and its molten core. On this day, he was busily digging under a log on our property, no doubt for a mouse living underneath as I could tell by the nature of his yelps and barks. You see, Sammy had different barks for mice or moles, squirrels, deer (yes, he frequently chased deer), rabbits, and one of his favorites around here, turtles. I knew his "squirrel bark" because of the three years I lived in a house with a yard full of huge oak trees. While there, Sammie would sit at the dog door and wait for squirrels to stray one step too far from the nearest tree before bursting through the door with a cacophony of squirrel barks. On some occasions, I didn't need to feed him that day. Anyway, we sinced moved a few times and ended up here, where we have only pine trees and, until I put up a couple bird feeders this summer, not one squirrel for the 10 years we owned this property.

Back to Sammie digging. This predated my bird feeder experiment so we had no squirrels. So again, Sammie is digging to beat the band when Max, our older dominant male decided to amble over and take advantage of all the prep work Sammie had done to make access to the mouse a matter of minimal effort for Max (Max was all about minimal effort). Max nudged Sammie out of the way, and took over the digging. Needless to say, Sammie was not pleased. I watched him look at Max, whine a little, then look left, then right, then left again. He then walked over to the closest pine tree, put his forepaws on the trunk, looked up to the top of the tree and let out that bark I had not heard out of him for years--his squirrel bark. Maxie immediately ceased digging and ran over to the tree, I have to assume, to seek a much more filling morsel than a mouse, and Sammie immediately departed the tree to resume digging for the mouse. To me, that kind of obvious deception was something I never would have attributed to a non-human. It struck me as, well, intelligent.

I wonder how that little sh-- would have done on this researcher's test. By the way, I once had a picture of Sammy retrieving a teal that I had shot. I would have posted it but I can't find it anymore. He loved being outdoors. He was always into something. Always had something to do. And would chew through rebar if it was standing between him and me on my way to going hunting. He was a great dog. And maybe even intelligent on a human scale. I don't really care though, I just miss my buddy.