Dogs may be as smart as owners think they are
I've always felt that our own Salem the Wonderdog is the smartest dog ever. Now I find out that she just may have company.
BERLIN -- Rico, a border collie with what appears to be an uncanny talent for human language, may be the Albert Einstein of dogs or just your average pooch. Either way, he has scientists wondering if man's best friend is smarter than they thought.
A series of careful studies concluded that the energetic German house dog has a stunningly large vocabulary and apparently can even do something scientists thought only humans could do -- figure out by the process of elimination that a sound he's never heard before must be the name of a toy he's never seen before.
That feat, described in today's issue of the journal Science, suggests that dog owners who claim their pets understand what they're saying and are trying to respond may have been right all along.
"Maybe this is the Albert Einstein of dogs. Or maybe this is something that other dogs can do too," said Julia Fischer, a biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, who helped test Rico. "We just don't know. We need to find out."
Yeah, I know; you're probably thinking what I am: if you sat 500 dogs in front of 500 typewriters, one of them would eventually write Shakespeare, no?
