Dogs regularly make top-10 lists of the world’s smartest animals. As any pet owner has likely noticed, though, some dogs—like some people—are sharper than others. And a few might even be, in canine terms, geniuses. As researchers describe today in Scientific Reports, certain dogs are capable of learning the names for more than 100 different toys. Remarkably, most of the dogs in the study seemed to do this spontaneously, without any special training from humans.
Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!“Owners just notice one day that their dog knows the name of toys,” says the paper’s lead author Shany Dror, a doctoral candidate in ethology at Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary. “Someone says, ‘Pizza,’ and their dog suddenly comes with the pizza toy.”
Language is integral to how human beings think, communicate and collectively function, yet questions abound about the evolutionary origins of this behavior. Comparing and contrasting other species’ abilities to comprehend words and phrases can be a useful method for learning more about how human language came to be. Most of these studies to date have focused on apes or dolphins, but results can be complicated by the fact that such investigations have often involved animals in captivity instead of in the wild.
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Dogs, on the other hand, have been living in tandem with humans for some 15,000 to 20,000 years and are constantly exposed to language. “The way we interact with our dogs is very similar to how we do with our infants,” Dror says. “The connection dogs form with human caretakers is also very similar to infants.”
Yet at some point, she continues, babies learn to talk, while puppies do not. Only a few researchers have tried to explore the origin of that difference. In 2004 scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, reported that a border collie named Rico knew the words for more than 200 different items. In the nearly 20 years since the paper on Rico was published, however, researchers outside of Dror’s group have only found six dogs that demonstrated similar abilities, which has limited the scope of studies that have been performed.
Dror, who is also a professional dog trainer, wanted to expand the field by finding more dogs with an aptitude for language. First, she tried to train 34 dogs from typical households to learn a set of vocabulary words. “That was a miserable failure,” she says. “We all worked really hard, but after three months, they didn’t even know the names of two toys.”
So rather than trying to teach dogs, she decided to put out a call for owners of particularly astute canines to come forward. She and her colleagues also launched the “Genius Dog Challenge,” a live YouTube-broadcasted game that pits smart dogs against one another to see which possesses the greatest linguistic prowess. After five years, the researchers identified 41 “gifted word learner dogs,” or ones that knew the names of at least five toys. The dogs came from nine different countries on three continents and included a range of breeds. More than half were border collies, but the team also documented language abilities in a few mixed-breed and purebred dogs, including three Labradors, two Pomeranians, and a Pekingese, Shih Tzu, corgi, toy poodle, German shepherd, and cross between an Australian cattle dog and a miniature Australian shepherd.
When Dror first gathered the data, which were validated on video calls online, the 41 dogs knew an average of 29 words for toys, and the top performer among them knew 86. From that baseline, the dogs demonstrated an “amazing” learning speed, Dror says, with owners reporting that dogs needed only five minutes or so to learn a new toy. Proving that old dogs—or at least older dogs—can learn new tricks, the canines continued to expand their vocabulary over the years. By the time the researchers were finalizing their new paper, 16 owners reported that their dogs now knew the names of more than 100 toys.
The new research represents “a very exciting step forward” for the field, says Heidi Lyn, a comparative psychologist at the University of South Alabama, who was not involved in the work. “Overall, I think this study is a great example of the next wave of potential for citizen science and for understanding our canine companions and their ability to understand us.”
Dror and her colleagues do not know what differentiates canine wordsmiths from average dogs. The animals in the study were very motivated to play with toys and also paid close attention when their owners spoke. But as Dror points out, these are hardly unique traits among dogs. She suspects that dogs’ early rearing environment, combined with some form of natural talent, plays a role in whether they become gifted word learners, but “we still do not know the elements that compose each of these factors and how the two interact,” she says.
Irene Pepperberg, a comparative psychologist at Boston University, who was not involved in the research, says that it’s interesting to see in the study that not all working dogs—or those bred to be herders, hunters or trackers—can become gifted word learners. Yet almost all gifted word learners are working breeds. Those include the obvious breeds such as shepherds and labs but also less obvious ones such as poodles, which were used in militaries in the 17th century through World War II, and Pomeranians, which were originally bred as watchdogs. “At least until recently, when beauty standards have evolved and probably affected the gene pool, breeds were carefully selected to learn and respond to aspects of human speech over thousands of years,” Pepperberg says.
Dror and her colleagues hope to pursue follow-up studies that delve into the factors that contribute to certain dogs’ talent for language and examine how the animals’ approach to learning is similar or different to that of human children. The team wants to expand its sample size, too, so Dror encourages owners who think their dog may be a genius to reach out. “We’re always interested in meeting new dog owners and meeting their dogs,” she says.
