Born to Bark (38 page)

This set of behaviors always made me laugh.
“I am the hunter—the king of terriers. Watch me destroy my prey! I am Flint the Ripper!”
he would tell me.

Joannie would hear this and sigh, “Please pick up the bits of stuffing from the toy when the king of terriers tears it apart,” she would ask. “You know it’s a waste of money buying plush toys for him and then letting him destroy them.”

“That’s why I only buy used toys,” I said. I had found a store run by a local charity that had a big bin of used plush toys that sold for two or four for a dollar (depending upon their size), so that watching Flint destroy them in his game of “serial killer” caused little economic pain.

Wizard, however, was different. He did not play with toys, but rather collected them. If you tossed a toy for him, he would run after it, but when he reached it he would often turn around
and return to me without retrieving it, or sometimes he would simply lie down on top of it. Certain toys, however, developed a special meaning for him and he would pick them up and walk off with them. There were around a dozen of these, including a small white wooly sheep, teddy bears of different sizes, a sable-colored rabbit, a green fuzzy dinosaur, and a small moose that was missing one antler (probably due to an earlier encounter with Flint). Wiz stashed these in a small pile in the corner of my office and would sleep on that heap when I was working, occasionally rearranging th
em or nosing one gently.

Flint and Wiz differed in their relationship to toys
.

The importance of those toys for Wiz was clear from the fact that he would defend them from Flint. Wiz never confronted Flint over anything other than those toys. One confrontation was particularly interesting. Flint one day walked over to the pile of toys and lifted up Wizzer’s fluffy white sheep. Wiz had just entered the room when he saw this and gave a single bark, startling both me and Flint because Wiz virtually never barked. Flint dropped the toy and Wiz raced to his possessions and stood over them staring directly into Flint’
s eyes in a direct threat.

I turned from my work and watched, fully expecting to hear a challenging growl from Flint and perhaps a threatening snap. But the two dogs just stood there—eyes locked on each other
for many long seconds, until Flint, the “Great Fighter,” “King of the Terriers,” and “Killer of Toys,” turned and with a stiff-legged walk, left the room. As Flint moved away, Wizard, the “Flop-Eared Love Sponge,” lay down on the toys and silently watched.
“I don’t ask for much,”
said Wizard’s quiet voice,
“but these are mine!”

Whatever passed between the dogs was significant, because although Flint would occasionally look in the direction of Wiz’s possessions, he never again tried to walk off with any of them.

It was when I became sick again that I learned another difference between my dogs. Since acquiring the major infection that nearly killed me and contributed to the end of my first marriage, I have been left with an immune system that occasionally goes on strike. When it decides to close down operations, I get sick, often with a systemic infection of some sort. These infections can be quite severe and often worry my doctor again, but fortunately heavy-duty courses of antibiotics have managed to keep me alive until my immune system felt guilty and returned to its normal function. Whe
never it is not working at full capacity, however, I can be rendered nonfunctional and can be in prolonged pain and discomfort.

This time the infection mainly affected on my respiratory system, and my breathing was labored. Fluid built up, so I coughed a lot. University classes were not in session, so I did not have to try to be a hero and stagger onto campus to give my lectures. Instead, I took my medication, drank lots of fluids, and tried to get as much sleep as possible to give my immune system a kick start.

Flint and Wiz both noticed my condition because of the disruption of their routine and usual walks. They both also seemed to sense my distress and, in their own ways, responded to it.

I was lying in bed, propped up by pillows, since that seemed to make breathing easier. I was dozing off again when something cold nudged my hand. I looked over the side of the bed, and there was Flint. He banged his nose against my hand several times, and when I finally made eye contact with him, he made a few quick steps toward the bedroom door. When I didn’t respond, he repeated the process, this time adding a bark.

“Come on, lazy person. Out of bed! You’ve got dogs to entertain!”
The words stayed in my head since I couldn’t even muster enough energy to supply a voice for my dog at that moment. Flint tried once more with more vigorous barking. Finally, he jumped onto the bed and stared directly at me, then looked toward the door of the bedroom.
“Up and at it! Stop being sick!”
the silent voice said.

When I still did not move except to weakly pat his head, Flint slowly curved around my inert body and walked to the foot of the bed. He turned to face me and then lay down with his head on my ankle and gave a loud, dramatic sigh.

While all of this was going on, Wizard simply stood and watched, adding his comment in the form of a longing look toward the door. I wished that I had enough energy to respond to my dogs, but I simply felt too fatigued to do anything. I closed my eyes and must have drifted off to sleep.

Sometime later I was awakened by the sound of Joan coming up the stairs. I opened my eyes to see her come into the room.

“I thought that you were going to rest today,” she said in a slightly disapproving voice.

“I am resting,” I croaked in response.

“Then what is all of this?” she gestured toward me
and the bed.

I looked down. Flint was still lying at my feet. Wiz had come onto the bed as well and was lying in the crook of my arm where he liked to sleep if he could get away with it. However, resting
next to me and on top of my chest and stomach was a collection of plush toys. A wooly sheep, several teddy bears, a fuzzy green dinosaur, a moose that was missing one antler …

I looked into Wizard’s big eyes.
“They make me feel better. Maybe it will work for you too,”
his quiet voice said in my head.

My interest in the differences in the behavior and abilities of the various breeds of dogs has been ongoing for most of my life, although others have shared my fascination. Anyone who owns or loves dogs is bound to go on about the merits and intelligence of some breeds and the limitations of others. I’ve long collected comments that various people have made about the intelligence of different dog breeds, including TV newsman Peter Jennings’s comment on the Malamute: “Their brain [is] like a piece of river rock”; veterinarian Michael Fox’s comment on Irish setters: “They’re so dumb that they
get lost on the end of their leash”; author E. B. White on the dachshund: “Someday, if I ever get a chance, I shall write a book, or warning, on the character and temperament of the dachshund and why he can’t be trained and shouldn’t be. I would rather train a striped zebra to balance an Indian club than induce a dachshund to heed my slightest command”; or the comment on a TV show by a Los Angeles dog trainer to a woman who wanted to train her West Highland white terrier: “There’s not much you can do with a terrier, ma’am.”

I had been thinking of systematically ranking dog breeds by their intelligence for a long time, but even starting to define what we mean by intelligence in dogs turned out to be complicated. Eventually, my research showed that there are actually three different types or aspects of dog intelligence.

I labeled the first type of canine intelligence
instinctive intelligence
, which is simply what the dog was bred to do. Thus, retrievers retrieve, herding dogs herd, pointers point, terriers hunt small furry things, and some companion dogs (like Wizard) are bred to love and be empathetic.

The second type of dog intelligence is
adaptive intelligence
. It represents the dog’s ability to solve problems and how well he learns, remembers, and benefits from his experiences. This can vary even in a single breed of dogs, so you might find that some Labrador retrievers are brilliant and clever and that some are no brighter than cows. To determine the adaptive intelligence of a dog, you have to test the individual dog. It took me about a year to develop a set of tests for adaptive intelligence in dogs. This is actually a very short time in terms of most research projects, but the work wen
t quickly because I had a shortcut: namely a number of tests that had been designed to measure the intelligence and mental development of young human children, which I adapted and modified for dogs. From these tests it became clear that, in many ways, the average dog’s mind is equivalent to that of a human child age two to two-and-a-half years. That one insight explains a lot about dog behavior.

The final form of dog intelligence is
working and obedience intelligence
, which is what the dog can learn to do—the dog’s trainability. In humans, this would be the equivalent of how well you do in school.

I had wanted to use the test that I had developed to measure the intelligence of the various dog breeds and combine this with another measure of trainability. Unfortunately, with around 160
breeds registered with the American Kennel Club, the need to test 10 or so of each type would be prohibitively expensive in costs and time.

Fortunately, there were people who already had the information that I needed—namely the people who judge dog obedience competitions. These dog judges are trained to observe and evaluate how dogs perform under controlled conditions. It is not unusual for a judge to spend 10 to 20 hours on any given weekend judging and scoring dogs of various breeds. Because of their extensive experience watching and evaluating dogs, they were bound to have accumulated knowledge about the relative performance of various dog breeds.

To gather data from this group of professionals I first obtained the lists of judges from the American and Canadian kennel clubs and then sent out questionnaires to every dog obedience judge in North America. The questionnaire was fairly long and complicated, and asked the judges to rate each of the dog breeds on several aspects of their intelligence and which specific breeds they would rate as the 10 most intelligent and the 10 least intelligent breeds. To my amazement, 208 experts—approximately half of all the obedience judges listed in North America—responded to my request. Of these, 199 pro
vided complete information in all sections of the questionnaire. In addition, about one-quarter of the judges added letters and notes, many of which contained insights into the way dogs think. Some even added extra statistical data that helped me adjust the placement of particular breeds. Finally, after my preliminary analyses, I telephoned about two dozen of the obedience judges for follow-up interviews that allowed me to clarify some issues and sharpen my interpretation of the data.

All of this work eventually became the basis for my first book about dogs,
The Intelligence of Dogs
, which, in addition to discussing how dogs think, also provided the ranking of the working and obedience intelligence of the 110 dog breeds
for whom the obedience judges had provided adequate data. I expected that many people would be interested in the book, but I did not expect all hell to break loose.