Canis lupus hominis

I must confess that I find certain arguments among dog people rather boring. I don’t like the continuous bickering that exists between the different philosophies of dog training.  The fights that erupts among those who feed dog food, those who feed home-cooked meals, and those who feed raw (and the debates between the raw-feeding sects) is actually more humorous. After all, domestic dogs evolved to eat human fecal matter and cast-off bones. I don’t know how someone can get so worked up about it, but trust me, there are people who do.

However, one debate that I’ve always thought was interesting was the old “which breed is more intelligent” debate. What is interesting about it, though isn’t that there is a great objective way of answering the question (just as it is with human intelligence, which I will get to in a minute). I’ve never read a dog breed description that considers the dog in question to be stupid. Never. Nearly every dog breed description I’ve read mentions the word “intelligent”  to describe the breed’s characteristics.

Now, a lot of people think that dogs that do well in obedience trials and are generally easily trained and regimented are more intelligent. So golden retrievers, border collies, German shepherds, and pooldes are the most intelligent dogs, because those breeds are very easily trained and regimented. Conversely, those breeds that can’t be regimented easily are “stupid.” Afghan hounds are dumb, so goes the reasoning, as are bulldogs, chow chows,  and virtually every toy breed, scent hound, and sight hound.

However, I’ve always felt that this reasoning was terribly flawed.

If one is to peruse the infamous Stanley Coren Intelligence of Dogs list, you’ll notice something. Here are the top ten top “Obedience/Working Intelligence” breeds:

1. Border collie (herder)

2. Poodle (retriever)

3. German Shepherd (herder and police/army dog)

4. Golden retriever (retriever)

5. Dobermann Pinscher (derived from herding ancestors)

6. Shetland Sheepdog (herder)

7. Labrador retriever (retriever)

8. Papillon (toy spaniel/toy spitz)

9.  Rottweiler (herder)

10. Australian cattle dog (herder)

Now, Coren’s methodology required obedience trial judges and dog obedience trainers to pick their best and worst dogs at this type of intelligence. It’s very interesting– but it tells you nothing about the breed intelligence. It simply says which breeds trainers and judges  find respond to traditional motivations in dog training.

And note that all of these dogs, except the papillon, are herders or retrievers. Herding breeds and retrievers require a certain amount of regimentablity in their working behavior. After many generations of selective breeding, one can produce dogs that are truly genuises at regimentation.

Also, these breeds are very common. The Labrador retriever and German shepherd are well-known throughout the world, as are the golden retriever, poodle, and (lately) the border collie.  Their higher levels of popularity mean that the average obedience trainer or obedience trialer is going to know these dogs better.

But that’s not the only thing we have to look at. What are the “dumb” dogs on Coren’s list?

70. Shih Tzu (toy)

71. Basset hound (scent hound)

72.  Beagle (scent hound) and Mastiff (war dog, guard dog, companion)

73. Pekingese (toy)

74. Bloodhound (scent hound)

75. Borzoi (sight hound)

76.  Chow Chow (spitz, human food source)

77. bulldog (former catch dog, current companion dog)

78.  basenji (pariah dog, sight hound)

79.  Afghan hound (sight hound)

Of these breeds, only the bulldog, the Shih Tzu, and the chow chow have had periods of popularity in recent decades. The some of them have had periods of fad breeding– Afghan hounds in the 1960’s and 70’s, Borzois in the early years of the fancy, and bulldogs have had boom or bust periods of utter faddishness. Fad breeding for trendy pets is generally a selection away from working characteristics, so the dogs could have lost some of their trainability there.

But I think there is a better answer here. After all, a lot these top ten breeds are also top tens in registration statistics and are certainly experiencing fad breeding

Most of these dogs were not required to be regimented in their working temperament.

Afghan hounds and borzois were bred to catch and kill game independent of the hunter’s guns. Now that requires an intelligence that is very different from a golden retriever. A golden retriever retrieves already shot small game species with the assistance of the handler.

A retriever has to pay attention to its handler, while a working Afghan hound, which aren’t exactly common outside of Baluchistan, must pay attention to its own senses.

Let’s look at it another way.

We both think Einstein and Shakespeare are geniuses, right?

But Shakespeare probably wasn’t any good at mathematics, or at least, he wasn’t as good at it as Einstein was.

Einstein was a very good physicist, but I doubt that he could have ever strung together sentences the way Shakespeare did.

But they were both geniuses.

And yet they were different.

Genius as a human quality is not a size-fits-all trait. Different people can be geniuses at different things. IQ tests are interesting, but I don’t think they fully capture genius.

Dogs are the same way, but these traits are more accumulated in different strains, simply because selective breeding has accentuated them in the strains. If we were ever to go crazy with eugenics again, we might experience some of this in our species. However, I doubt that the extremes we see in dogs would ever develop in any “strain” of our species. (Of course, I think eugenics is a crazy idea, and it definitely shouldn’t be attempted again.)

A breed is only as smart as the task it was bred for. It’s when you start breeding for superficial characteristics alone and heavily inbreed your lines that you really start producing stupid dogs.

But superior working dogs are not smarter than other working dogs that have been bred for other tasks.

Intelligence in dogs as a question has little scientific merit, but asking the questions might does lead us to really understand what caused the very real differences in dog breeds. It’s very unfortunate that so many of these discussions don’t get to that point.