Scientists are currently searching for the world’s most intelligent dog to try and understand why they are born with these gifts. They put a call out on social media for exceptional dogs. And guess what? All the owners who responded to the request lived with border collies. I guess that might answer the question in the title. And a quick bit of research on the internet more or less concludes that the border collie is the smartest dog.
Study
Claudia Fugazza of Eotvos University in Budapest is testing dogs around the world to see what makes them gifted. She says that dogs have great difficulty in naming objects even after intense training. Although sometimes there are, as mentioned, gifted animals who really apply themselves to the task. A co-researcher on the project, Adam Miklosi said that:
We have seen so many dogs, lovely dogs. But they really have a problem to choose between even two objects. These dogs [the border collies] were thinking, they were not just running and having fun. They were trying to make a choice.
Self-taught
They say that they want to know what makes these dogs tick and what makes them different. They are canine Einsteins. Is it possible to have a canine Einstein? We have human geniuses but is there a canine version? The researchers don’t provide me with an answer to that question but it common sense days that individual dogs vary in intelligence. One thing is sure, the border collie appears to be the most intelligent canine and the respondents to the request by the researchers had never trained their dogs. They were self-taught and their human caregivers appear to have been unware that their dogs were so smart compared to other dogs.
They hadn’t trained them, there’d just picked the language up. The owners had no idea that other dogs could not do this. – Claudia Fugazza.
Online contests
The researchers are running an online contest each Wednesday in which dogs are pitted against each other. They are trained for a week and in one test, Max in Hungary competed against Squall in the USA in testing whether they could identify six new toys by name. They picked out six each so it was a draw. It took 10 minutes and both went through to the next round.
