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Most owners will attest to the intelligence of their dogs, large or small. In our case, we have two small dogs - Ollie, a Jack Russell terrier, and Mickey, a Yorkshire terrier. Each has their own endearing personality and each of them know just how to manipulate us when they wish.
It is Mickey who is, perhaps, the most manipulative of our two pets. At the same time it seems to me that he operates rather as some sort of impatient automaton.
For example, when we return from our twice-daily walks, he will loudly demand his doggie treat. Midmorning when we have coffee, and midafternoon when we settle for a cuppa, he demands another one. At around five o’clock he gets very impatient and voluble for his evening supper of a saucer of chicken. And so on.
To attempt to deviate from the strict routine he has imposed on us turns him into a noisy impatient bundle of fur. For such a little dog, the noise that he can create in the house if his demands are not met has to be heard to be believed. The curious thing is that if he is offered a titbit at other times he will usually turn his nose up at them, so fixed is the routine in his mind.
Ollie, on the other hand, is possibly one of the most patient dogs we have had. He knows Mickey’s routine very well and merely waits quietly for the treats to be handed out. He is much less manipulative than Mickey, but even he knows that if he feels like a treat he has only to come to where I am sitting and stare quietly at me for something to be eventually offered.
Our sons say that our two dogs rule our house, and we have never sought to dispute this for clearly that is the situation. I guess that, despite television programmes such as The Dog Whisperer’ which exhort us to treat dogs as animals and not humans, most dog-owners are as soft as butter when it comes to their pets.
The routine of our two dogs was brought to mind this morning by a report from the University of South Australia in Adelaide which has shown that pet dogs are less intelligent than their forebears, the wolf, or of Australia’s wild dogs, the dingo.
The researchers set up a problem-solving test in which, to reach a bowl of food behind a fence, the animals had to move away from the food, pass through a swing door and then come back on themselves. The wolves and dingoes passed the test in twenty seconds. but the domestic dogs failed altogether. They just pawed uselessly at the the fence and barked out of frustration, thus proving that they were utterly reliant on humans.
They should have asked Mickey. When it comes to food, he’d have beaten the other animals hands down with Ollie closely following in his wake!
.
Most owners will attest to the intelligence of their dogs, large or small. In our case, we have two small dogs - Ollie, a Jack Russell terrier, and Mickey, a Yorkshire terrier. Each has their own endearing personality and each of them know just how to manipulate us when they wish.
It is Mickey who is, perhaps, the most manipulative of our two pets. At the same time it seems to me that he operates rather as some sort of impatient automaton.
For example, when we return from our twice-daily walks, he will loudly demand his doggie treat. Midmorning when we have coffee, and midafternoon when we settle for a cuppa, he demands another one. At around five o’clock he gets very impatient and voluble for his evening supper of a saucer of chicken. And so on.
To attempt to deviate from the strict routine he has imposed on us turns him into a noisy impatient bundle of fur. For such a little dog, the noise that he can create in the house if his demands are not met has to be heard to be believed. The curious thing is that if he is offered a titbit at other times he will usually turn his nose up at them, so fixed is the routine in his mind.
Ollie, on the other hand, is possibly one of the most patient dogs we have had. He knows Mickey’s routine very well and merely waits quietly for the treats to be handed out. He is much less manipulative than Mickey, but even he knows that if he feels like a treat he has only to come to where I am sitting and stare quietly at me for something to be eventually offered.
Our sons say that our two dogs rule our house, and we have never sought to dispute this for clearly that is the situation. I guess that, despite television programmes such as The Dog Whisperer’ which exhort us to treat dogs as animals and not humans, most dog-owners are as soft as butter when it comes to their pets.
The routine of our two dogs was brought to mind this morning by a report from the University of South Australia in Adelaide which has shown that pet dogs are less intelligent than their forebears, the wolf, or of Australia’s wild dogs, the dingo.
The researchers set up a problem-solving test in which, to reach a bowl of food behind a fence, the animals had to move away from the food, pass through a swing door and then come back on themselves. The wolves and dingoes passed the test in twenty seconds. but the domestic dogs failed altogether. They just pawed uselessly at the the fence and barked out of frustration, thus proving that they were utterly reliant on humans.
They should have asked Mickey. When it comes to food, he’d have beaten the other animals hands down with Ollie closely following in his wake!
.
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