How Smart Is Your Dog?

June 8, 2011

Interview with John Bradshaw, author of the book Dog Sense: How the New Science of Dog Behavior Can Make You A Better Friend to Your Pet

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Mike Carruthers:
Dogs have been our pets for thousands of years but only recently has research revealed some interesting insight into the canine mind.

John Bradshaw:
There has been quite detailed research comparing chimpanzees to dogs and you might think the chimpanzees are a much smarter animal than a dog but when it comes to understanding people they’re not.
 

John Bradshaw, author of the book Dog Sense: How the New Science of Dog Behavior Can Make You A Better Friend to Your Pet...

Dogs are tuned into watching people, watching where they point, watching where their eyes are going, watching their body language. And that’s I think what we’ve given them in as part of the domestication process.

Dogs don’t really think about the past or the future they think about the here and now and we need to keep that in mind when we’re dealing with our dogs.

For example if you come home and find that your dog has been upset while you’ve been away and its chewed the TV remote. The instinctive thing for us to do is to punish the dog; well the research has shown that if you do that the dog does not associate the punishment with something its done maybe 30, 50 minutes before hand. It associates the punishment with you coming home and all that does is make the dog more anxious and less confident when its left on its own.

Many dog owners wonder if a dog would be happier if it had another companion dog in the house.

The research suggests that it’s not essential to have more than 1 dog, that a dog (even if it’s been brought up in a litter obviously with other puppies) taken away and lives with people the rest of its life it’s not suffering as a result, it’s not thinking where are the other dogs?
 

To hear the complete unedited interview, click here