Canis lupus hominis

Posted in dog behavior | Tagged Chinese crested dog, tool use, tool use in animals | 8 Comments

8 Responses

1. on June 15, 2012 at 9:43 pm massugu

   That’s one smart puppy!

   
   
2. on June 15, 2012 at 10:40 pm Pai

   The owners swear they never taught her to do this; they only set up the camera after food on the counter kept disappearing and they didn’t know how she was doing it!

   I remember a long time ago in an old episode of ‘Its Me or the Dog’, there was a Jack Russel Terrier that opened kitchen drawers to make steps to reach the counter top and steal food.

   
   
   • on June 15, 2012 at 10:46 pm retrieverman

     It wasn’t a JRT. It was a Patterdale/Welsh terrier cross or maybe Patterdale/red fell. I can’t remember the exact formula.

     
     
   • on June 15, 2012 at 11:00 pm retrieverman

     Definite tool use.

     A dingo did exactly the same thing and it got a lot of mention in the popular science blogs: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/thoughtful-animal/2012/02/23/dingoes-ate-my-nametag-tool-use-in-a-dingo/

     
     
   • on June 15, 2012 at 11:02 pm retrieverman

     Dingo tool use:

     
     
3. on June 16, 2012 at 9:07 am The Octopus Gallery

   My dog has dragged a heavy end table around to use it as a stepstool over a gate.

   
   
   • on June 16, 2012 at 9:56 am retrieverman

     Yeah. This is something that’s only now getting some attention. I bet it’s far more common than ethologists would have assumed.

     
     
4. on June 16, 2012 at 2:46 pm Peggy Richter

   dogs are generally overlooked in comparison to more exotic animals’ intellegence and tool use. It wasn’t that long ago that many asserted that dogs didn’t feel (but elephants do?) , they didn’t see color, and so forth. The actual fact was that because dogs were “common” people thought they knew everything about them and didn’t seriously study them. The same goes for “pack structure” (the rise of black wolf clearly shows that it is NOT a case of the “alpha pair are the only ones that mate”, etc). There’s more data on behavior in lions than there is on wolves. The natural environment of wolves isn’t especially condusive to tool use and the wolf is well equiped to exploit the environment “as is”, but mostly the reason this surprises most scientists is that they previously hadn’t set up a good test venue to discover what canids are capable of.
   I often am amused at the “mirror” tests “proving” that dogs don’t have a sense of self. I’ll believe that when they prove people can identify themselves as modified using a “smell” tool instead of vision.

   
   

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