Chapter 1: How smart are dogs?

Dogs aren't "smart" the same way as short-snouts. We can't memorize math equations, or the third basemen on every baseball team in the 1980's, and we can't do inventive things like build bridges or weed-wackers or machines to open cans in which humans hide two-year old vegetables. Humans are the engineer species of our planet.

But dogs are born with sharp instincts and sharp abilities, some of which humans don't have. And we are even born with built-in instinctual memories, some ancient- more on that in a later blog. First, we use odors to identify and catalog every living thing we meet. My bearded man-servant is for me odor 112, the Australian terrier next door is odor 161, and the tree outside my living room is odor 286. Steak is number 9. I love steak. The majority of our brain is devoted to detecting and analyzing smells close and very far-away. And why not use our head space for that? Humans don't even use 95% of their brains.

Anyway, dogs can also sense emotions in other living things. We can sense when our human pack members are ill or sad or happy. Or when strangers are kind or fearful or dangerous. As you already know, not all humans are kind-hearted.

Most importantly, we are born imprinted with certain memories, so that we don't have to learn much in order to live a dog's short life. We all instinctively understand the mutually beneficial bond with mankind, and we know the workings of the pack and role of each member. We also have a sense of the history of the dog species, including how we came to be.

It's possible that in more ancient times, humans possessed some of these capabilities and senses too, but no longer. And because of that, these intuitive dog abilities complement those of the engineer species. Dogs make fine companions and assistants to humans, but this was not always the case. More on this history later. Wait, I hear the door opening...GTG