Canine Intelligence: Whats your story? - Page 3

Enjoyed reading the stories .. thank you all :-). Kaff , I too had a dog from Jeck and another dog from Odin. My Jeck son , I would match against any police dog . Both these gs were very very cunning and good problem solvers.
I currently have a gs. I had him 7 days . When he was 10 weeks old , a tennis ball rolled under the TV, my TV stand, which is about 6 inches of the floor and 5 feet in length. He was in front of the TV, the ball rolled . Without even looking under the TV , without even trying to retrieve from under the tv , the exact moment the ball rolled , he ran to the right side of the TV , the 5 feet , went around the tv and got the ball . My jaw dropped watching this. He never . never had any experience near the TV in those 7 days. How did he know how to get that ball and how could he have figured that out , without trying anything else, instantly at that . You draw your own conclusions !! Personally , I still contemplate that.

Friend had a most remarkable Marko V Cellerland grandson. The dog intimidated you without making a sound. Never let you stand close to owner ( he would keep bouncing you away ). If you spoke loud or waived arms his facial expression changed ( and you just knew what he meant ). Never any barking or growling . Would let you in the home but not let you leave without being escorted by a family member to the door. He had an off the charts hunt drive that just wont quit. Friend said he was never trained to do any of this.
Do people have dogs like this any more? He was out of kai V Silberbrand. And Hunde he was bred in England by Malcolm Griffiths.

One of the most intelligent dogs I've heard about in recent years was a Shiloh named Mali. She's a medical service dog, and when her owner goes to the doctor, she wants to alert to all the sick people in the room. I tried to get a puppy from a breeding to her sister, but unfortunately, it didn't work out. The puppy was too shy.

Here's one of the stories her owner shared with me.

We were at our last stop, Walmart, and it was about 2 in the afternoon. After this we would go home and I could put my feet up and Mali could go be a dog. I just had a few things to pick up, but Walmart was packed with people since it was the middle of the month. I had to wait for an electric cart to ride, as there was no way I was going to have Mai help to pull me in one of their wheelchairs, she does not have a pulling harness. I do not know how long we waited but Mali started to get antsy and I had to tell her to down stay. I thought it was because she had been out all day after being in for so long.

Finally a cart came. We shopped for about 15 minutes before she started to push against me and whimper. I looked down at her and asked if she needs to go be a dog. She looked up at me with those intelligent eyes hopefully, and I thought I had guessed it. I told her I was almost finished. When we passed the aisle with soda in it she started to buck and wine and make wooing sounds. I am thick and did not understand, I corrected her and told her, Mali enough. By the time we got to the pastry department she had enough of my not listening and grabbed me by the arm, puling me halfway out of the cart, while making a gurgling wooo. This is when I got it; my blood sugar was low.

I quickly picked out a donut, and went to the cash register and checked out. You see, I am one of those rare people who does not get any symptoms of low blood sugar until it is too late. I checked my blood sugar level in the car and it was a 42. To some of you that might sound like OMG, I have gone as low as a 39 without a symptom before. After that it goes very fast, nausea, shaking, turning grey and coma. I had only minutes until my sugar dropped further. I could have been driving my car and had no way to bring it up or even known what was happening as a wave of nausea swept over me. Thank goodness for my girl!

@Sunsilver -  there are ever increasing uses

for such talents;  the bandwidth of Medical Alert

dogs is increasing exponentially.  In fact, there

seem to be a range of other animals where some

show parallel abilities, from things I have read

recently.  The humans working with this expanding

field still can't figure out how & why the animals

can do it, though.  Although it seems likely the

answers lie in the olfactorary systems / pheramones

area.  A lot of dogs (&c) tested can't, apparently, so

it's a bit "hit & miss", as yet.

There are similarities with the extending range of

things "detector dogs" can sniff out - although there

tends to be more actual "training" in evidence in that

field.

@Centurian :  have you considered the extent to which

your dog's better senses of smell & hearing could have

contributed to his ability to fast-track the movement of

his ball under the TV stand ?

There is no evolutionary advantage to developing

skills, and rationalisation for those skills, in animal

species which do not have the physical character-

istics necessary to USE them.  Take the issues of

bi-pedalism and opposable thumbs - which dogs

are never likely to develop (however many new breeds

we dream up !).  Looking at primates, where there are

closer parallels (and genes) to humans, most of the Apes

and some monkey species (and a few non-primate eg

arborial rodents) use tools.  BUT they use tools like

twigs and stones;  haven't seen any brick-making &

laying yet (all they'd need is mud) - they don't need

to build housing (though if humans keep taking away

their habitats, who knows ?).  As far as I am aware,

"Planet of the Apes" is Sci-Fi.

 

@Mithuna - out of curiosity, do you know your friend's

dog's UK Registered name ?  Bedwin's what ?  Or was

he from an Australian breeding ?

OTOH some of the claims being made of dog's capabilities in the medical field are outrageous and exploitive.

Double blind tested under clinical conditions is a beautiful thing.

T
Homeschoolers trying to outscience science not so much.

Pete, I'd agree - occasionally we see something about
the way eg "cancer sniffing" dogs are being kept /raised,
that raises concerns around exploitation. [ Let alone the

humans who may get conned sometimes !]   I'm mostly
reading in British developments in the field though, where
the people involved are usually 'non-profit', and where welfare
controls apply. But yeah, something to beware of.

I am more concerned about people being exploited by con men selling them fake medical devices... of the furry kind foregoing a silicon based device that actually has been proven to work.

Much to loathe about the self made medical dog industry, scammer, detectors on.

Sunsilver , yes .. I thought of the use of the other senses .. but what I can't put into words is that when the ball rolled , he immediately , in an eye blink , ran to the other side of the tv... Most dogs would have visually followed the ball and stuck their nose under the tv first to problem solve. Or paw under the tv etc etc.. He did not. In context , this was a puppy.
Interesting , .... lately I found that his half brother , had done the same thing. Intelligence can be bred for , but the results are not always consistent. Like people i guess you can have a genius dad but that doesn't make you automatically a genius . I think this thread is interesting because the among the reasons I think people / families gravitate to GS for a family dog is because of their Intelligence .and Trainability. Sometimes i wonder , how much do breeders pay attention to their lines in this respect ??

Maybe those GSD breeders concentrating on 'working /
sports' abilities in their lines are fostering the gene-mix
for intelligent responses ? Or, enhancement of those
extraordinary physical capabilities which may provide the
foundation for much of the 'clever' behaviour ? I doubt that
anybody breeding for physical adherence to Showing potential
anywhere has 'brains' very high on their agenda. Even in GSDs.
Or that the great army of BYB/'pet' producers is overly concerned
with such ability. Even if you could get that lucky in the gene
allocations in your particular breeding selections (see now-Closed
'Bloodlines' thred !) Willing to be proved wrong, even by some
tiny minority of such breeders; - but it has been noticeable that
some charities training 'assistance' and 'alert' dogs definitely
prefer mongrels for their programmes.

Of course, something not mentioned here so far is another angle;
that there is a 'psychic' element to some of these notable clever
events. Maybe some kind of telepathy going on ? Let me make
it VERY clear that I am open-minded about this possibility. What
I am NOT doing is saying that I 'believe' it, above other possibilities.
At least one poster as good as called me a hypocrite on Off Topic
recently because I dared suggest I retained a curiosity about the
idea of some telepathic process WITH A PHYSICAL, EXPLAIN-
ABLE CAUSE that science has just not found yet, while declaring
my un-belief in religious fairy tales and my dislike of those who
spread evangelical warfare around the Internet. For some reason,
she believes the two strains of thought are incompatible.

Hund, animals are extremely good at reading our body language.

Back near the beginning of the 20th century (IIRC) there was a horse named "Clever Hans" who could tap out the answers to arithmetic questions with amazing accuracy.

Researchers wanted to figure out how he was able to do it. They put his handler behind a screen...no more "Clever Hans"! He was responding to very subtle cues from the handler. I think it was the way the handler relaxed his stance when Hans hit the right number of taps with his hoof.

I believe intelligence can be bred for. The Littlest Hobo dogs are a good example. Chuck Eisenman was good friends with Shiloh shepherd breed founder, Tina Barber. He told her every time he tried to go too far outside his lines with breeding, he'd get dogs that were 'just dogs', and lacked the amazing intelligence shown by London and his sons.

An example from his book about London: Chuck had recently been dropped by his baseball team due to an injury to his pitching arm. He was out of work, and stayed up late at night, brooding about his future. London wanted to go to sleep, and kept whining. Finally, the dog stood up on his hind legs, and pawed at the light switch until it turned off! No training for this - just copying what he'd seen Chuck do!

Imagine how easy it would be to train a dog like that!!

BTW, if you go to the GSD dog forum and do a search, you will find some posts where Carmen of Carmspack talks about 'genetic obedience'. Interesting reading!!

Shepherds are definitely way up there in the ability to learn. When training Ranger to be my Hearing Ear dog, I bought a book called "Lend Me Your Ears" which goes into great detail about training the tasks needed. It states that a dog must repeat a behaviour 100x before it can be considered 'proofed'!

They certainly weren't talking about training German shepherds for these tasks!! I've mentioned elsewhere (in Ranger's obituary) how he learned to respond to the kitchen timer after just two short trials, and still remembered the task several months later, with NO reinforcement during the intervening months. He was like that with eveyr task I taught him...three repetitions max, okay, he's got it!

The only thing I really ever had trouble with was teaching the 'down'. I think it might have been because he felt vulnerable in that position. He was a rescue, after all, and he had a few little quirks due to bad experiences.