Canine Intelligence: Ranking Dogs By Breed

Note from Con Slobodchikoff: This is a guest post by Dr. Stanley Coren.

Dr. Stanley Coren is professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia and author of many books on dog behaviour, including The Intelligence of Dogs,  How to Speak Dog, How Dogs Think, The Pawprints of History, Why We Love the Dogs We Do, and a children’s book, Why Do Dogs Have Wet Noses? which won the Best Children’s Book award from the Animal Behavior Society. His website is www.stanleycoren.com.

Just as everyone wants to have smart kids, most people want to own clever dogs. However whether a dog is “smart” or “dumb” depends upon the specific aspects of its behavior we consider. For example, was Nobel Prize-winning physicist Albert Einstein intelligent? Obviously, to derive the theory of relativity required a mathematical genius. Yet Einstein was so bad at simple arithmetic that his checkbook was always out of balance.

Intelligence has a variety of different dimensions. In human beings we might subdivide intelligence into verbal ability, numerical ability, logical reasoning, memory, and so forth. The intelligence of dogs also has several different aspects, among which we recognize three major dimensions. The first is called instinctive intelligence. This really refers to what a dog was bred for. For example, herding dogs were bred to herd animals. Their ability to round up animals, keep them close together, and drive them in a particular direction is inborn and only requires human intervention to keep it under control and to give it a bit of direction.

Different breeds obviously have different types of instinctive intelligence. Guard dogs watch over things, retrievers fetch, hounds track or pursue, pointers sniff out birds and indicate their location by pointing, while companion dogs are attuned to human social signals and respond to our moods to provide comfort. Every dog has an instinctive intelligence, but it is senseless to make comparisons across breeds as to which are “smarter” in this respect—their abilities are simply too different to compare.

The second dimension of dog intelligence is adaptive intelligence. This is basically a measure of what a dog can learn to do for himself. It includes learning and benefiting from experience with his environment, solving new problems, and so forth. Adaptive intelligence can differ among individuals of the same breed. Thus, all Golden Retrievers have the same instinctive intelligence, yet while most are quite clever you will occasionally encounter one that seems totally clueless and makes the same mistakes over and over again. The difference between the various Goldens is a matter of difference in adaptive intelligence, and this can be measured by using the appropriate tests.

When most people think of dog intelligence they often think of the dog working his way through complex obedience exercises in an obedience ring or on a stage. They might also think of highly trained animals such as police dogs, guide dogs for the blind, hearing assistance dogs, or search and rescue dogs. A dog responding appropriately to his master’s commands and signals tends to give us the impression that we are viewing the peak of dog intelligence. Thus when a dog demonstrates through his response that he understands what particular commands from a human mean, he is demonstrating one of the most important aspects of his intelligence. It is important because if dogs did not respond to human instruction, they would not be capable of performing the utilitarian tasks that we originally valued them for, which means that they would never have been domesticated and wouldn’t be with us now. This third type of intelligence in dogs is appropriately called working and obedience intelligence. It is the closest to what we might call school-learning ability, and is based upon what the dog can learn to do when instructed by humans.

        It should be possible to actually rank dog breeds in terms of their working and obedience intelligence. Using statistics from kennel club records based upon obedience competition trial results doesn’t work, because it gets mixed up with popularity. For example, in one recent year, according to American Kennel Club (AKC) trial records, Otterhounds earned no obedience degrees while Golden Retrievers earned 1,284. This doesn’t tell us that Otterhounds are stupid, however; there were approximately 670,000 Golden Retrievers registered with the AKC, while in that same year there were only 300 Otterhounds. Even if Otterhounds were the most brilliant of all dogs, and if every single one of them earned an obedience degree in the test year, that would amount to only 300 obedience degrees as compared to the 1,284 degrees for Golden Retrievers.

            While their records can’t help us assess dog intelligence, the kennel clubs do provide us with another resource, namely the dog obedience judges themselves. These individuals are trained to observe and evaluate how dogs perform under controlled conditions. It is not unusual for a judge to spend 12 to 20 hours on any given weekend judging and scoring dogs of various breeds. In addition, most judges are also dog trainers, spending many more hours observing and working with dogs. Because of this extensive experience watching and evaluating dogs, if any one group of people should have the accumulated knowledge of the relative performances of various breeds, it is them. They see each dog perform under the same conditions, and should be able to separate out the quality of the performance from the number of competitors.

            For my book The Intelligence of Dogs (Free Press, 1994), I contacted all of the dog obedience judges registered with the AKC and the Canadian Kennel Club, and provided them with a long questionnaire that allowed them to rank the various breeds in their working and obedience abilities. Despite its length, 199 judges provided complete information, which is approximately half of all the obedience judges listed in North America. If we limit ourselves to breeds for which at least 100 judges provided assessments we end up with a ranking of 133 breeds. This is shown in the sidebar where dogs are ranked from a high of 1 to a low of 79 in terms of their obedience and working intelligence. Dogs that share the same rank number were tied with identical scores. You will note that in the middle (around average obedience intelligence levels) there are a number of tied ranks, which is what you would expect if there are some notably bright and some notably less brilliant breeds, with the vast majority of breeds coming in around average.

            The degree of agreement among the judges was amazingly high, suggesting that there were real observable differences that were being reliably detected. For example, when we consider the dogs ranked highest in obedience or working intelligence, we find that 190 of the 199 judges ranked the Border Collie in the top 10! There was somewhat less agreement as to which breeds showed the poorest working or obedience intelligence, yet even here the degree of agreement was still high among my sample of experts. Of the 199 judges, 121 ranked the Afghan Hound in the bottom 10.

            According to the judges rankings the top 10 dogs in terms of working and obedience intelligence are, in order:

Border Collie

Poodle

German Shepherd Dog

Golden Retriever

Doberman Pinscher

Shetland Sheepdog

Labrador Retriever

Papillon

Rottweiler

Australian Cattle Dog

While the bottom 10 dog breeds  (moving downwards) are:

Basset Hound

Mastiff

Beagle

Pekingese

Bloodhound

Borzoi

Chow Chow

Bulldog

Basenji

Afghan Hound

             Does this mean that everyone should rush out and get one of the top 10 breeds of dogs? Definitely not! While a smart dog will learn everything that you want it to know, it will also learn everything that it can get away with. This means you may have to spend much more time “civilizing” your clever dog so that it learns the limits of behaviour in your household.

            Does this mean that we should stop breeding the dogs low in the rankings to “improve the species”? Definitely not! Every dog has an instinctive intelligence for which it was bred. Thus the Afghan Hound, at the bottom of the list, was bred to spot, pursue and pull down antelope and gazelle. If you ever saw one of them running you would appreciate how refined that skill is. Also most dogs in our urban society were chosen as companions—did you take the time to give an intelligence test to the last person that you were considering as a possible spouse, lover or companion?

            In addition, some of the dogs lower in the intelligence list have other qualities. The Afghan Hound is arguably among the most beautiful of dogs. I notice that every year People magazine has a special issue presenting “The 50 Most Beautiful People in the World.” I don’t ever remember People ever having an issue featuring “The 50 Most Intelligent People in the World.” Just think about what we consider to be the most important aspects of humans—well, the same applies to dogs!

Comments

[James Drake'S Golden Retriever Guide]

Nice post. I learn something totally new and challenging on websites I stumbleupon on a daily basis. It will always be exciting to read through articles from other writers and use a little something from other websites.

[dog food]

Great article. Food for the brain.

[Cheryl @ Allergy Friendly Dogs]

I found the list about intelligent dogs very interesting, thankyou. Have bookmarked your site, and will return for more reading. Great article, thanks.

[raj]

what about dalmation rank

[Patrick C. Byrne]

This is more of the same old intelligence based on a dog's willingness to follow what man wants. What a lot of nonsense. Breeds have specific qualities. I have bred pure bred dogs for forty years and am an AKC judge. I have heeard this flawed nonsense for years and I can tell you through long experience it is meaningless.

[digits]

Great posting, thanks lots!

[keep dogs]

A book of breeding? this is interesting.. I found this site very useful for me because I'm new dog owner. thanks a lot. n_n

[Janice Koler-Matznick, MS, ACAAB, CPDT]

Dr. Coren is clear in this post that the "intelligence" the obedience judges were ranking was the "working" intelligence: the desire to gain approval of humans by following trained commands. This is the breed's "bidability" and the dogs that ranked highest were of course those dogs selected for their responsiveness to training. The lowest ranking breeds were selected to work on their own, without human direction: in other words, to use thier own judgement and self-motivation. In addition, Pekingese, Bulldogs and Bloodhounds are today highly abnormal dogs selected for unusual conformation and/or one heightened sense (scent in the bloodhound) and this strong selection for physical characteristics meant other traits such as native problem-solving ability (Coren's adaptive intelligence) were ignored.

The well-known early experiments by Scott and Fuller (Genetics and the Social Behavior of Dogs) showed that Shetland Sheepdogs were extremely biddable, scoring high on leash and stay training, but failed miserably on problem-solving such as the maze test. Beagles were better at problem solving than Shelties, but the best problem-solver of all was the Basenji, which failed miserably on the training tests.

As a dog ethologist I appreciate those dogs with high problem-solving ability, such as the Basenji and Afghan, as these are dogs that could survive on their own, while the Sheltie and Brder Collie would sit around waiting for a human to tell them what to do next . It is not that Afghans and Basenjis do not learn as fast as a Border Collie, as given appropriate motivation to pay attention they actually learn the task just as fast or even faster. These "independant-minded" breeds just see no point in doing the same thing over and over, and they highly resisted the old force/intimidation type of training. Given modern science-based positive reward training many of these formerly hard-to-train breeds are performing well in activities less rote routine than competitive obedience, like agility and rally.

Lastly, Coren said: "It is important because if dogs did not respond to human instruction, they would not be capable of performing the utilitarian tasks that we originally valued them for, which means that they would never have been domesticated and wouldn’t be with us now."

Since the first dogs attached themselves to humans long before there were any other domestic animals or any other "tasks" for dogs to perfom for humans, the ability to follow human generated commands certainly was not one of the factors in domestication of the dog. The only factors important for the domestication of the dog ancestor had to be its service as a camp sanitary worker (consuming human feces and what little garbage hunter-gatherer people produced) and as a "walking larder" to supply easily accessible meat when hunting failed. No ability to follow human commands was needed, and even today many dogs in less industrialized societies still live in this original pariah niche performing these neccessary functions.

Janice Koler-Matznick

[sheereka]

there was nothing on why collies rank #1 on the intelligence list. maybe i might of skipped over it. im doing a project on types of dogs and need information.
also it was interesting. it wasn't the best information i could have gotten though.

[saheem williams]

Ok i have a full breed pitbul, and his species is "canine"!!!! What does this mean?????

[Betty]

I recently came across your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I don't know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.

Betty

http://smallpet.info

[Randall Johnson]

Grisha Stewart raises an interesting point about how training methods might influence the ranking of dog intelligence by breed. If it hasn’t already been done, this would make for a very interesting research project. In the end, Dr. Coren’s list might look a good bit different. And while I’m on the subject, what does ‘trainability’ really have to do with an animal’s overall intelligence, however one defines it? What does it tell us about how an animal relates to its world, its conspecifics, and other species? From an ecological point of view, nothing much.

Rick Smith’s question about the intelligence of mixed breeds really hit home with me because most of my recent experience with dogs (other than my own) has been with street dogs in my community, most of which don’t conform to any recognizable breed description. I myself can’t imagine how a study could be designed to answer Rick’s question, but other DBB readers might have some ideas.

One more thing. I was perplexed by Dr. Coren’s closing comment that we should “think about what we consider to be the most important aspects of humans—well, the same applies to dogs!” And the aspect he chose was 'beauty'. Dogs clearly don’t share our very narrow Western concept of beauty—one more good quality in their favor! I would have chosen ‘loyalty’, ‘companionship’, or ‘unconditional acceptance’ as far more worthy, relevant qualities.

[Grisha Stewart, Seattle dog trainer]

One major factor to consider is the type of trainer doing the evaluation. Most obedience judges are traditional trainers, meaning they use choke chains and correction to train the dog. But some dogs that are considered dumb by force-based trainers are very trainable with positive reinforcement! Beagles are a case in point.

[rick smith]

This was a very interesting article and really made me think a lot deeper about the subject of canine intelligence in general and the variety of methods and terminology used to measure it. But one thing struck me immediately after I finished reading : What about the intelligence of mixed breed canines ? Since the vast majority of dogs in our human population are mixed breeds, I would hope some research has been done in this area or else we would be excluding the majority of our canine population. I was going to add a remark about comparing the intelligence of "different" people, but i'd better not go there :-)