Many dog owners think their pooch is special. In some cases, it’s more than just an impression: recent research from Hungary has investigated exceptional dogs whose cognitive abilities far exceed those of other canines.
The scientists who worked on this study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, tracked dogs that can remember the names of hundreds of toys, known as Gifted Word Learner (GWL) dogs. This ability is all the more remarkable in light of the fact that the average canine can remember 89 words and phrases.
Researchers at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest spent five years scouring the globe in search of canines with exceptional memorisation skills. They succeeded in finding 41 dogs from nine countries, including the United States, United Kingdom, Brazil, Norway, Portugal and Hungary.
Many of them were border collies, which is perhaps not surprising given the breed’s reputation for mental sharpness and intelligence. Previous research published in the journal Behavioral Processes in 2011 claimed that a border collie was able to retain over 1,000 object names after three years of intensive training.
That said, lead researcher Shany Dror and colleagues found that two pomeranians, a Pekingese, a Shih Tzu, a corgi, a poodle and a few mixed-breed dogs also had significantly above-average learning abilities.
“Surprisingly, most owners reported that they did not intentionally teach their dogs toy names, but rather that the dogs just seemed to spontaneously pick up the toy names during unstructured play sessions,” Dror said.
This enabled the experts to determine that there was no correlation between the owners’ training experience and the dogs’ ability to correctly select the toys whose names they heard.
“GWL dogs learn new object names very quickly. When we conducted our test with the dogs, the average number of toys they knew was 29. But by the time we published the results, more than half of the owners reported that their dogs had already acquired a vocabulary of over 100 toy names,” the researcher added.
While this research is the first to examine the characteristics of gifted dogs, the academics need to continue their investigations to understand the origin of these extraordinary abilities. They encourage dog owners to contact them via the Genius Dog Challenge website if they think their pooch is more intelligent than average.