One of my friends in college taught his dog to bring him random different objects like a lighter, backpack, pencil, tv remote, etc etc. He taught it to skateboard and when he'd make a gun with his hand and point it at the dog it would freeze, then if he "pulled the trigger" with his thumb the dog would fall over and play dead. There were a bunch of other tricks it could do like 'kickflip' were the dog would spin itself. I really do think dogs are smarter than people give them credit for.
I think the sticking point for many people is the definition of intelligence. You'll get people who protest "but it's just doing those things for treats!" or whatnot, but it's the ability to memorize all of those gestures/words that makes it impressive. I think it's kind of similar to the "do submarines swim?" question.
What it really is is a hold-over idea that humans have some innate specialness.
Animals are just doing tricks. Humans who learn to play a sport aren't.
Animals are just doing it for the food. You go to work every day, why?
It's worth noting that this has been an idea that has less evidence to back it up all the time. This idea will eventually be disproven, but in the meantime, there are an awful lot of people emotionally invested in this specialness being true.
The finger-gun trick was the last trick I taught to my yellow lab (he was five or six at the time). It's awesome, because he looks at me like he can't believe I'm making him do it, then slowly (almost melodramatically) "dies".
Opening doors is one trick I definitely wouldn't teach pets!
Many years ago my parents' cat started trying to open doors without any training from us. She clearly understood the process from her efforts, but couldn't grip the round handles. Given a house with cranked handles though and any door that opened out rather than in would have been insecure to her.
Oh, her house is out in the garden so she only has access to the garden door, all the other doors have keys and she hasn't managed to grow opposable thumbs yet, so I think we're safe :P I do agree with you for house pets, though.
I got my dog about 5 months ago from the SPCA. She's now a year old (plus a month), we got her at 8 months. She was picked up as a stray and I'm unsure how long she had been in her original home to begin with. She went poop outside, but she had bad problems with submissive and excited peeing that it's hard to tell if she was ever fully trained to bathroom outside. What I do know is that when we got her she barely understood sit (only with food in my hand, so I'm half betting this was a natural reaction than actual training), and that was the extent of her tricks.
With only reinforcement of her existing behaviours we've got her to learn: sit, spin, lay, roll (over), pretty (where they sit with their ass on the floor but upright with her front paws off the floor, my mother-in-law's dog helped greatly with teaching by example), tall (where she stands by herself on her back legs) dance (she'll do a 360 while on her back legs) and speak. [Ed: I forgot, we taught her to 'stand', IE move from lay down to sit, or sit to on all fours, because she'd continuously lay when told to sit.] These are all performed easily with verbal command only.
So far we've only trained using single syllable words (dogs don't understand the actual words, their brains are merely receiving a signal and performing an associated action) to keep the input the same. My wife is Canadian and I'm British, so how we pronounce things can be very different sometimes, but a syllable is nearly universal in the Anglosphere... basically we're making our dog multi-region compatible as just in the people she meets there's easily 4 or more dialects that can be giving her commands.
Potential tricks we can teach based off her existing behaviour are: Play dead, jump, growl and as she's got hound in her I'm hoping to one day get a howl command trained. We've noticed hints of 'paw'. She already knows fetch with a thrown object, so it would only be a matter of association training to get her to actually bring things (although for my in-laws their dog just brought the paper when my father-in-law jokingly told the dog to bring it without it being previously trained and their dog was picked up at 8-weeks so I doubt it had previously been trained).
My dog is a Dachshund and Jack Russell Terrier cross and certainly isn't the easiest dog to train, but simple operant conditioning is working great. By making her wait before she's allowed to eat she's actually stopped scavenging when we take her for walks (try ripping a piece of KFC out of a dogs throat, she never bit at me but it's damn hard trying to pry a dogs jaws open and stick fingers down its mouth to stop it choking on a piece of meat with bone in it), she's also stopped stealing food off of the coffee table (she got in from her walk one day and stole a large day old pizza crust off the table and had eaten 4/5ths of it before I finally managed to catch her).
By the best estimates, I have another 14 years with this dog and so far I've mostly been working at removing bad behaviours she had learnt. For all the time I taught tricks, I spent easily twice as long making bad behaviours go extinct. I don't intend to stop training my dog because the more time I spend training her, the more relaxed she is at home (Jack Russell and relaxed are commonly considered antonyms).
I'll have to record it sometime, but the thing I don't think people understand about dogs is that they're consciously trying to comprehend you. When teaching her to sit pretty by verbal command only she would hit this point where she hits the 'zone' her eyes become locked and you can see the gears crunching and then she performed the trick with no signalling. She also tried brute-forcing her tricks; literally she'll perform every trick she's learnt and then give up and start doing 'speak' to every command. You go back 5 minutes later and she'll hit the 'zone'.
Humans have the ability to understand multiple meanings, modify the meanings and understand the mis-meanings.
Example joke: "Ever notice how we park on driveways, drive on parkways, pay tolls to go on freeways and it takes longer to get where you want on an expressway." All illustrate how our usage and the meanings of our words have been modified over time.
A driveway is a section of personal roadway that leads to a personal garage (you would never have left one of the old 70% wooden cars outside with zero rust proofing on the metal, ever). A parkway was supposed to be a scenic roadway to link urban and suburban parks with pleasure roads where people could park freely and enjoy the area, now it's commonly a synonym for any general highway. Freeways were actually speed-limit-free highways, the 'free' never had anything to do with cost until the very late 20th century. An expressway was designed as a high-speed arterial road, which may have a limited number of driveways.
None of that addresses the issues of whether the dog understands. Yes, humans have a higher level of understanding in the sense that we understand abstractions, but our greater abilities in that area don't disqualify the dog's simpler ability from being called understanding.
If the dog can tell the difference between being told to fetch the paper vs fetch my shoes, then he understands.
Beyond that, the statement...
> their brains are merely receiving a signal and performing an associated action
Equally applies to humans; our brains just have a more complex form of association. There is no inherent meaning to any of the noises we make that we call words other than they're associated to something. Your associations to those noises is far more complex than the dogs, but you can't call yours understanding and not his; his understanding is simpler, but if he performs the correct trick, then he understands the word in the same sense you do, he associated some kind of meaning to that word, just like you do.
That's fair to say. Any comprehension is understanding even if it is just rote learning of single words to commands.
You're right, just because the dog doesn't understand 50+ words for 'drink' (water, coke, pepsi, coffee, tea, etc etc.) doesn't mean it isn't understanding in the same comprehension as if you got a 3 year old to bring you a 'drink'.
I don't know what I was thinking, I must have been in a state of sleep deprived idiocy. The simple fact you can teach a dog in human linguistics to sit when you say 'sit' signifies its understanding. You wouldn't get this response in an animal that all its communication skills are genetically encoded.
I remember reading about how Native Americans used to hunt Wolves with pitfall traps and how wolves would teach their young how to avoid the traps, like they would hunt a deer, they can also do the same with poisoned meats. These clearly show wolves are capable of understanding abstract concepts. Unless sink holes are a natural predator of wolves I doubt there's a genetic cue for "you see that flat piece of ground, you'll fall through that into a big pit" or "you see that steak, that's poisoned, but the one sat on the side of that metal contraption in their yard isn't!"
I was thinking of understanding along the lines that we can understand multiple meanings and abstract ideas. However, 1:1 learning is still understanding, and clearly Canis Lupis is capable of learning abstract ideas so a dog certainly has the ability to (even if we have to rebreed it into the species).
What's funny, is you're the guy with the dog; I have no pets. You should have been the one convincing me that your dog understands. Anyway, and up-vote for you.
One major difference might be our ability to map various signals into the same internal "sign" or meaning (synonyms, explanations, relations, generalization, instantiation, specialization, negation etc.) while dogs might have a 1:1 mapping between signal and meaning.
If you had a golf ball, tennis ball and cricket ball; all small enough for a dog to fetch. Would it know which "ball" to fetch if you had a club/racket/bat in your hand?
If yes, then two forms of learning are identical. If not, well ..
