Good Dogs, Clever Dogs

New Zealand Listener, Volume 25, Issue 630, 27 July 1951, Page 24

Good Dogs, Clever Dogs

by

SUNDOWNER

JUNE 17

— NE of my relatives has a dog which can do everything, he says, but lift a straggler over a fence. He is the first to detect a stranger in the flock, and as soon | as he sees it he draws attention to it by following it. I am not able yet to accept the claim, but I hesitate, knowing the owner, to dismiss it as nonsense. | I have seen dogs follow a sheep right

through a flock, isolate it, and hold it, but the sheep has been indicated and

| the manoeuvre first started by the shep- | herd. I know that sheep, even of the | same breed and off the same pasture, | differ greatly in appearance when you really begin to see them. To.dogs, which have noses as well as eyes, they are probably as different as hens and pheasants. I think I could myself get to know 50 or 60 sheep as individuals, and per- | haps a few more than that. But the | dog which detects strangers in a flock | before they are pointed out is doing something which is not done often enough to become routine. When the Countryman some years ‘ago fan a sefies of letters ‘describing clever. performances by dogs, there were, I remember, at least two entries from New Zealand. One was far too clever to be true-the story of a bitch who had an injured eye for which painful .drops had been prescribed and who, when she was left alone one day, removed the _ bottle containing the lotion and emptied it out. The other story was an example of the kind of thing mentioned at the beginning of this note-the recovery of three sheep which had jumped through a fence into a paddock filled already with sheep of the same breed. The chief feature of the story was the fact that the dog rescued the three trespassers’ without competent direction, since the man temporarily in charge of him "was an amateur. It was good and clever

work, but no more unusual, I thought, than a hundred New Zealand dogs had been doing every day for a hundred shepherds for nearly a hundred years. » te 7

JUNE 19

ro. HAVE been thinking a good deal about clever dogs during the last 48 hours, and am not sure that I know what a clever dog is. What we usually call a clever dog is an obedient dog; a dog that does quickly and accurately what we want it to do; a dog that surrenders its mind to ours. A really clever dog would probably not work at all. It would hunt, do some things that we

wanted it to do and many more that would make us mad. There are such dogs,

even such sheep dogs, but they usually have a short life. Whether it is clever to die rather than confotm is a metaphysical question that neither dog nor man can answer; but conformity is certainly not a proof of cleverness. Someone suggested once-perhaps Julian Huxley-that an experiment should be made in breeding dogs for intelligence only. Forget about the standards, he said, about size, shape, colour, and use, and mate those dogs only that seem unusually well supplied with brains. How far the experiment went I don’t know. It was perhaps never started. But I should like to see the result of such a test-after, say, ten years-if someone else had the responsibility of owning it. The chances are, I think, that we would begin to be anxious before ten years and deal with our clever dog as Babylonian princes used to deal. with un~usually clever men--destroy them before their cleverness threatened our own peace. (To be continued)