Canine Cognition Quotes

Dogs do not grasp the concept of house cleaning.

A dog will stay stupid. That's why we love them so much. The entire time we know them, they're idiots. Think of your dog. Every time you come home, he thinks it's amazing. He has no idea how you accomplish this every day. You walk in the door; the joy of this experience overwhelms him. He looks at you, He's back. It's that guy, that same guy. He can't believe it. Everything is amazing to your dog. Another can of food? I don't believe it.

Reason number 106 why dogs are smarter than humans: once you leave the litter, you server contact with your mothers.

Dalmatians are not only superior to other dogs, they are like all dogs, infinitely less stupid than men.

Many dogs can understand almost every word humans say, while humans seldom learn to recognize more than half a dozen barks, if that. And barks are only a small part of the dog language. A wagging tail can mean so many things. Humans know that it means a dog is pleased, but not what a dog is saying about his pleasedness.

Marvelous as may be the power of my dog to understand my moods, deathless as his affection and fidelity, his mental state is as unsolved a mystery to me as it was to my remotest ancestor.

It is my experience that in some areas [my poodle] Charley is more intelligent that I am, but in others he is abysmally ignorant. He can't read, can't drive a car, and has no grasp of mathematics. But in his own field of endeavor, which he is now practicing, the slow, imperial smelling over and anointing on an area, he has no peer. Of course his horizons are limited, but how wide are mine?

Dogs are dim creatures, do not speak to me of their good sense--have you ever heard of a team of tomcats hauling a sled across the frozen wastes?

The dog, on the other hand, has few or no ideas because his brain acts in coarse fashion and because there are few connections with each single process.

We breed dogs to be more social than the wolf. There is very interesting research that has been done with a wolf and a domestic dog. If you have a tamed wolf and you have him sit in front of the experimenter or stand in front of his master and his two dishes, one to the right, one to the left – so that the dog or wolf see the food put in the left hand dish but the owner points to the right – the domesticated will go where owner points, whereas the the wolf goes right where he saw the meat thing put. In other words, in a dog social cue from a master can override where he saw the being placed.

Sometimes you're sure dogs have some secret, superior intelligence, and other times you know they're only their simple, goofy selves.

All dogs seem to be great linguists, according to their owners. They always understand every word that's said to them.

I agree with Agassiz that dogs possess something very like conscience.

Dogs are the only mammals that will actually stare and look into a human's eyes.

My dog has the intellectual capacity of a lime wedge, yet even he possesses an elaborate set of assumptions, based on his ability to control my behavior through a combination of slavish devotion and incessant howling.

Let's examine the dog mind: Every time you come home, he thinks it's amazing. He can't believe that you've accomplished this again. You walk in the door. The joy of it almost kills him. "He's back again! It's that guy! It's that guy!"

All knowledge, the totality of all questions and answers, is contained in the dog.

You have to train a dog to think.

Dogs do have feelings, I gather.

I am convinced that basically dogs think humans are nuts.

The biggest mistake people make is assuming that their dogs think like little humans, and that they can negotiate behavior with them, but it doesn't work that way.

A dog can never tell you what she knows from the smells of the world, but you know, watching her, that you know almost nothing.

The dog has seldom been successful in pulling man up to its level of sagacity, but man has frequently dragged the dog down to his.

At home I have a Tibetan terrier. I'm still not sure if he's a genius or very thick. It's a fine line.

All knowledge, the totality of all questions and all answers, is contained in the dog. If one could but realize this knowledge, if one could but bring it into the light of day, if we dogs would but own that we know infinitely more than we admit to ourselves!