What they found was that dogs didn’t seem to stand out from other animals in any of the categories. There were carnivorans, social hunters, and domesticated animals alike that could match or outcompete dogs in cognition tests. What was different about dogs was their ability to match animals
across those three groups. Hyenas seem to follow the cues of others in their pack better; dolphins perform better in tests of self-consciousness, and raccoons are better at physical puzzles. However, no other animal could perform as well in all the categories.
“Every species has unique intelligence,” says Lea. What he and Osthaus argue is that “their intelligence is what you would expect of an animal that is... recently descended from social hunters... that are carnivores and that have [also] been domesticated,” he says. “There's no other animal that fits all three of those criteria.”
This new study takes an unusual approach to cognition studies, says Daphna Buchsbaum, the principal investigator at the University of Toronto’s Canine Cognition Lab. “I think a lot of times as humans, we naturally look at animal cognition through the lens of what makes them so similar to or different from us,” she says. Here, Lea and Osthaus compare dog cognition to that of other animals, with some illuminating results. Even within their proposal that dogs aren’t uniquely intelligent, she says, there may be “something interesting and unique” about dogs that enables them to sit in the middle of those three categories.
There are competing theories about why dogs are good at what they’re good at—whether it’s because of domestication, because of an evolutionary history of hunting in packs, or other reasons. Lea says nobody knows exactly why dogs are the way they are, but this paper points to more questions about how they think, and future research directions for other animals that have not been as widely studied as dogs. Studying other carnivores—particularly endangered species such as the
African painted dog or the
dhole, which may go extinct before we can figure them out, Lea says—could offer a whole new window into pre-domestication dog cognition, as well as providing insight into those animals themselves.
