If you ever make the mistake of asking a dog owner how smart his or her pet is, be prepared to spend at least half an hour listening to how Fido figured out where the treats are kept or when Rex got a new toy and immediately buried it in the garden to stop anyone else getting their hands on it and so on. As someone who is an avowed cat person, I have trouble maintaining an enthusiastic expression when I’m being told what’s basically the same story for the hundredth time by Fifi’s proud owner. But being English, I’m too polite to say, “Please stop talking about your dog, before my brain melts.” Fortunately for these people, more earnest help is at hand.
A team led by dog-loving Brian Hare at Duke University’s Canine Cognition Center has launched a system called Dognition, which attempts to shine a light on how canny your canine is. You pay $60 and perform a series of tests at home with your dog, entering the results online. Tests are based on the exercises used to train service dogs and bomb-sniffing dogs, backed up by published animal cognition studies, and you get a summary of how well your dog has done. The tests describe what personality type your dog is (a smooth operator or a problem-solver, for example). There’s also a companion book, co-written by Hare with his wife Vanessa Woods, called The Genius of Dogs: How Dogs Are Smarter Than You Think.
Hare came up with the idea after giving a presentation at a conference run by the Association of Pet Trainers in 2009. He was taken aback by the number of people who asked where they could get hold of the tests he’d talked about, and whether Hare was planning on starting a company. Back at Duke, Hare mulled the idea over for a couple of years, wrote a business plan, and raised a million dollars in financing.
But Dognition isn’t just a neat business idea catering to dog-owners’ pride in their charges: Hare and his team are hoping to gather meaningful science from the test results. Other researchers in the field are dubious that the data will be at all useful, as it’s being generated by people who, for the most part, aren’t trained scientists. Hare acknowledges that there are issues with his approach, but hopes that there will be enough data of sufficient quality to take that into account. The team at Duke has also tried to make the tests simple enough so that experimental error can be minimized: one of the tests is to yawn at your dog five times and see if your dog yawns back. This measures the worryingly-named attribute called contagion, which Hare claims is a precursor to empathy.
Other researchers have expressed concern about leveraging the tendency of pet owners to splash out considerable sums of money on their animals in the name of research, but Hare claims people are already incurring a considerable “opportunity cost”, as he puts it, in driving their pets to Duke to take part in previous studies at the Canine Cognition Centre. This way, Hare says, people can do the tests at home and save the trip.
Hare and his team are aiming at getting 100,000 dogs and owners recruited in the first year and have been promoting Dognition extensively through social media channels like Twitter and Facebook. That sounds like a huge number, but Hare notes that it’s a tiny fraction of the estimated 70 million dogs in the U.S.
It remains to be seen if Hare turns out to be top dog in canine cognition studies or whether he’s barking up the wrong tree.
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