The Final Pages of Stanley Coren’s How Dogs Think:

An Interesting Example of Causal Reasoning:

 

 

As I was working on the latest section of this book I heard some excited whimpering. My beagle, Darby, was excitedly running back and forth between my office and the kitchen. Curious about what was wrong, I left my computer and went to investigate. Darby has a fascination with my wife’s cat Loki, and seems puzzled about how the cat can get himself up onto table and counter that are far too high for Darby to reach with his short beagle legs. Like all of my dogs, he also has a fondness for cat food if any can be stolen from the cat’s bowl. For this reason, we have taken to putting Loki’s food dish on the kitchen counter, where it cannot be emptied by dogs looking for an extra meal. In fact, I had fed Loki only twenty minutes or so earlier. Since the counter is high, we sometimes leave a little plastic stepstool near so that a lazy cat doesn’t have to exert himself so much in leaping to the counter. The stool is low, however, so it doesn’t help greedy, short dogs reach the counter. As usual, Darby had been interested in the feeding process, watching carefully as I kished that cat’s kibble into his bowl, and as usual he had made excited hopeful sounds. Now as we entered the kitchen the cat had just jumped off of the counter. Darby glanced up, then at the cat, then at me, and next he did something very strange. He looked down and began to dig at the base of the counter. I looked down but saw nothing.

 

“What are you trying to say, Darby?” I asked him, as if I expected an answer.

 

Again he looked at me and then frantically began to dig at the base of the counter. I looked down more closely and still could see nothing. Darby paused and once more started to scratch at the base of he counter with even more determination. Finally, in order to examine what he was pawing at, I got down on my hands and knees to examine the area better. Suddenly I felt something on my back and when I look up Darby was standing on the counter and scooping up some of the stray bits of kibble that the cat had left behind.

 

There are many ways that one can interpret this sequence of events. One of the most generous is to suggest that Darby had observed the cat using the stepstool but recognized that he needed a larger step to reach the counter. He also new that I often came over to investigate what he was doing or places that he was paying attention to. Therefore, if he had engaged in conscious planning, his scheme was simple—namely to get me to bend down near the counter and to use me as a larger, more functional stepstool. That is a long chain of speculations on my part, and it credits the little dog with a high degree of consciousness and reasoning. As a scientist I know that I have no evidence that this is what went on his mind, but then again, I have no evidence that this was not what went on in his mind. Since it is clear that in this instant a dog apparently outsmarted someone who has a Ph.D. in psychology, it is more comforting for me suggest that this is evidence of a dog’s thinking and intelligence.