Not so dumb animals

DOMESTICATION is not normally reckoned good for a species’s intelligence. All that grey matter is expensive to grow, so if you have an owner to do your thinking for you, then you do not need so much of it. Natural selection (not to mention deliberate selection by people) might therefore be expected to dumb domestic animals down.

Dogs, however, look like an exception to this rule. Some, such as herding sheepdogs, have been bred for tasks that seem to involve a lot of intelligence. More intriguingly, an experiment carried out in 2004 by Brian Hare, then at Harvard and now of Duke University in North Carolina, suggested that natural selection in the context of domestication had boosted dogs’ intelligence, too, by allowing them to understand human behaviour in a way that their ancestors, wolves, cannot. The latest study of the matter, however, suggests that is not the case after all, and that wolves, not dogs, are the clever ones.

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Tagged as: Animals, Brian Hare, Dogs, Domestic Animals, Domestication, Duke University, Harvard, North Carolina, Sheepdogs, Species, Wolves

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