Your training program can be as flexible as you need it to be.

      How Smart Is Your Dog?

      Is a Border Collie smarter than an Airedale Terrier? Just how smart is your dog? There are many theories, but it’s very difficult to get a consistent measurement of canine intelligence in the scientific community. Experts can’t even decide on a consistent way to test human intelligence, and less study has been devoted to canines.

      What does it take to prove intelligence, anyway? The ability to use tools? A great memory? The ability to solve problems? An IQ test? And do we bias any measurements by looking at the results through our human eyes rather than focusing on a different species?

      You could argue that a Basset Hound that sits by the pantry door waiting for you to get his dinner is as smart as the Golden Retriever that figures out how to open the door himself. Maybe the Golden has more initiative, but the Basset knows that he’s going to be waited upon!

      In general, dogs are fairly smart creatures. According to psychologist and canine researcher Stanley Coren, PhD, a dog’s mental abilities are equivalent to those of a two- to two-and-a-half-year-old human child. The average dog can learn approximately 165 words, including signals. Dogs can also learn how to count up to about five and understand errors in simple computations.

      Just as with people, some individual dogs are going to be smarter than others. You may find that your dog has difficulty learning some behaviors, or you may find that you need to scramble to stay ahead of your dog!

      Chapter 2: Understanding How Dogs Learn

      Dogs are a different species than we are. Behavior that you find unacceptable in a person is often normal in canine terms. Imagine waking up one morning surrounded by people who use a language you don’t understand and who have unfamiliar customs. You can learn the new language and what this community finds acceptable and unacceptable, but someone is going to have to teach you in terms that you can understand. This is your role with your dog.

      Understanding Instincts

      Dogs instinctively dig and jump and chase and bark and perform other behaviors typical of their species. These are normal dog behaviors. If you are taking a lovely stroll down the block and your dog sees a squirrel, he may instinctively bolt after it. This doesn’t mean that you have to tolerate behaviors that you don’t like, but it helps to understand what behaviors are normal for dogs.

      Some breeds were purposely bred to do specific things. Some dogs were fine-tuned to chase livestock, while others were developed to follow scent. These behaviors are now ingrained in those breeds, so it’s natural for them to do them. Your dog is not being stubborn or defiant if he’s just answering to his DNA.

      Feelings and Emotions

      Anyone who has ever loved a dog will tell you that dogs have feeling and emotions, and a recent study has shown that dog lovers have been right all along. Gregory Berns, a professor of neuroeconomics at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, completed research demonstrating that dogs use the same area of the brain as humans do to feel. Berns found similarities in structure and function of a region of the brain called the caudate nucleus. In people, the caudate nucleus responds in anticipation of things that we enjoy, such as love, food, and money. In dogs, Berns’s research found that the caudate nucleus responds to hand signals indicating food and to the smells of familiar humans. Preliminary tests also showed that the caudate nucleus reacted to the return of a dog’s owner after the owner had momentarily stepped out of view.

      What the study basically showed is that dogs have about the level of sentience as a human child, which is no surprise to anyone who has ever loved a dog. What else can you describe other than happiness when your dog greets you after an absence? If you’ve ever seen those heartwarming videos of servicemen and servicewomen returning from deployment to greet their ecstatic dogs, how could there be any doubt? If you’ve ever lost one dog of several, don’t the others appear to mourn?

      Dogs are feeling, emotional beings, whether or not science has caught up with what we know to be true.

      This is important when it comes to choosing a training program. If dogs can feel, do you want to hurt them to train them? Of course not. And you don’t have to—there are positive ways to train your dog to do what you want.

      Breeds Make a Difference

      Your dog’s breed or mix of breeds will have an impact on his behavior. Humans have selectively bred dogs to perform different tasks over time, eventually coming up with defined breeds. There are hundreds of breeds of dog in the world. If you have a mixed-breed dog, you may have to take a guess at who his parents are if you don’t get a chance to meet them. Sometimes, you can tell by looking at a dog, but you can also look at your dog’s behavior.

      If your purebred dog exhibits breed traits that you don’t like, who can you blame? You’re the one who chose the dog. This doesn’t mean that you have to put up with excessive chasing or barking or hunting, but please don’t get angry with your dog for doing what he was bred to do.

      The American Kennel Club (AKC) puts dog breeds with similar traits together into groups. Let’s take a look at some of the traits of these groups.