Although we haven’t had a dog full time in the house for many years, there never seems to be one too far away.
Both our daughter and son have or have had dogs at different times and we end up dog-sitting. Also, friends and other family members go on holidays and need dog-sitters. So, we get our dog fix on a fairly regular basis — our door and backyard is always open.
Recently, our son announced he had purchased or put a down payment on a pup — an Australian labradoodle — that, if the breeding program goes well, should be ready for home delivery sometime in May. He didn’t reveal the exact price, but it sounds like this pup is somewhere around $3,500 — and that’s about the time I blacked out.
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I know I am outdated. This is the era of designer dogs, but spending $3,500 on a dog is still a fantastic amount of money. There were always one or two dogs on the farm when I was growing up as a kid (and after I left). Their names over the years in order of appearance were Old Bud, Ginger, Sam and then Joe (son of Sam) and, finally, Louis (he was from Ottawa and so had the French Canadian connection). I am quite sure my dad never bought a dog in his life. They were either given to him or showed up as strays and never left. And as I recall, doggie funerals, if they happened at all, were dignified, simple and low cost … like zero dollars.
And we had dogs ourselves for many years. First there was Abbey, who I bought as a pup for $10, who was later joined by Bosco, who was somehow bequeathed to us. And, finally, there was Molly, a little allergy-free spaniel/poodle/cockapoo combo I paid a crazy $150 for, but if you amortize that over her lifespan, the capital cost was about $10 per year — a livable figure.
I have usually liked most dogs. My sister-in-law once had a chihuahua who didn’t like anyone except her, so that yappy, snarly little creature was hard to warm up to. A longtime friend, Mike, always had Brittany spaniels for hunting dogs. They were smart dogs, although Mike wasn’t the best trainer. The dogs didn’t always respect commands. Sometimes Mike had to lie on the ground and play dead, and when the dog came close to check him out that was the only opportunity he had to catch it. I don’t think that is recommended in the dog-training manual.
And I had another friend who had one of those furball Shih Tzu/bichon-cross dogs that certainly had a mind of its own. My friend yelled at it quite a bit, but there really wasn’t any consequence to the yelling, so I think the dog came to understand her screaming was normal human and dog interaction. That dog was either really dumb or really smart.
So, I was interested in a column from Reuters news service recently that talked about how much human language dogs understand.
This researcher in developmental psychology at Dalhousie University was looking at how kids begin to understand human language — their cognitive development, especially their executive functions — which is a set of mental skills that include working memory, flexible thinking and self-control. The researcher, Sophie Jacques, wondered if the relation between language and executive functions exists only in humans. So how well do dogs understand human language? (My first thought is for some dogs the answer is zippo, but I’m not a researcher.)
A few key points of this research with dogs are dogs can perceive different words and can learn to respond to specific words. For example, three dogs — two border collies named Chaser and Rico and a Yorkshire terrier named Bailey — learned to respond to more than 1,000, 200 and 100 words, respectively.
In another project, Jacques began a collaboration with psychologist Catherine Reeve, at the time a graduate student working on dogs’ scent detection abilities. The goal was to develop a similar measure of vocabulary for use with dog owners that could then be used to examine links between language and executive functions.
They developed a list of 172 words organized into different categories (for example, toys, food, commands, outdoor places) and gave it to an online sample of 165 owners of family and professional dogs. The owners were asked then to select words that their dogs responded to consistently.
On average, service dogs respond to about 120 words, whereas family pets respond to about 80 words, ranging between 15 to 215 words across all dogs. They also found that certain breed groups, such as herding dogs like border collies and toy dogs like chihuahuas, respond to more words and phrases than other breed types like terriers, retrievers and mixed breeds.
They couldn’t determine whether dogs who respond to more words also had better executive functions. That’s still being studied.
This isn’t just “nice to know information.” The researchers are hoping the research might also provide important practical information about dogs. For example, it is very expensive to train puppies for service work and many do not make the final cut. However, if early, word-based responding abilities predict later behavioural and cognitive abilities, it might become an early-warning system to predict which dogs are likely to become good service animals.
I’m still thinking about that $3,500 puppy that may be coming. For that money, that thing will not only need to know how to read, but how to set up the coffee pot for the morning, mow the lawn and rake and bag leaves, and if I don’t have an autonomous vehicle by then, it will also need to be able to drive me to a doctor’s appointment during light-traffic times of the day. My expectations may be a little high, but I could pay that much for a decent Angus-cross bull and then get to eat it afterwards.
