What about dogs? Okay, well, this is a place where dogs may fall down a little bit. We all know that if you go on a walk with your dog, but more importantly if you were me, riding your bike with your dog. You have to be really careful when you go by lamp posts and things like lampposts, because your dog is not always going to understand that they're connected to you on the leash, and come close to you as you go by things like lamp posts. Instead often, at least in my experience, my dog, it took a long time for them to realize that if they went on the other side of the lamp post, that we were gonna both end up wrapped around the lamp post cuz of course we were connected. So here's a version of trying to look at dogs' understanding of connectivity in an experiment. And dogs were just given a box, and they could see inside the box, but they couldn't get the food that was in the box, and there's a string that protrudes outside of the box, and there's a little place they can, a little hand where they can grab onto. And there's a little bone on the end of the string inside that box. But what, in the beginning happened when dogs solve this, is they spent a lot of time on top of the box digging, scratching, and not really understanding that they could pull the string. It took them a while to realize that pulling the string resulted in the food being drawn closer. There's your food. And once dogs did realize that they could do that, they were given a slightly harder version of that, which is the string now was put at an angle, so actually you had to go away from the food to pull the string and understand, obviously, connectivity again. And this was very difficult for the dogs. And in fact, a lot of dogs, because the food was just out of reach, they spent a lot of time sort of digging at the entrance of that box, and as depicted here, some of the dogs would actually use their tongue and try to use their tongue to reach in and grab the food, even though it was out of reach. Those are pretty funny videos. Once dogs were finally trained through a lot of repetition to solve that problem and the others depicted, they were given the real tough test, which is, could they understand that even though the food is closer to the string on the right, that they needed to pull the end of the string on the left. Because that was the string connected. And that the two strings were crossing each other. And what was found is the dogs totally didn't get this. And not only did they not choose randomly, but they tended to choose to pull the end of the string closest to the food tree. So, at least in this experiment, it seems that dogs have absolutely no understanding of connectivity. I'm sure that they can learn to, slowly over lots of repetition, to behave as if they understand in a very limited set of context like they understand connectivity. But if you were to give them a completely new problem like Vern Heinrich gave his ravens, they would totally fall apart and show their lack of understanding of the unobservable property of the world, which is causality of the connection between two things acting together. So, ravens certainly are champions here. Dogs, not so much. Then as a final example where dogs are sort of not that remarkable is, all great apes are known to recognize their reflection in a mirror, this has been observed in all great ape species. Other primates have not been observed to show the same type of self recognition in mirrors, and what apes do is, when you put them in front of a mirror, at first, they show behavior as if they think that is another ape. They may even look behind the mirror. But very quickly what happens is they start doing what are called self-exploratory behaviors. They start looking at parts of their body that they couldn't see without a mirror. So they start looking in their teeth, and they start looking at their back, and all sorts of parts of their body that they couldn't see otherwise. And those behaviors are really interpreted as examples of apes really understanding that that is potentially me in the mirror. Now, there's controversy about that interpretation, but what do dogs do? Well, they never really get past the point of thinking that when you're in front of a mirror, that there's just another dog there. Or looking behind the mirror to try to find that dog that's hiding, and that keeps copying everything that they're doing. So it doesn't seem that dogs really show much understanding, like apes do, of self awareness. And that makes them like most other animals that have been tested. Very few animals show the self exploratory behavior that we see in great apes. There are a few other examples. Some people have argued elephants may show these abilities, and dolphins may show these abilities. But dogs are not a species that does it. So we don't have to worry about the controversy there, because dogs don't even do it, there's no phenomenon to explain. Okay, so to wrap up, people are trying to explore how dogs understand the the physical world, not just the social world. But really if you were to push me, I'd say dogs are a little bit lost when they're not with the pack. They're not really special when it comes to solving problems on their own. Lots of animals make tools, but dogs certainly cannot. Dogs do not understand gravity, while apes do. Dogs do not seem to understand connectivity, while ravens do. And dogs really show no evidence of recognizing themselves in mirrors, while apes do and maybe some other animals. And dogs are totally unremarkable when solving problems on their own. So that takes us back to thinking about dogs social skills, because really what makes dogs interesting is when they're using others to try to solve problems that they can't solve on their own.
