When Dogs Aren’t That Clever

Even though dogs can perform many complex tasks, they don’t handle every type of problem equally well.

Dogs can do amazing things. They take part in military and rescue missions, follow complex instructions to herd sheep, guide visually impaired people through busy city streets, and can even detect cancer and other diseases.

But there’s one area where dogs perform particularly poorly: the rules of mechanics.

Tasks like unlocking locks, using tools to retrieve objects, or tool use in general are very difficult or even impossible for dogs. Studies have shown that dogs don’t understand, for example, the concept of physical connection.

Scientists at the University of Michigan (Frank & Frank, 1985) gave dogs and wolves a task where the animals had to pull a rope to bring a food container closer. Wolves solved all variations of the task with ease, while dogs struggled with the more complex versions.

Another experiment by researchers from the University of Exeter, UK (Osthaus, Lea, Slater, 2004) showed that dogs have trouble learning to use a string to get food out of a transparent box. Initially, dogs ignored the string and tried to reach the food by scratching at the transparent lid. It took dozens of attempts before they accidentally discovered the solution.

Even after learning to pull the string to get the food, dogs failed when the position of the string was slightly changed. When the food was placed close to the opening, dogs completely forgot about the string and tried to get the food by licking or sticking their tongue into the opening, despite these efforts being totally ineffective.

By contrast, primates and crows handle these kinds of tasks easily. In terms of understanding physical connection, dogs perform as poorly as cats, which are also helpless in similar tests.

Dogs also don’t fully understand how gravity works. In a study on this, food was dropped through a flexible tube into one of three containers. Sometimes the tube led straight down into the container below, sometimes at an angle to a container that was not directly underneath.

When the tube was straight down, dogs understood the food would fall into the container below. But when the tube was angled, dogs still looked for the food in the container directly under the tube’s opening, where the food was dropped.

This explains the common scenario when you throw a ball downhill and the dog is repeatedly surprised that the ball rolls away.

When it comes to understanding physical causality, dogs aren’t geniuses. Despite struggling with many physical problems, like going around obstacles or opening doors, dogs perform much better when they can first watch another dog or a human solve the problem.

Dogs have become highly specialized in observing and understanding humans and using them as tools to solve problems (though they probably don’t think of it so mechanically).

Some say the ability to use such a complex tool as a human is a sign of true genius.

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Harry Frank, Marta Frank, Comparative manipulation-test performance in ten-week-old wolves (Canis lupus) and Alaskan malamutes (Canis familiaris), Journal of Comparative Psychology, Vol 99(3), Sep 1985, 266-274.

Britta Osthaus, Stephen E. G. Lea, Alan M. Slater, Dogs (Canis lupus familiaris) fail to show understanding of means-end connections in a string-pulling task, Animal Cognition, January 2005, Vol 8(1), 37–47