Unbelievable: the dog that draws, plays, does laundry and even puts the little one to sleep (YouTube page of GreenDO1324)
A new study reveals what the smartest dog breed is and surprisingly - it's not the Border Collie.
The race that until today is considered the smartest had to settle for second place after another race, impulsive and expert in catching criminals, managed to beat it in tests.
Guess who it is?
Assessing intelligence is a complicated task as there are different types of intelligence, even among dogs.
To try and represent a wide range of cognitive talents, the study put over 1,002 dogs through the smartDOG cognition test, which tests the dog's ability to solve problems and strategize, control impulses, read human gestures, copy human behavior, memory and logical reasoning.
The dogs went through a series of tests in which they gained points in order to decipher which breed has the highest cognitive abilities - and the results definitely showed differences between the breeds.
Border Collie settles for second place this time (Photo: ShutterStock, Cliff Lloyd)
As we mentioned, the second place was taken by the Border Collie, a breed specially cultivated to work in cooperation with humans, while the one who defeated him and took the first place is... the Belgian shepherd.
Yes, the breed that is usually used as a police dog for rescue purposes, sniffing out explosives or drugs and catching criminals - is the smartest dog in the world.
"Most breeds had their own strengths and weaknesses," study author Saara Juntila, who is doing a PhD in dog cognition at the University of Helsinki, told The Telegraph.
"For example, the Labrador retriever was very good at reading human gestures, but not so good at spatial problem-solving. Some breeds, such as the Sheltie, scored fairly evenly on almost all tests."
However
The research he discovered: there are genius dogs and they mainly belong to one breed
To the full article
The Border Collie scored well in most tests.
However, the Belgian Shepherd outperformed and led by 9 points, giving it a score of 35 out of a possible 39 points on smartDOG's cognition tests.
The Belgian Shepherd is the smartest dog in the world (Photo: ShutterStock, cynoclub)
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If you're unfamiliar with the breed, the Belgian Shepherd is a popular choice for security jobs.
It seems that their affinity for sniffing out crimes and identifying search targets may be related to their exceptional problem-solving skills.
They were the highest performers in tests involving interpreting human gestures and solving problems while navigating their environment.
However, although they are the great winners - they were not without weaknesses.
The Belgian shepherd, as well as the German shepherd, scored very low in the cylinder test, in which dogs learned to extract a snack from a sealed cylinder.
After learning how to do this, the cylinder was replaced with a transparent cylinder.
If the dog continues to enter the cylinder as he learned - he will succeed in the test.
If he chooses the direct route - he will fail.
The cylinder test challenges their drive, as dogs must resist the urge to go directly to the target and use their spatial awareness to access their reward around them.
The Belgian Shepherd's weakness in this test is related to its role as a working dog, as security and police dogs require a quick response associated with low impulse control.
10 things you didn't know about the Belgian shepherd:
Researchers agree that breed nurture can explain certain cognitive strengths in each breed, such as sheepdogs and retrievers scoring highly on human-directed behavioral tasks.
However, the study was unable to explain all the differences between the breeds, as some dogs' cognition scores were beyond what would be expected, such as the Finnish Lapphund that failed the human-directed task despite being a herding dog.
The researchers add some caveats to the study, such as the fact that the dogs studied do not represent the entire dog population, but believe that the study contributes to obtaining a more complete picture of behavior typical of dog breeds.
A 2021 study found that there are single-character gifted dogs.
While the vast majority of the dogs in the study had difficulty learning the names of objects, a small group of gifted dogs did it effortlessly.
Not surprisingly, the talented dogs found in the study belonged to the Border Collie breed.
Both studies were published in Scientific Reports.
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