Summer Reading: Lessons in Canine Intelligence – DoggieUK9

What better choice can we make for 2024 summer reading than learning how to better understand our canine friends and family.

Dogs have been a subject of increased study and research for the last few decades. They continue to capture our attention and affection as we try to understand how they think, how much they understand us humans and how much we understand their behavior toward us and other canines.

A new book by Jennifer S. Holland, a former National Geographic journalist, captures readers attention on a journey to unlock the secrets of dog cognition, based on evidence from trainers, owners, behaviorists, and the animals themselves. She focuses on the extraordinary abilities of “working dogs,” and explains that guide dogs must exercise keen judgment in deciding when to follow or disobey their owners. For example, she recounts accompanying trainers as they taught dogs to refuse dangerous commands by praising them for resisting orders to walk off the edge of a subway platform. Dogs’ excellent sense of smell lies at the heart of their intelligence, according to Holland, who cites studies that show canines can “sense some substances at concentrations as low as parts per trillion” and describes how Auburn University’s Canine Performance Science Center trains explosives detection dogs in a mock airport terminal.

In the book, readers will meet a pack of genius dogs embodying all types of smarts. Holland heads into the field with a cadaver dog and his trainer to learn about “nose intelligence.” To unpack emotional intelligence, she examines how dogs help people dealing with trauma. To investigate task learning ability, she seeks agility trainers, TV-dog trainers, and a man whose dog has learned to hang glide—one step at a time. She interviews police-dog trainers (volunteering to be attacked by a bite dog in the name of science), service-dog trainers, and trainers who rehabilitate “bad” dogs. And she gets to know breeds that are considered especially intelligent—border collies, cattle dogs, and German shepherds—to discover whether they are truly “smarter” or just more willing to do as they’re told.

In between field experiences, Holland spends time with the dogs she knows best while pondering the lessons the animals teach us about ourselves. And she poses entrancing philosophical questions: How do we define intelligence in another being? Where do “instinct” and “intelligence” meet and diverge? Can we be more “dog smart” in our own lives?

This book is one woman’s quest to understand what it means to be smart—and how dogs got that way.

Dog Smart: Life-Changing Lessons in Canine Intelligence
by Jennifer S. Holland
Published by National Geographic, 2024