Although the Border Collie, due to its excellent herding work, is generally dog smartest in the worldscientists have just discovered that another race has this honor: Belgian Malinois may be the smartest dogBased on tests on more than 1,000 specimens from 13 genera.
Malionies are excellent sniffers, guard dogs and police dogs and are also known for being independent, problem solvers and quick to respond to needs. They also stand out because they are experts at understanding people.
Scientists from the University of Helsinki in Finland have created the most comprehensive dataset to date on the cognitive aspects of different races.
Moreover 1,000 dogs of 13 different breeds were tested on a total of 10 tasks (seven cognitive and three behavioral). and then evaluated by the experts who created the test series called smartDOG.
“Most species had their own strengths and weaknesses,” study author Saara Junttila, a PhD researcher in canine cognition at the University of Helsinki, told The Telegraph in Britain.
“For example, the Labrador Retriever is very good at reading human gestures, but not so good at solving spatial problems.
“Some breeds, such as the Shetland Sheepdog, scored fairly evenly on almost all tests, meaning they didn’t score too high or too low on any test”.
“The Belgian Malinois did well on most of the cognitive tasks and performed very well on most of them.” Added study author Katriina Tiira, owner and CEO of smartDOG.
“Border collies also performed well in most of the tests,” he added.
The only test the team felt would be the best indicator of the animal’s general intelligence was the logical reasoning test, where the dog was shown two bowls of food and one could see that it was empty.
The idea was to see if he could conclude that the food was in the other covered bowl. However, the data revealed that there was no difference between the different dog breeds when it came to solving this task.
But then The researchers used three tasks, each testing a specific aspect of the dog’s cognition.and then it was shown how the races differed from each other.
A V-indirect path task, in which the dog must circumnavigate a transparent V-shaped fence to access a food reward that is already visible, partially measures problem-solving ability.
Human gesture reading ability was measured by assessing how dogs respond to five human gestures: continuous pointing, short pointing, foot pointing, pointing when looking in another direction, and following our gaze.
The researchers also investigated how independent a dog is and how quickly they turn to a human for help. An unsolvable task (trying to access food in an unopenable box) was used for this feature.
Understanding of human gestures is a measure of social cognition.so dogs that solve this task well are good at reading and understanding humans,” Junttila said.
“The unresolved task also measured a social aspect; some breeds scored very highly in people-oriented behavior, meaning they tried to ask human help for the difficult task, while at the other extreme the dogs tried to solve the problem independently. Both answers can be useful in different situations.”
malinois, champion
As the data show, the Belgian Malinois ranked first in both the human gestures and the V-turn task, making it the fifth most independent breed.
In general intelligence score, Malinois took first place with a maximum score of 35 out of 39.
The border collies earned their reputation by coming in a valuable second place with 26 points.Hovawart, on the other hand, took the bronze medal with 25 points, one point ahead of the Spanish Water Dog.
Known for their emotional intuition, Golden Retriever and Labrador scored high on the gesture test and low on the other two, placing 13th and 9th, respectively.
But the research team says trait-specific and general intelligence rankings aren’t as helpful as knowing which breeds are better at certain skills than others.
Reference work: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-26991-5
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