Although the Border Collie is often considered the best pet due to its excellent husbandry performance dog the smartest in the worldScientists have just discovered that another race holds this honor: Belgian Malinois may be the smartest canidBased on tests conducted among more than 1,000 samples of 13 genera.
Malionis are great sniffer, guard and police dogs, and they are also known for their independence, problem solving and quick response to needs. Likewise, they stand out with their expertise in understanding people.
Scientists at the University of Helsinki in Finland have created the most comprehensive data set to date on cognitive aspects of different races.
Moreover 1,000 dogs from 13 different breeds were tested on a total of 10 tasks (seven cognitive and three behavioral). It was then evaluated by experts who created the test battery called smartDOG.
“Most breeds had their own strengths and weaknesses,” study author Saara Junttila, a doctoral researcher in canine cognition at the University of Helsinki, explained to The Telegraph.
“For example, the Labrador Retriever is very good at reading human movements, but not so good at solving spatial problems.
“Some breeds, such as the Shetland Sheepdog, scored fairly equally on almost all tests; In other words, they did not score too high or too low on any test.”
“The Belgian Malinois excelled at many cognitive tasks and achieved very good results on most of them.” added study author Katriina Tiira, owner and CEO of smartDOG.
“Border collies also performed well in many tests,” he added.
The only test the team thought would be the best indicator of the animal’s overall intelligence was a logical reasoning test in which the dog was shown two bowls of food and could see that one was empty.
The goal was to see if he could deduce that the food was in the other, covered bowl. However, the data revealed that there were no differences between 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 different the races were from each other.
A V-detour task, in which the dog must navigate around a transparent V-shaped fence to access a food reward that it can already see, partially measures problem-solving ability.
The ability to read human gestures was measured by assessing how dogs responded to five human gestures: pointing continuously, pointing briefly, pointing with the foot, pointing at something while looking away, and following our gaze.
Researchers also investigated how independent a dog is and how quickly it turns to a human for help. An unsolvable task (trying to access food in a box that cannot be opened) was used for this feature.
“Understanding human gestures is a measure of social cognition.”“Therefore, dogs that solve this task well are successful in reading and understanding people,” Junttila said.
“The unsolvable task also mediated a social dimension; Some breeds scored very high in human-directed behavior; This means that they tried to ask the human for help with 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
Data shows that the Belgian Malinois ranks first in both human movements and the V-turn task, and is the fifth most independent breed.
In general intelligence score, Malinois took first place with 35 points out of the maximum 39 points.
Border Collies lived up to their reputation and took second place with 26 points.Hovawart won the bronze medal with 25 points, one point ahead of the Spanish Water Dog.
Golden Retriever and Labrador, known for their emotional intuition, scored high in the gesture test but scored low in the other two, ranking 13th and 9th, respectively.
But the research team says classifying each specific trait and general intelligence isn’t as useful 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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