My initial question was, “What does the dog know?” My first answer is another question: “What do you want the dog to know?” Dog intelligence, as I first outlined at the beginning of my paper, is an expression of human intelligence. For centuries, humans have shaped dogs into new creatures able to read our social clues to better survive with us. Dogs love to cooperate with humans and make them happy. For them it is a matter of life or death.
Thousands of years of domestication have affected dog intelligence. Civilization interfered with evolution to the point that you cannot talk of natural selection when it comes to dog breeds. Humans obtained the obedient dog they wanted to herd or hunt, sport or work. Now, I am not surprised the “smartest” dogs belong to shepherd breeds, the breeds that have been the longest in humankind’s history.
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