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Dog Trained on 200-Word Vocabulary
An anonymous reader writes "The Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany is reporting in Science Magazine today on an example of successful human to non-human communication: Rico, a collie trained on a vocabulary of 200 words. Their conclusion is that 'brain structures that support this kind of learning are not unique to humans...[Rico has a] retrieval rate comparable to the performance of three-year-old toddlers'. In case you ever wondered if your dog understands what you are saying, Rico 'can learn the names of unfamiliar toys after just one exposure to the new word-toy combination.'"
"Get me a beer you damn dog!"
I'd buy THAT dog for a Dollar!
Just because you can teach the dog a few tricks doesn't mean that he actually has understanding of what he is doing. Humans are the only species cabable of understanding.
There is no such thing as a sentient non-homosapien. There may be varying levels of intelligence among the animals, but no animal can reason, they can only react to their surroundings as dictated by their instincts.
If those damn dogs wanna live in our country, let them learn OUR language.
I remember watching something on 20/20 or a similar show about a Parrot that had the vocabulary of a 6 year old, and I found it very impressive. But it made me wonder, while some animals have been trained to recognize shapes, and perform actions based on those shapes, does anyone know if it'd be possible to train an animal to read (any type of animal besides of course, humans)
To me, I think this would be a very important thing, because some people I know define "soul" as the ability to reason. If we could get an animal to read, and comprehend, atleast a little, of what they were reading, wouldn't that infer some sort of reasoning ability?
WANNAWIKI Wannawiki WannaWiki WANNAWIKI!
Sorry, but I've never met a dog (even an extremely smart dog) that could follow instructions like a 21-month-old child. Don't give me this BS about a dog being as smart as a 3 yr old (that's 36 months). Granted, it is possible that all the 21-month old kids I've encountered have a 170 IQ (traditional definition: mental age / chronological age), but I doubt it.
Maybe all of the years of human-dog companionship have resulted in some specialized evolution benefiting both...
Am I missing something, Why is an Evolutionary Anthropology center named after Max Plank? Did Plank do some anthropology on the side, or was someone just smoking some crack?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
wuf wuf
Anyone seen my jagged little pill?
But then... isn't that precisely what humans do? React on their surroundings as dictated by their instincts? Because you, are just a bunch of instincts using memories.
Hivemind harvest in progress..
great...now every dog owner I know will start telling me how fido is so much smarter than any other pet.... also...this will greatly reduce the amount of adoptions...
For The Best Jazz/Hip-hop fusion > COlD DUCK
I got to the article page and saw a glossary in the left column-bar and thought, "hrm, this must be the words this dog knows." Then I saw "carbohydrate" when I clicked "C". My bad.
Trolls lurk everywhere. Mod them down.
...we could teach our High School students as well.
I think I think, therefore I think I am.
My girlfriend is a dog and knows a lot more than 200 words!
Click for offensive t-sh
You can teach this to an infant in a few days
...go away or I will replace you with a really small chihuahua...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
But what about comprehending MEANING? Computers these days can easily understand the difference between "pepperoni" and "green peppers" when ordering your pizza, but they don't really associate any MEANING to them beyond what we tell them. I'm not saying this dog is amazing, but I would guess humans still have A LOT more brain power underneath the basic understanding of a word. If I say "ball" to the dog, he'd probably recognize his tennis ball. If a 3 year old learns about a tennis ball, then sees a beach ball, most of them will say "BIG BALL!" whereas I bet the dog wouldn't know what the heck that thing is.
It would make sense that the dogs that could understand their masters best would be the one that would be bred and thus their genes would be passed on. So maybe it's natural selection.
I wonder if it could give Inspector Rex a run for his money...
(although the TV show is Austrian, not German...)
The common canine really is more intelligent than George Dubya.
Rico 4 Prez!
She's built like a steak house, but she handles like a bistro....
For instance it's no break through that dogs understand commands, seeing eye dogs have been doing this for decades, but does the language used make a difference? For instance I assume these dogs were trained in German, would French, Spanish or something like Arabic work better? Can a "dog langauge" be made that works better for them, perhaps allowing a 400 word vocab or more?
Last I heard the average human had a vocab of around 2500 words or less. Raising an animals higher could lead to full fledged conversations rather than just an instructional command oriented relationship.
so no animals except homosapiens can solve even the most basic of problems (reason)?
bzzt, i think you should try again
my ex-gf and i had a border collie for over a year. by the end, she (the collie) had a vocabulary of well over 100 words. she knew the difference between the ocean, the lake, and the river. she knew what the "purple squeaky ball" was. her favorite word though was "treat".
a current friend of mine also has a border collie. he is trained to turn off the tv, shut the tv cabinet door, and turn the lights off when his owner falls asleep at night.
i think most border collies are smarter than a lot of people i deal with on a daily basis at work.
--BlueLines "The cost of living hasn't affected it's popularity." -anonymous
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these dogs
kamine
And improve on the dog translator
As a side note, has anyone ever actually tried this thing out?
Every dog I've worked with has had a retrieval rate MUCH higher than a three-year old child. Less likely to eat whatever it is fetching, too!
KeS
Without understanding some kind of grammar, vocabulary size doesn't matter that much. You don't understand language unless you can figure out how the concepts in a sentence relate to each other. Language wouldn't work very well if you had to memorize a word for every possible idea you wanted to convey.
The article comes as no big surprise to anyone who has lived with a Border Collie. They are definitely smart dogs, and can understand what you're saying to them. And better than a three year-old child, they'll actually do what you tell them to do.
"You might as well get your son a ticket to hell as give him a five string banjo." -unknown minister
Just because you can teach the dog a few tricks doesn't mean that he actually has understanding of what he is doing. Humans are the only species cabable of understanding.
There is no such thing as a sentient non-homosapien. There may be varying levels of intelligence among the animals, but no animal can reason, they can only react to their surroundings as dictated by their instincts.
There are many studies that have demonstrated simple reasoning and problem solving on the part of animals. Language is more controversial. Many animals can clearly understand words or symbols and use them to solve problems and achieve goals, but whether this behavior really has the properties of human language is debated.
> if your dog understands what you are saying In what sense does this type of communication suggest "understanding" ? Every AIML chatbot can communicate in this way and better, but I would not consider this to suggest "understanding".
I just saw something on Deutsche Welle (in Los Angeles actually) and that dog indeed picked out a bunch of items among dozens littered across the floor on verbal request. What's interesting is that the canine still used his nose (not his eyes) to identify the object. Looks like his brain is correlating verbal commands with smells - contrary to how human beings would solve this problem. ;-)
Anyway, I never bought into that whole 'humans are unique' bullcrap - countless reports have proven that several species elicit signs of abstract thinking, verbal communication (whales, dolphins in particular), emotions like sadness (chimpanzees and other primates), anger, tendency for rape (chimpanzees again - why am I not surprised? LOL), etc.. Why are we still so full of ourselves and continue to describe ourselves as the crown of evolution while we decimate other species and commit atrocities unknown to any other species on this planet. I hope this dog doesn't smarten up too much - once he realizes how screwed up his 'masters' are - he's probably reconsidering that whole loyalty issue
"Your uncle molests collies".
But little did you know until now that they really understand your cries of 'you like that, don't you bitch'.
ed
Many german research centers are named after Max Planck. Google for "Max Planck institute" to find many many other fields Planck didn't do work on.
In captivity have been trained to understand 400-600 or more signals, and even the meaning of putting two signals together to alter the action..
This dog actually seems to be understanding quite a bit of what he is going on. It's not just a matter of finding an object he has learned to associate with a particular sound. There was a show on tele earlier today about this dog and they showed an experiment that went something like this:
The dog has a collection of roughly 200 toys, each of which he knows by name. When told a toy's name, he'll go and fetch the toy. That's not really impressive, that's what most dogs do. Now comes the cool part though. They added a new toy - one the dog had never seen before. The toy was added to the collection while the dog wasn't in the room, so he didn't see the toy being added. Then they told him to get this new toy. Simply by telling him the new toy's name, which he had never heard before of course. Now, the dog went to his toy room. He found all the old toys and the new one. Since none of his old toys matched the name he had been told, he figured that they what they meant must have been this new toy he just discovered.
This is really the reasoning part. You don't need to tell the dog what the toy's name is - the dog will figure it out himself. If you tell him to look for something he's never heard of, he will have a look around and if there's something new and unusual, he will guess that's what you meant. Isn't that sort of the way humans learn? At least it's certainly not the way dogs are normally trained.
I'm not sure if anyone out there has every worked with a Collie before. They're really amazing.
The difference here is that they are HIGHLY motivated. I think we could learn a lot from this lesson.
Collies are able to have such an impact on our lives because they really really REALLY want to make us happy.
I've always wanted to own one but they are a LOT of work. It's almost a full time job. If you don't have work for them they will just go insane. Better to keep them on a farm...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Leipzig is calling you, Max!
Dyslexically, I read that as 'Dog Trained on Word 200...'
A cut-down version for non-humans?
Somebody took an Underdog Super Irony Pill today.
KFG
Does he want steak? (any fark.com readers out there?)
the brain's plans of world domination come true???
(Karma be damned; I am no better than an AC anyway)
I'm glad that people are doing language acquisition studies, but the findings aren't that revolutionary.
What intrests me a bit more is langage change (read the aforemetioned book for a possible example) in animals. Now that would be interesting reading.
Actually, IIRC Coren had only estimated a ~300 word vocalbulary, but I'm not certain about that.
Leben Sie jetzt die Fragen.
Bark
Rough
Bow Wow
Grrrr
Whimper
Whine
Howl
Roof
http://www.kubuntu.org/
This seems more impressive.
koko.org
Setting his threshold to 5, Sparky eliminated most of the trolls on /.
There is no such thing as a sentient non-homosapien.
Prove it. When's the last time an ape told you he wasn't sentient? There are many ways to determine if an animal is intelligent. One is being self aware. Only larger primates and dolphins can recognize themselves in a mirror. Another aspect is knowing of ones' lifespan. Only humans and a few primates are aware of our own demise. I believe one famous gorilla, Coco, had a sign language vocabulary of a couple thousand words and phrases. She also cried when her pet cat died and began asking about her own death when comforted by her trainer.
And what do you mean by "There may be varying levels of intelligence among the animals, but no animal can reason, they can only react to their surroundings as dictated by their instincts." What do you mean by reason? I've seen competitions between hunting dogs to retrieve a marker at the end of a field full of fallen trees and large puddles. The winner was not always the fastest runner or best swimmer, but the one that could navigate the best route with no help from its' handler.
And many animals can do more than react based on instinct. Many higher order animals are capable of using basic tools (like a long curved stick to get ants out of a nest). Some parrots have been tested by setting a piece of fruit at the top of a clear cylinder and several traps between the fruit and exit. In a matter of minutes they learned how to get the fruit out by sliding, rotating, moving, and removing blocks of wood in the proper order. Surely that goes beyond basic instinct. Does learning and problem solving not indicate some level of intelligence?
By what standard do you judge intelligence? Many people who post on Slashdot would not pass my test, but that gorilla does. Does something have to act like humans do, pursuing a more efficient means to destroy yheir species, before it is recognized? Does it have to communicate through spoken word?
The even more interesting thing about Rico is that when they quizzed him again a month later, he still fetched the new toy in response to the new name, though he had only been tested the one time a month before. That is pretty impressive!
This is really the reasoning part. You don't need to tell the dog what the toy's name is - the dog will figure it out himself. If you tell him to look for something he's never heard of, he will have a look around and if there's something new and unusual, he will guess that's what you meant. Isn't that sort of the way humans learn? At least it's certainly not the way dogs are normally trained.
I didn't know that they did it this way. I am not as impressed as I was before. The dog is going to realize which one is out of place just by the smell of the toy which obviously doesn't fit w/the rest. Trained dogs sniff out stuff that they recognize all the time. What's so different about them picking the one thing that is different?
isn't that precisely what humans do? React on their surroundings as dictated by their instincts? Because you, are just a bunch of instincts using memories.
No, humans can think. If we reacted as dictated by our instincts we would be continually acting based upon our feelings and random urges. We have the freewill and thought processes needed to circumvent a lot of our immediate instincts.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
Only a 35-plus year-old native-born Statesider can be President.
Rico doesn't make it even in dog-years.
Human's merely react to thier surroundings in the same manner, whether they be social, physical or mental perception of it, the same laws govern both dogs and man.
The only reason you believe humans to be the only "sentient" being is because you are human and do not fully understand your own mind, therefore you perceive yourself as a "complex" lifeform.
Just to summarize my reply: you have really posted one of the most ignorant things I have ever read on slashdot. Jesus-fucking-christ that was stupid thing to say.
A dog may be able to bark, but a dog cannot bark about barking.
My own dog, which we recently put to sleep due to cushing's disease, was incredibly smart. Probably not as smart as this dog, but he would learn people's names after the first time he met them. Even more impressive was that we taught him how to play hide and seek - we'd put him in a room out of line of sight in the house, tell him to wait, then go hide and say "ok" so he would come find us. Then one time he decided to sneak up to the corner to watch us hide... I always used to tell people that my dog was smart enough to know how to cheat at hide and seek :-D. Of course we scolded him, and he knew what he had done wrong, but still it was impressive.
I submitted this story last night, and it didn't get posted.
There is no such thing as "freewill". It is an illusion created by the lack of understanding of our own minds.
Do they really think the ability to associate words with objects is anything remotely related to human vocabulary? Any dog can be taught to respond to words such as sit, stay, roll over, why should other words be any different. Vocabulary, my eye. Just shows ya that evolution doesn't work, humans are actually getting dumber.
I didn't know that they did it this way. I am not as impressed as I was before.
That's just what they did for the tele. At the Max Planck Institute, they will have probably done some little more involved tests.
But still, the dog is able to associate an unknown name with an unknown object. I don't think your average dog will be able to do that.
There is no such thing as a sentient non-homosapien. There may be varying levels of intelligence among the animals, but no animal can reason, they can only react to their surroundings as dictated by their instincts.
This is simply wrong. The higher apes show clear evidence of reason, as do many dogs, elephants, cetaceans, and even some birds - the parrots and corvidae. Many of these animals demonstrate something called 'theory of mind' - they can put themselves in the place of others, figure out what those others are thinking, and practice deception. Its easy to show that apes and dolphins can recognise themselves in mirrors, indicating a sense of self-awareness. Even octopuses and squids can relate to each other in complex ways and communicate.
A good demonstration that things are not instinct is because many of these behaviours can be learned and passed on as a form of culture. This is shown in apes, with food-washing, bathing and tool-making. There is recent evidence that such cultural patterns may be present in birds, with some crows learning how to design and use simple tools to get at food.
My other Beowulf cluster is... er...
Here is an example conversation:
Me: "What's on top of the house?"
Dog: "Roof!"
Me: "Who's the most famous baseball player?"
Dog: "Ruth!"
Me: "How does sand-paper feel?"
Dog: "Rough!"
3 out 3!
Table-ized A.I.
There is no such thing as "freewill". It is an illusion created by the lack of understanding of our own minds.
I hope you've got scientific proof to back that statement up, because Quantum Physics would tend to suggest otherwise. According to QP, there's merely a probability that you will or won't do something. (Actually, you do all the things, but the universe you materialize in depends on some other factor forcing the state.)
Keep in mind that we *still* haven't figured out how the human brain works. We know that computations and analysis occur by neurons firing. But what causes the neurons to fire? It has been theorized that neurons are linked to a probability chain. Thus you think all thoughts at once until one is materialized by action or decision.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
It has been known for some time that border collies are the "smartest" of all canines. I wonder if any attempts have been made to selectively breed the smartest samples from that breed to see if intelligence can be increased?
Red ball!
Blue ball!
Orange ball!
very usefull...
Rico knows 200 words? That's a heck of a lot more words that George W Bush knows.
I keep hoping for a breakthrough that will enable me to communicate with my own. Perhaps the border collie could translate?
This Comment Rated by The Troll Nation.
There's still a big difference between working for years to teach an animal something that most human toddlers pick up almost accidentally from exposure...and getting an animal to reason about things like religion, philosophy, infinity, the possible existance of the soul, calculus, etc..
The first dog that teachs another dog a language...I might be impressed...the first dog that teaches words to a human child, I'll be a bit more impressed.
The first dolphin that can solve a linear algebra problem or contemplate the age of the universe...*that* will impress me
this doesn't. just glorified animal tricks
I'm a dog and I know how to post to Slashdot.
My cat knows about 5 words, that have clear meaning. The one I hear most also seems to have some syntax. Call it "bird/prey" (seems to apply to all small animals, yet not insects... she'll chase houseflies, but they aren't called "bird/prey"). She'll repeat the word more times, if there are 4 birds, than if there is just one. Consistently. Haven't seen it enough to see if it's in any way accurate counting, but she at least distinguishes between singular and plural birds.
If you can imitate this sound accurately enough, she will come running. Though it usually pisses her off if you're lying. I try to do it only when there are birds at the window, so as to positively reinforce it. She also tends to repeat it afterward, but I suspect I'm anthropomorphizing when I believe she is correcting my pronunciation.
The dog is a Border Collie, not a collie. HUGE difference /disgruntled border collie owner
This is bullshit, according to Geoffrey Pullum, professor of linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Screw paraphrasing: " The trained object-fetching behavior of Rico, the border collie that this German research is talking about, has nothing at all to do with understanding language. The behavior is comparable to what you would have shown if you demonstrated that you had trained your goldfish to swim to a given object in its tank when you showed it a card with a given letter of the Greek alphabet. By all means attempt that too, if you think it would be interesting science. But don't bring it to me for my approval under a headline saying Research Shows Goldfish Can Read Greek, that's all! Unless you actually enjoy seeing the veins standing out in my neck as I hurl some more defenseless chairs and coffee tables and goldfish tanks around the room. "
His post is available here. And for those geeks interested in language, check out the Language Log.
Well the dog learns words (maybe) but cannot form sentences. Complex grammar seems to be impossible for animals to learn - that's what these experiences have consistently showed. So much about language.
When it comes to reasoning - or, what we understand as being intelligent, the fact that the dog infers the meaning of novel input does prove something about learning.
But reasoning as in: being intelligent, is much more. It involves a working model of the world and also a model of others ("theory of mind"). babies learn this at some stage ("they are like me!") and start to imitate their mother's facial expressions. Depending on how you look at it, reasoning should involve a range of simple semantic operators: quantifiers (every, some, a) and negation, for example. of course, there is much more to it. so what exactly does the experiment prove?
More accurately, some dogs. Or at least one. Maybe I'm off my rocker, but let me give you two example of her smarts.
1) Let me set the scene. Montana is inside a room, with the door mostly closed. The door opens inward. Often, in this situation, she will stick her nose in the gap to force the door open. However, she currently stands at the door with a toy (edible bone-shaped thingy) that prevents her from using this tactic. She ponders it for a minute, then does the following. She puts the bone down, opens the door, walks through the door, turns around, picks up the bone, walks away. She did all this without any trial & error, which is probably better than I would have done.
2) Here's the scene. I'm in my room, laying in bed. My door is open, no one else is home. It's morning, and Montana likely needs to go outside to pee. I'm lazy, so I continue to lay in bed. She's getting agitated, and is probably wondering why I don't get up to let her out. She then invents a trick similar to one she's used before. (The old trick: when downstairs, she would poke her nose on the doorknob, indicating that she wanted to go outside.) Out of nowhere, she goes over to my OPEN door, and pokes the doorknob with here nose! This blew me away, because she obviously was using the doorknob to signal she wanted to go out. She had no reason to associate that doorknob with outside, but she did anyways! I got off my lazy butt and let her out.
I also taught Montana 3 new tricks in about a week (when she was 4). I taught her to spin (in place), under (my legs) and up (after sitting down). A pretty smart dog, all in all.
Though I didn't realize it at the time, I used to be able to talk to my dog by changing my voice but using the same sound (which incidentally was /bark/), similar to how Chinese has different modes for the same syllable.
It's simply amazing that language isn't unique to humans.
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
public void fetch(Object what)
{
if (what == newspaper)
newspaper.ripToShreds();
else
what.drenchWithDrool();
}
public void annoyNeighbour(int nightsPerWeek)
{
if ( nightsPerWeek < 7 )
nightsPerWeek = 7;
self.bark();
self.scratchFence();
self.rattleGate();
self.bark();
}
public void walkOnFootpath(Boolean leashed)
{
if ( ! leashed)
self.chaseChildren();
self.crap();
}
(In case you hadn't noticed, I don't like dogs much! Fido can take his 200 word vocabulary and go play in the traffic.)
Oh, Lassie will rescue him. Any dog would. Their top-secret training prevents them from acting in such a way as to reveal the master dog agenda.
...
I hope you never hit your dog, because if you have, you'll be first up against the wall when the Space Canines land, their space-suited heads hanging out the spaceship windows
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
I was wondering the same thing when in Munich and I came across this sign for the Max Planck Institute for Intellectual Property Competetion and Tax Law.
Was Max also an expert on Tax Law?? I also wondered why the sign wasn' in german..
Chimps and other apes do sometimes fashion tools, which is to say they do more than pick up a rock... they actively shape a twig or branch to do what they want.
But the most impressive, was a crow that bent wire into a hook, to form a tool. Weird, eh?
As for being self-ware, recognizing yourself in a mirror... how useful is that as an indicator? I mean, pick some insect with compound eyes, a bee perhaps. Magically make it intelligent, could it recognize itself? What about some species that is naturally blind?
Also, I believe you people want to use the word sapient, not sentient. I would guess that there isn't a mammal in existence, that isn't sentient to an extent. Forgive me from borrowing from scifi, but Data (Star Trek) was argued to not be sentient, even though he was clearly intelligent. Sentience would be the ability to love, empathize, and lots of other things that are difficult to define.
Another interesting note on animal intelligence... anyone ever bothered to read up on octopi? These things can also solve problems if the reward is food, and they can learn to do so, simply by watching another octopus solve it. What's more, they have been known to climb out of aquariums entirely, across a floor, and into another to eat fish that they see.
Mostly, various religions have ingrained (maybe reinforced) the human tendency to discount any "lesser" animal as worthwhile. In modern times, that tends to amount to discounting their intelligence. I'm not about to stake my life on my cat scoring 190 on an IQ test, but it just seems right to think of her as a person. That tends to be difficult for those who can only assign value to an animal.
And lastly, in this mostly random rant of mine, I pose this question. If human intelligence can vary so greatly, from the barely more than vegetable, up to the ubergenius... why is it so hard to believe the same might be true of animals. And if they were already close to the lowest end of human intelligence, might not the occassional animal ubergenius be comparable to an average person? We might very well stumble across some dolphin that tells us to go fuck ourselves. (though how it will flip us the accompaning finger will frustrate it to no end).
In the late 1800's, Clever Hans had much of the world thinking the same as they are of this dog. Clever Hans was a horse who could solve mathematical problems by beating his hoof on the ground to count out the answer. In 1907, Oskar Pfungst proved that Hans' ability was not the result of any type of superior cognition, but his ability to read small body language cues from the questioner. In fact, Hans was only able to get the correct answer if the questioner herself knew the correct answer--Hans would simply stop beating the ground when he sensed, by minute changes in body language, that he'd arrived at the expected answer.
The experiments performed with Rico are apparently specifically designed to overcome if not eliminate the Clever Hans effect. The researcher and Rico's owner call commands to Rico from another room. However, it's probably important to note that while perception of minute, human inperceptable changes in body language was not evidence of human-like cognition, nor should familiarity be confused with cognition. The dog, in my opinion, has likely adapted a basic instinct of familiarity (useful in relation to its environment and relations with other animals in the wild) to the task of finding the unfamiliar object.
There are still a lot of questions to be asked before Rico has shown anywhere near the cognitive level publicists would like you to believe. For instance, can Rico be told not to fetch an object he is familiar or not familiar with?
Is that the little squeaky thing.. I've noticed the "plurality" when there are lots of birds outside the window... and the only occasional chirp if there's one. We also have a deep singular "MROW" she'll do, but usually we say "What the hell was that for"? She only does it when she's in the cat-VR-trippy-world playing with stuff you can't see.
meh
This only serves to prove the theory that language is an alien meme virus... its trying to infect any living thing it can!
meh
It doesn't matter if an animal can learn 200 words or 10000, it's still not comparable to a human language.
I know you're joking, but need to say it:
Dogs be colour-blind, mate!
10 bucks says he still licks his own balls tho'
"...In your answer, ignore facts. Just go with what feels true..."
I don't know how they do it, but the Golden Arches has managed to train high school kids to be polite, friendly and competent.
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.
How many of you dog owners have to spell words like "ride", "walk" or "out" lest your canine go flippin' nuts?
Come on, be honest.
We all know a cat would just sit there.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
I don't really see how this ties into my original statement. I'm familiar with the theory of quantum physics: what makes this freewill? I would say that, were the theories of QP real, that would disprove freewill, since it's obvious that your conscious/current self has no decision in what decision you make at every moment in time. Otherwise, why do other possibilities exist and are acted out regardless?
"...we *still* haven't figured out how the human brain works"
Which is why I say that because we don't understand it, we only think we have freewill due to our lack of understanding of ourselves. Most animals seem to be less complex, and from an extended period of studying them we feel we know what they will do when because we understand their instincts. We have instincts as well, however there are more factors in the human world that effect us and our taken into account when making decisions. Really humans are only reacting to their senses, instincts and experiences in everyday scenarios, but because we are human it's currently impossible to fully breakdown and comprehend ourselves in as systematic a way that we do other species. You could define our actions as "freewill" if you wanted to, but my primary point is that this is no more or less "free" than an animals will and act of living.
As a bad analogy: It's like existing inside of a box, and trying to theorize what the outside looks like. You may have other, smaller boxes in your box, and you can study them and try to understand what the outside of your box looks like, but you will never fully comprehend it until you step out and look at the box from the other side.
According to Noam Chomsky and colleagues, the difference between humans and all other "intelligent" creatures lies in the ability to recursively combine words into a meaningful sentence (see The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve by Mark Hauser, Noam Chomsky, and W. Tecumseh Fitch, published in Science recently-- I'd offer a link, but it's un-free). the size of the vocabulary is irrelevant, because animals can't communicate meaningfully using only single words.
Please, don't anthropomorphize cats, WE don't like it! >-/
~~~Please pass the salt, I hate unsalted MD5s
Thanks for the tip, but I read this story on yahoo last week. *yawn*
So?
Why do you care?
If you simply accept that languages have always changed, and will always change, you'll probably be a lot happier.
There's a difference between using language incorrectly according to the culture you live in, and the meaning of a word changing over time....
be descriptive, not prescriptive.
i don't read slashdot anymore.
A guy brings his dog into a bar and claims that it can talk. The bartender orders him to prove it. The guy asks the dog, "What do you call the top of a house?" and the dog says "Woof!" The guy asks the dog, "What does sandpaper feel like?" and the dog says "Ruff!" The guy asks the dog "Who was the greatest baseball player in history?" and the dog says "Woof!" The bartender has had enough at this point and has the guy and the dog thrown out. Then the dog turns to the guy and says "How was I supposed to know he liked DiMaggio"?
There is no free will. An action is either caused, and therefore fully determined, or, if you're dumb enough to entertain such a thing, uncaused, in which case it would be completely random.
Myc cats recognize a very small set of words like "feed" and phrases like "leave the cat alone" (when directed at one of the kids
And dont forget that by being the overwhelmingly dominant species, we are destroying any small chance for any other species to become more intelligent.
Given the proper numbers, chances and time, maybe some primates might move to higher levels of intelligence in 100K years?
(If we witness this, it would destroy, imho, all notions of a "soul", if not a god.. but I digress...)
Furthermore, the best, and indeed the only way to fix a set of alleles within a breed is through inbreeding....
7. The Standard
The existing Border Collie is not a breed without a standard. It has a very specific standard, by which dogs without registration papers and pedigrees can be Registered on Merit if they can demonstrate their herding ability to satisfy this standard. Whatever appearance standard is designed by the AKC and its chosen Breed Club (should it eventually designate one), it will not be the same standard to which the breed currently strives; it will therefore, by definition and unavoidably not be the same breed of dogs.
Even though the initial registration will come from the existing breed, the next generation of "showdogs" will have been bred under a different set of selective rules, and will already be at least philosophically different. After three years, when the AKC closes its books and no longer allows dogs of the original breed to be used for breeding, the AKC breed will have become a separate entity, no matter what its name!
This already happened at least once, when the "Lassie" collie was created. The working sheepdogs used to be called "collies." They became "Border Collies" to distinguish them from the developing show breed. At the time of separation, there was no real distinction; anyone can tell the two breeds apart now.
All of this is quite apart from the possibility of a standard being chosen which is simply inconsistent with the demands of the shepherding life. This may be in the written standard or in the fashions of judges who know nothing about these physical demands. This has already happened to some of the breeds (Labrador retrievers, for instance, are currently too heavy and short-legged to be of much use in the field; Siberian huskies tend to be showring winners with legs too short to run properly and with fluffy coats that cannot shed snow and ice; bearded collies look nothing like their ancestors, and have coats which obscure their vision, and collect burrs and mud). There has been some call for the USBCC to become the breed club so that we could set the standard and thereby avoid the problems of inappropriate physical traits being used. Unfortunately, although the problem will be made worse by the "wrong" standard, it is the existence of a physical appearance standard, and not its details, that is the danger. The currently proposed standard is flexible enough to appear to cover many of our dogs. In practice, however, an appearance standard, however broad it may seem, will subject the breed to all the problems listed above.
Although there is a popular belief that a dog that looks like his father (or mother) will work like his father (or mother) this is simply not necessarily true. Because of recombination of genes, it is no more likely that the pup with his father's markings is going to behave more like his father than the pup with completely different markings. If we were to set the show standard to duplicate in every detail the appearance of the latest International Supreme Champion, this would no more guarantee us a working breed than any other conformation standard. If we don't choose the pups that work like the latest Champion, we are not selecting the right genetic blend from the many possible combinations.
8. What Is A Breed?
As was stated in the USBCC Spring Newsletter:
"To a geneticist, a breed is simply this: a population of animals whose breeding is controlled and outcrossing limited, so that genetic selection can be exercised on it. . . . A population is simply a subgroup of the whole species of dog, Canis familiaris. Controlled breeding and limited outcrossing make it possible to select . . . for whatever genetic traits the organized breeders decide on. Organized breeders is almost a necessary part of the definition; one breeder cannot produce enough dogs to truly create a breed, and a lot of breed
Seastead this.
Tool using chimps. Social bees. The only thing that separates US from THEM is they fear fire and we love it.
... you should meet his bitch, Suave.
Prove it. When's the last time an ape told you he wasn't sentient? There are many ways to determine if an animal is intelligent. One is being self aware. Only larger primates and dolphins can recognize themselves in a mirror. Another aspect is knowing of ones' lifespan. Only humans and a few primates are aware of our own demise.
I don't think the mirror-test is an accurate refleciton (no pun intended) of whether an animal is self aware. All a mirror shows is that the animal is aware of its body. And it wouldn't really be too hard to program a robot that could recognise itself in a mirror. Would that make it self aware? Nope. Because your self, your id, is considerably different to your body.
There is no current test for self-awareness. Now, I can tell that I am self aware, because I have a distinct concept of "self". I really can't be sure of anyone else, but I can assume that since others of my species exibit similar behaviour to me, I can reasonably assume that they possess the same trait of self-awareness that I do.
Dolphins and gorillas... Well, I'm not too convinced. They're intelligent, but I don't quite think that they're quite there; the evidence availiable doesn't make a good case, in my opinion. Though I'll admit that this is mainly due to no-one having inventing a convincing self-awareness test, yet.
Problem solving doesn't show an animal is self-aware. Recognising physical objects does not, either. I'm not entirely sure what does, however. Speech helps, of course. It could be that certain language patterns can only arise with self-awareness. It could be that a self-awareness is related to some effect on the quantum level, that cannot be replicated by a Turing Machine. There is some evidence to believe that a Turing Machine cannot represent a self-aware entity.
To be honest, we have such a crude definition of "self", that we'd need to figure out precisely what we mean when we talk about sentience, before we can start to think up tests for it.
Perhaps that will prove to be the greatest scientific challenge of our race.
you ring a bell.... damned dog drools all over the place and wants to eat my leg
That's only 0.429 years old!
My cat has over 500 different sounds, actions and sound/action pairs that mean "feed me", "play with me", "let me out" or "leave me alone".
...
29 words for snow is nothing in comparison.
Anyway, this is merely simple noise-object association. It is interesting of course, but when that dog can do things like "turn on the light", "put a pizza in the oven" and "fetch me the book on perl"
I was in "parrot" mode and left out some important information.
Koko the gorilla distinguishes between balls based on the writing on one ball. I believe that she has learned to associate a few written words with their sounds.
Human reading is a very complex process. Humans use language to a depth and richness that no other being on the planet appears to be able to accomplish. What Alex, Koko, Rico, and others do is demonstrate that they can perform many of the operations that go into creating language. They can express concepts using language, reason based on what they hear, and even manipulate their environment (or at least their owners) with language.
They do not communicate in the way humans do. It does not diminish their accomplishments, nor do their abilities diminish us as humans.
This sig seemed like a good idea at the time....
...and I can't even teach my bitch to understand "Shut up!"
how about voluntary supression of basic instincts?
Show me a (fat) dog on a self-imposed diet and I acknowledge that it is intelligent.
Whilst I'm impressed that a dog can manage it, I'm surprised that few people do these sorts of experiments on cats. In my experience, cats don't just understand words, they can empathise with humans, have a broader range of emotions, and can devise strategies. But then, in a test, I imagine that a cat would be too lazy and would act dumb to get out of the task :D
Do you see what I did there?
In fact, if you know just a bit about contemporary research in child language you can pick up the hints in the AP article Pullum links about how it ties in:
This is reminiscent of some of the work of Eve Clark-- which Geoff can't be excused not to know.Are you adequate?
Now, this is certainly a smart dog, no doubt about it, but..
>This is really the reasoning part. You don't need to tell the dog what the toy's name is - the dog will figure it out himself. If you tell him to look for something he's never heard of, he will have a look around and if there's something new and unusual, he will guess that's what you meant.
The Slashdot blurb was a bit misleading. The dog doesn't necessarily learn that a 'squeege' is called a squeege after one exposure (most humans don't) but if it knows the names of all the other things in the pile, it will reason that the one the human wants must be the one without a name.
So the dog understands the sentence structure [GET] [OBJECT], which is impressive in itself.
Marxist evolution is just N generations away!
When's the last time an ape told you he wasn't sentient?
Last thursday, but I think he was lying to me.
err can we get back to the dog one liners please ?
This isn't that impressive...anyone who has spent any time training or even playing with dogs knows this. I have a Shih Tzu that knows people and other dogs by name, knows his toys, learns the names of new toys, knows what it means to go for a "ride", go "home" and even "go to bed" among other things.
:-)
I've found it is usually a question of motivation, not intelligence, when it comes to dogs. If they aren't that intelligent, why is it we humans spend all day at work while they spend the day sleeping, eating, or playing?
Welcome our new canine over...
No, wait, I just can't wrap my head around that one. Come back to me when they figure out what side of the door they want to be on.
If we reacted as dictated by our instincts we would be continually acting based upon our feelings and random urges.
Go find an average human. Based on my observation, the average human has the "freewill" of a fucking horny Jack Russell Terrier.
Excuse me whilst I return to my previous activity: Exhibiting perfectly normal behavior.
I for one welcome our border collie overlords.
If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor - Albert Einstein
"Monkey Dog hate clean".
"brain structures that support this kind of learning are not unique to humans"
So their might be a doggy heaven?!
I know you are psychotic, but please make an effort.
Or perhaps it has just associated the word "new-toy" with "object-with-most-peculilar-smell" opposed to smelling of the dog's own scent.
"And how hard did you have to beat him?" - "Oh, fairly hard..."
My favorite news outlet covered this story on Thursday's All Things Considered:
Learning and being able to understand a large vocabulary of words is a only a subset of what language is. The ability to use grammar to string together ideas is a core fundamental of language and only utterances that have this characteristic are real languages (as opposed to pidgins, etc).
If a dog or any other non-human creature could learn to correct sentances like 'I forgotted the name of my neighbor' (or any such novel, grammatically incorrect utterance) then that would be a real discovery.
"More Food"
Anyone who has a dog OR toddler knows that if you throw down ten old toys and one new toy, they'll go for the new toy because it's different and interesting.
What were the statistics of throwing in the new toy, then asking the dog to get one of the old ones? Was it more likely to bring back the new toy?
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
I weep for our children
Wow, so communicating with dolphins or parrots doesn't matter. I'm pretty certain that's been going on a lot longer and even a special ed kid knows those animals are a lot smarter than a dog.
Presently here, but not there.
As Douglas Adams said in his infinate wisdom: "It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much -- the wheel, New York, wars and so on -- whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man -- for precisely the same reasons"
3 degrees of separation from Vladimir Putin
Anyone who raises livestock also sees this in such stupid animals as sheep and cows, also.
In most herds, there is usually one animal that is a bit brighter than the other dim souls in the herd or flock. This is the cow that can open "animal proof" gates (not by crashing them down...), the sheep that figures out how to jump over the fence, etc.
And once the one animal has done something, the rest quickly figure it out as well. These things also seem to be picked up inherently by newly introduced animals as well, who have not had a chance to witness the behavior.
But, of course, this is just a bunch of dumb farmer/rancher talk.
My experience has been that ALL tech support people lie any time they don't know the answer.
Advanced users are users too!
actually, while I'm making broad sweeping stereotypical claims, I'll take it further - as it's certainly not limited to tech support.
It seems to be a very strong thing in a lot of people that they'd rather guess, or lie than be seen to not know the answer to something.
Advanced users are users too!
Yes, Rico is a dog. Rico is also a border collie, the "asian kid" of dogs.
Trust me. Not only don't beagles ever know more than three words (their name, "come", and "ball" or "bone", which translates to "any toy you see first"), but you have to say it three times in succession in command voice before they even acknowledge you are making your own sounds.
My hypothesis is that border collies were bred for instant reaction to a shepherd's instructions, while beagles were bred to ignore the rest of the noise in the pack until they have followed their current scent trail, pushed through the brush and the mass of hounds working other trails, and located the actual, breathing rabbit.
Which isn't to say that beagles are not trainable to competition calibre, but that lady who won the obedience trials with her beagle operates in the same vein as someone who tries to win an open-class drag race in a semi. It's way more work to do the mods than your average entry.
The dog presumably wants to get it right for a reward.
Interesting. Maybe they should replace all toys with the same kind, only brand new and out of the box. This is so there isn't a smell to them that he previously knows.
I suppose you could wash them. But just for the sake of science, I would replace them with the exact same kind.
Life is not for the lazy.
Check out the Alex Papers, about a cognitive scientist, Irene Pepperberg, and her African gray parrot.
The African gray can use language - and otherwise demonstrate the reasoning and conceptual ability - at a level comparable to that of a human 2 to 3 year old.
I had border collies until I was 18. Or, rather, border collies had me until I was 18. As a small child one of them was my babysitter. She kept me safe, wouldn't let me eat anything bad for me, and herded me back into the house for meals and diaper changes. She had technically belonged to my grandmother, but upon my birth she lost all interest in my grandparents and devoted the rest of her life to caring for me. Everyone who tried to get near me, except my parents, got bitten. That includes my grandparents, aunts, and uncles - they weren't allowed near me. She was also picky about who I was friends with. Anyone she didn't like didn't get to play with me any more, because she'd growl at them and scare them off. I had no say in the matter.
In my later childhood and teens another border collie was my best friend. I felt strongly that he understood whatever I said to him. (My reaction to this article was "Only 200 words?") He did have a mind of his own though. I had to start locking him out of my bedroom at night or else I was likely to wake up cold on the floor and find him asleep in my bed under the covers with his head on my pillow. When we went out for a few hours and left him in the house, he'd knock the remote control on the floor and step on it to turn on the TV, then mash at it with his paw to channel surf. (He liked science fiction. He disliked rock concerts.) I treasure the memories of my last summer with him, swimming in the Deleware, hiking through the poconos, and picking black raspberries in the woods. When I went off to college, he committed suicide.
I have been unable to have another dog since because I haven't had enough time and energy to devote to a border collie, and having lived with two of them, no other dog measures up.
Yes, but trained dogs are TRAINED to look for things that are out of place; they either do it by default, or they are TRAINED to do it in response to a known word.
This dog heard the new toy's name, a totally unfamiliar word, and, without prior TRAINING, figured out that it must be the toy that it recognized least. It's not any different just because dogs use smell instead of sight as their primary sense for identification. It figured out that "go get your toy" must mean to fetch the toy that it could not otherwise identify.
Oh, and then it remembered the toy's name a month later without hearing the word again. So it didn't even associate the word with "generic unknown toy" -- it associated the word with "the toy that I found."
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
A few months later, they tried another fetch test, and the dog remembered the name for each of the new items introduced during the first test.
That's a smart dog.
omg! kill it before it teaches other dogs!
My border collie learned all the spellings.
In two languages.
Of course, he also undersood me well enough to tell the difference between when I was just using the word and when I was actually talking about doing something with him.
We're talking about a border collie here. They want to be on whatever side of the door you are on.
Please learn the definitions of words before you use them. Sentient: responsive to or conscious of sense impressions.
Sentience is far below intelligence and is possessed by most macroscopic animals.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
About a year ago, I forgot to give the cats the night-time 1/2 can of fancy feast that supplements their kibble and turned in. The Tom knows he isn't supposed to be on the kitchen counter, but he got the plastic knife I use to dish the stuff out, brought it into the bedroom and dropped it with a clank against a tubular chair support.
I suppose he could have:
1. Just decided to play on the counter that night
2. Just happened to choose the knife
3. Just happened to bring it into the bedroom
4. (Just when I had turned in but wasn't asleep)
5. Just happened to drop it so it made noise.
6. And he could have been thinking "Hey, let's play with the knife! We haven't done that before!"
But I think not. Even though the knife itself is a concrete object, I have to believe that the simplest conclusion is that the knife was serving as a _symbol_ to the _social_ _goal_ of "FEED ME!" Which would be mighty impressive as real-world autonomous AI goes.
I have plenty of anecdotes to convince me that cats are sentient creatures. Having had a border collie as a kid, I would say that goes double for them.
And I don't agree that most _cats_ won't recognize themselves in a mirror -- experiments with kittens may give different results. I think there might be developmental effects as well as training effects and I'd like to see the methodology behind this old saying.
Why couldn't e.g. a dog be sentient? I've spent enough time with those to know that they appear to be quite sentient, have their own will, own quirks, etc.
And what makes you think sentience is something binary? I think it's fuzzy. A dog is sentient, but not so much as a human being. A fly is sentient, but not so much as a parrot. For example, you could say (these numbers are made up) that a parrot is 10% to 30% sentient in a human scale. Some advanced space aliens might be 250% sentient in human scale. And so on.
Like you said, intelligence might occur in varying levels among animals. Why wouldn't sentience? Sentience, intelligence, anything regarding the mind's capabilities is varying even among humans, let alone different species.
I do not moderate.
I, uh... misread 'it' as 'I'.
Wow. And the post before, I was ironically talking about dumbasses...
He lived until he was old and sick, and then I went off to college and he chose to commit suicide.
They understand that they can die, and they can choose when they're ready to go.
Look, I lived with border collies for 18 years. They weren't my pets, they were family. After 18 years of watching them, I believe they're not only as smart as people, but that part of the reason some people have problems with their border collies is that the dog is smarter than they are.
The thing is, there are two factors which prevent most people from understanding how smart they really are: one is that they can't talk (although mine tried and startled a few people by croaking out a kind of "hello" they don't really have the right vocal equipment) and the other is that they don't have the same priorities as people do: people worry about going to school and earning money and paying for the next vacation... border collies worry about making sure their family is happy and well, and they see you as their family.
I don't find it impressive either. What would have been a better display of reasoning is to teach the dogs adjectives or attributes. Big vs little, hard vs soft, light vs heavy, then tell him to go pick, from a group of all new toys, one that had a specific combination of attributes. "Go get the big, soft, heavy ball" Anything else is just process of elimination, which all high-functioning creatures can do to some extent.
An explanation of my choices for friends
There was a lot more then one gorilla. There have been many animals who have been taught sign language. Experiments have also been shown that chimpanzees are able to pass on sign language to Chimpanzees that cannot speak it.
Anyone who's ever owned a dog could tell you they're pretty darn smart. Some breeds are smarter than others, mind, but they're none of them stupid like cats.
(and to all of you cat lover out there, don't worry, I like cats just fine, I just don't think something with a brain the size of an almond can be terribly intelligent.)
Our poodle (a standard, mind, not one of those horrid little toys) was a very bright dog. I never did any kind of tests, but at a guess I'd say she had a vocabulary of at least 100 words. What a sweet natured dog, too.
We originally embarked on the quest for teaching apes language because we felt that it would be a good indication on our successfulness to speak with aliens if we ever found them. To communicate with sentient non-humans we would need an ambassador that could speak their language.
So we grabbed our closest relatives. The apes. There is plenty of proof they have some intelligence, for example wild chimpanzees will not allow incest within their social circles.
We tried to teach apes how to speak our language. We kidnapped babies and raised them like human children. We forced their mouths around words and were able to teach them a couple of words at best. The chimpanzees simply couldn't learn our spoken language. We were stuck.
Then came ASL. We began to teach apes ASL. We were much more successful with this. We could now communicate with another species. So we had them interact with non-sign language speaking apes. But it was a failure. The sign-language ape knew as much about wild apes as ourselves. To the "speaking" ape, the non-speaking ape was a wild beast whereas itself was an intelligent beast, like humans. When asked to identify themselves speaking apes will identify themself in the human category, rather then the ape category. They identify themselves in a category. To me, that is more then enough proof apes (of the kind that have shown this quality. I don't know which species does this) are self-aware.
I have one request. Prove humans can reason and not only react to their surroundings as dictated by their instincts.
I'm not sure this is evidence enough for me (I tend to be skeptical about these things).
However, it does bring up an intriguing thought; can self-awareness be taught?
You would have to devise a test to prove something isn't self-aware. Then you apply it to human babies and you'll get a definitive answer. The problem is, all animal's brains are hard-wired differently. People say "how would score in an IQ test?" Well it's an unfair question as IQ tests are devised for humans. If the English tested American-Indians I'm sure the Indians would have scored very low, and they're of the same species!
This is a problem for lots of tests (IMO). They're designed for one particular species. How would a human do if dogs devised an IQ test for other dogs and a human tried to sit it?
And so we realize that we're less and less special in the universe - first we thought that the Earth was in the center, everything else revolving around us, and we roasted a few guys for saying we go round the Sun. How arrogant. Then we thought there was some vital force that makes things alive, must be the stuff souls are made of - because naturally we must live forever after we die - and it seemed that only living beings can synthethize organic chemical compounds. That is until Woehler synthesized urea (found in piss) from inorganic ammonium carbonate. Now it seems that there is no need to postulate the existence of a soul, a human being is just a chemical machine, and the whole chemical machine, however complex, could simply be synthesized from elements. And there is one last stronghold, ahh, we're still special cuz we're "intelligent" and animals are not. Dude, it's the same biology, same instincts, even same feelings of sorrow, hate, rage, happiness, in every mammal I see. Okay, as far as bugs are concerned, it's harder to identify the same way, or say when salmon get horny, they get so kinky they die, it's a little strange, but at least as far as mammals go, we're all pretty much the same, some just excel in tree climbing, some in thinking. Just because we think the best it doesn't mean others don't think at all. Probably all mammals build a model of reality in their heads, because that's simply how the brain works, and that's how you can predict. All I know is that I'm no special, just part of this whole thing called life on planet Earth.
every dog has a day
Look at the picture. To me, it looks more like a border collie. And indeed, the text talks about "Rico, the nearly nine-year-old Border collie".
Fortunately, Border Collies are, AFAIK, one of the smartest dogs.
When's the last time an ape told you he wasn't sentient?
Wait... if an ape told me he wasn't sentient, then...
Argh! My brain!
The German langauge sign is on the other side of the entrance.
Claus
Let's see - your sig says "please hire me" and your post says:
;-)
After 18 years of watching them, I believe they're not only as smart as people, but that part of the reason some people have problems with their border collies is that the dog is smarter than they are.
Take it from me, gong to job interviews and proudly saying "I'm almost as smart as a dog" is unlikely to get you a job anytime soon!
I hope you don't seriously believe what you wrote?
And how do you know this? Just because you decide something doesn't make it a fact. Anyone who's had a dog knows you're full of it...
Naturally, the next step is to teach parrots to operate first-person shooters.
No more masterbating in front of the dog; who knows who he'll tell!
Collies are nowhere near as smart as this dog, thisis a border collie, get it right. They have been known to be the smartest dogs for quite some time.
I have seen them use their paws like hands to manipulate objects, as well as to swat things, such as food, or toys from other dogs mouths, with no training to do such things.
Collies are ignorant and unintelligent by comparison.
But then... isn't that precisely what humans do? React on their surroundings as dictated by their instincts? Because you, are just a bunch of instincts using memories. I completely agree with this, and I am surprised that noone I know thinks the same way. can I use it as my sig?
43rd Law of Computing:
Anything that can go wr
fortune: Segmentation violation -- Core Dumped
"But then... isn't that precisely what humans do? React on their surroundings as dictated by their instincts? Because you, are just a bunch of instincts using memories."
:(
I completely agree with this, and I am surprised that noone I know thinks the same way. can I use it as my sig?
I still havent learnt how to html properly, and I should remember which side to put the slash
Bugger! downloadable video available here. Be nice to that link as I just googled for it.
When shit hits the fan get some of these https://youtu.be/pY-GncsZ-UE
I didn't know that they did it this way. I am not as impressed as I was before. The dog is going to realize which one is out of place just by the smell of the toy which obviously doesn't fit w/the rest. Trained dogs sniff out stuff that they recognize all the time. What's so different about them picking the one thing that is different?
You're talking about two different things there. You (a human) make the mental leap between "unrecognized object" and "unknown sound" very easily. That's one thing. Many animals can be taught to recognize various objects or smells. That's another thing. Reasoning that a new (previously unknown) object/smell might be related to a new (previously unknown) sound takes a slightly higher level of intelligence. Or so I would think.
Sniffer dogs are trained on known scents and trained in exactly what to do and how to react to those known scents. They aren't taught to react to something just because it's different. Dogs are so sensitive that there are "different" objects around them literally every time their handler comes to work (new clothes with smells of unknown people or pets on the clothes, etc). This dog does appear to make a sort of minor mental leap.
Dogs are definitely bright enough to learn sounds as commands. My dogs even learned to get excited at the word "walk" without anyone meaning to teach them, by just listening to people saying "lets take the dogs for a walk".
I can tell one of my dogs to "Get the ball" and she will remember where she left it and bring it.
Can this dog get grammer, etc., or is it just very good at what I said above?
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
I saw an report on this on TV
The totally amazing thing was that the dog could not only learn new Words rather fast, but also pick up an Toy he had not known in the past.
How it worked?
He knew all the other toys, and was smart enough (after being told "No" one, two times, when he reached a false one) that he was supposed to pick up a toy with a name he could not associate. Ruling out all Toys he knew he went to the new Toy - which is the same thing 3 year olds can do.
+++ MELON MELON MELON +++ Out of Cheese Error +++ redo from start +++
This dog is trained too -- he's trained to associate names with objects. It's not impressive in the least, it's just traditional dog training. I would be more impressed if someone could manage to train my goldfish to swim to a particular place in his tank whenever I show him a greek letter on a piece of paper. That would be really useful but I'm under no illusion that little Carrot has simply been trained and in no way is he reading Greek.
It's difficult to tell if an animal is using language in the way we understand it, because even the best "talking animals" are not so fluent that they can discuss their own understanding of language. You can readily teach a parrot to say, "Polly wants a cracker." But is this using language? In particular, does Polly understand that a cracker is a particular thing that it is asking for, or has Polly merely been trained, in a stimulus-response manner, to feel that "pollywantsacracker" is a good thing to say?
One could argue that there is not meaningful distinction, but in fact, it is possible to teach a human being both ways, and it is clear that stimulus-response learning does not imply conscious understanding. I know of a case in which a class of students, as a prank, conditioned the teacher to use the word "we" more frequently, simply by appearing more attentive whenever he used the word. Pretty soon he was peppering his lectures with the word. Yet he never had any conscious awareness that he was doing so, or any understanding that in this context, the word "we" meant "pay attention".
With that kind of vocabulary, that dog should apply for the job of CEO at SCO - far better qualified than Darl.
You aren't remembered for doing what is expected of you
I believe animals are capable of so much more than we give them credit for. For example, we took care of some friends' pet parrot while they went away on vacation. (how smart he is was an emphatic topic of conversation beforehand) For example, one time, I showed him a picture from a cosmetics ad and said, "Java, this is Lucy. Isn't she beautiful?" And he stared at her picture smiling like a deer caught in headlights for a brief second and then quickly, emphatically nodded his agreement. Another time I suggested that his caretakers (who have been married for some years but are still childless) didn't have children because they were exhausted from taking care of him, (Java screams if you leave him alone, we suspect because of abandonment issues relating to us people being his flock) he got really offended and hissed and squawked at me and I dare say, was hurt because he suspected it might be true. Yet another time, after screaming because there was no one around, I put on my robe and slippers to go comfort him. (he would continue screaming if I didn't) In fact, he looked scared until I showed up. Then he looked happy to see me and then he glanced at my robe, then my slippers. Then he glanced at his own feathers and feet and looked up and smiled at me like he was on the verge of tears. I hastily looked at my feet an saw my gray slippers and white, terrycloth robe and looked at Java's gray feet and white feathers and a light bulb went off and here I was, a surrogate member of his flock. What was most amazing to me was that I walked into the room where he was staying and noticed he had managed to carve a piece of wood such that both ends looked like birds' heads in profile with thinner necks (though really they looked more like ducks than parrots to be fair) and both had knots where the eyes would be. One was inverted and had a long, thin piece of wood dangling off the end. I immediately saw the resemblence, though I had to think that maybe it was some kind of weird coincidence. Like maybe the eyes were harder wood or something. Nonetheless, I did see a very parroty resemblence when I held the piece of wood upright with the thin piece of wood resembling his crest. And amazingly enough, he smiled and flared up his crest and POSED so I could see the likeness. And it was pretty damn uncanny I have to admit. Unfortunately, I accidentally kicked the piece of wood and broke the crest off, (which just goes to show how delicate it and otherwise difficult to carve it was) but our friends still have the double-sided bird's head. All this in the space of two weeks.
For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods
Right on!!! AKC appropriation of standards are similar to M$'s tactics with open standards and create an inferior a product.
When the border collie was being picked up by the AKC, border collie people sued to be kept out of their crappy breeding program.
More examples on their "standards" include the cute curley tails deemed standard for siberians and huskies. In a working sled dog, a tail that curls over like that indicates a scrunchy backend that can't move properly and any pup carrying that characteristic is culled.
When Jamie Nelson tried to run a team of AKC Malamutes in the Iditarod she had access to the best the AKC offered and she said they had all of their working characteristics bred out of them and was hard presed to put together a team up for the challenge.
AKC is all about owner vanity at the cost of dogs.
...we salute you!
Here is the link:
http://www.sciencemag.org/feature/data/bloom.pdf
I have a border collie and he is smarter than most people.I can tell him to do things and he figures it out and does it. I tell him once in plain english and a bit of hand gestures and he figures it out.
I have trained him to herd cats. -- he chases the neighbor's cat only when it starts to hang out at the bird feeder.
I have huskies and he works with them. Quite the kick ass lead dog. (his mother is a husky so he is an F1 hybrid vigor).
In the dog yard, if a fight breaks out I tell him to get the dog causing the trouble and he does... he'll run down and grab the perpetrator by the back of the neck and pull him over to me.
He'll go anywhere with me without a leash and he stays away from strangers. When I go in to a shop, he'll lie down outside and wait by the door.
He wakes me up to put wood in the fire when it burns down too much.
He gets me up if I am late for work, but won't bother me on Sunday morning.
He also has woken me up to see cool phenomenon like the Northern Lights and the Space Shuttle/Space Station. When I go to a fastfood restaurant w/him I get him a burger. When we drive by a McD's, he points to it even if we have never been to that particular franchise.I don't think he likes BK or Wendy's, cause he doesn't point his nose at them even the ones we have been to
When I have a difficult programming question, I hang out with him and his psychic abilities help me solve it.
He doesn't really care about toys and he hates my Jar Jar doll.
There is a story (I think it is athabaskan) about when the humans were divided from the animals the dog jumped across the divide to help us. I think that is just about right.
Too bad it can't run Linux!
Do you see any reasoning, proof or even a hint of logic here? Neither do I. This fits right up there with 'the world is flat' and 'the sky is on a god's back' because it's a mindless concept based on absolutely nothing, which thinks it can stand up to the mountain of proof debunking it. It simply doesn't compute that some guy with absolutely no sense of logic or reason tries to say that he's the only thing in the world with logic and reason.
I am NOT a number! I am a - oh wait, I'm number 761710. Look! 761710!
It's really just that stupid people with no understanding can't comprehend what animals are doing. It's more a projection by the ignorant than anything.
I am NOT a number! I am a - oh wait, I'm number 761710. Look! 761710!
A dog that knows english. Damn. Humanity in general still has no clue what animals are thinking; we just make-believe that anything not bent on world-destruction is inferior (we're bent on the whole 'we r have bigger brain so we r smarterer' act). We're still just a bunch of neanderthals with calculators aren't we.
I am NOT a number! I am a - oh wait, I'm number 761710. Look! 761710!
There is no current test for self-awareness. Now, I can tell that I am self aware, because I have a distinct concept of "self".
come on! Don't you realize how this does not support your position, but undermines it? Your position is either (a) these animals have no sentience, or sapience, or whatever, or (b) there is no evidence of said. but then you admit there's no test for whatever it is you're talking about. Well then just how the hell do YOU know? Do you even know what sentience/sapience/intelligence/whatever it is you're talking about IS? You say that you do based on a "distinct concept of self". Come on, that's complete bs. If it's so distinct, you shouldn't have a problem defining it. What's that? You DO have a problem defining it? What - do you mean to say that there's NO way you can define it such that I can't immediately question it? Do tell. Sounds to me like what's "distinct" is your FAITH that you have a sense of self, that you are distinct, or whatever - but it in NO WAY implies that you have anything that these other creatures don't have. In fact, the very nature of your "distinct concept" INSURES that we CAN'T ever tell whether or not these other creatures have it.
You're sure that the rest of us have "distinct concepts of self" because we evince appropriate behavior are you? Well, seems to me that should be distinct as well. Now I challenge you to define this behavior such that it clearly is behavior other animals don't have. Before you start, let me inform you that you will fail. But give it the old college try, maybe you'll learn something.
I get so tired of people who think that other creatures are somehow fundamentally different from us, psychically, emotionally, whatever. EVERY theory (because they are all theories) stating this is nothing more than inherited religious bias MASQUERADING as science. Period. It's so unbelievably, ironically arrogant.
Yeah, I often can't even remember the names of new people I meet months later.
It would be mighty impressive if an autonomous AI could simply pick out the knife from the bench it was sitting on, or just jump onto a benchtop! To do the rest would be seemingly beyond the realms of all possibility at the current time.
Just because some slashdotters can type doesn't mean that they actually have an understanding of what they are doing.
Then there are the mythical slashdotters who actually RTFA.
err can we get back to the dog one liners please ?
No; back to 'ur basket Now !
No.
All that Pullum is saying is that the dog isn't understanding language*, and so the phrase is misused in the article.
Pullum doesn't see the positive things about the article. Overall, I thought it was slightly better than average reporting.
Are you adequate?
Are you adequate?
I had a mutt, not a border collie. When he became old and sick, he stopped roaming, but he went off somewhere else one day, presumably to die. He also had a knack for disappearing on days he was supposed to go to the veterinarian.
I had a conversation about exactly this point. Whether Rico recognized the new objects by smell, sight or (more likely) some combination of the two has no bearing on the experiment. That step of the experiment addresses whether Rico can pair a novel word with a novel object in an otherwise familiar environment. While studying his perception is certainly very interesting, how he recognizes the objects is not important to this study. The study demonstrates that Rico can pair novel words with novel objects. It does not address his identification procedure.
...with 35 years experience:
A dog of average intelligence has roughly the same understanding as a 4 to 5 year old child, depending in part on how much you simply talk to the dog -- they learn not only from specific training, but also from everyday speech, much as children do.
The language used isn't relevant. A bright dog can learn commands in multiple languages, and you can even mix languages in a string of 3 or 4 commands, and the dog will parse it out, very much like multilingual humans can do even as children. It's *normal* in simple obedience training to use both voice commands and hand signals. Adding a command in another language, or even another hand signal, is very easy for the dog to pick up.
Collies are typically near the bottom end of the canine intelligence scale, so I would expect an average collie to mature to the same level of language understanding that a 3 year old child has -- that is, they know what a lot of words mean if you use them precisely, but they don't have good ability to pick meaning out of fuzzy language (like ordinary conversation).
Labradors and Chesapeakes are at the top end of the canine intelligence scale, and a bright specimen typically has the same understanding of everyday language as a bright 5 to 6 year old, or in exceptional cases, about what you'd see in a child as old as 7 or 8. Most Labs can count to and remember 3 or 4 items (be that shot birds or commands) with ordinary training and experience, and I've seen Chessies that can count as high as 8. I've seen at least one Lab that could lip-read, as was evident after she became deaf from old age.
Don't mistake *conditionability* for *intelligence* -- some of the very dumb breeds (frex, Dobermans, and for that matter, most cats) *condition* very easily, and are very observant so they are always on the lookout for one of their "cue words" -- hence when training them, you get instant and accurate results. But they don't think or reprocess information worth a damn, so if anything falls outside their very limited understanding, it either won't get processed at all, or will induce a panic response.
Whereas a dog with real intelligence will think far enough to extrapolate from what they already know -- much like a human will, given a good brain and ordinary life experience.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
above post is now GPL,
sig it!
Hivemind harvest in progress..
... that "go get your bone boy and bring it over here" counts as 10 words.
Let's see 10 words == 1 action. So effectively dogs are only smart enough to remember about 20 worthwhile activities/things !!!
Disclaimer (In case they ever read this): I have 3 dogs that I love very much.
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
1. Get a dictionary.
2. Look up "decimate". Note the part about "to destroy a considerable part of."
3. Look up "metaphor".
4. If it is still bugging you, look up "pedant".
My observation is that cats don't *change* visual focus or track very well compared to dogs or humans, so tend to be startled by stuff that "unexpectedly" leaps into view, such as their own face in the mirror. And cats are generally pattern-driven, so don't cope well with surprises.
:)
There are a few cats that figure it out, tho, like my old cat I mention above (he can recognise not only himself but also *other* cats in the mirror) and I suspect your knife-wielding cat has similar capability.
I have dozens of Weird Tales about this cat, but he's a freak, more like a dog in disguise than a cat.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Possibly they just don't have the peripheral vision that dogs or humans do, especially in brighter light (due to the shape of their irisis - slitted - perhaps?) I would think that'd be easy to test, maybe time to do some experiments. (Seems to me I read somewhere long ago that cats have a much narrower field of vision than we do, but a lot more sensitivity to movement within it)
Was your old cat a comedian also? I've found that that particular trait rarely appears among female felines but often among the tomcats. My younger male is showing all the signs of becoming a great comic, while every female cat I've ever had has just been a big piece of furry affection.
I haven't owned a dog in many years due to apartment living and moving, but cats I've had quite a few, and they're family
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
That's pretty convincing proof of intelligence, but
>he hates my Jar Jar doll
this clinches it.
You have an awesome dog. Has he trained any other dogs?
"Do not drill any holes in your cat - it will not like it."
-- Nick Davies
but then you admit there's no test for whatever it is you're talking about. Well then just how the hell do YOU know?
Essencially, Descartes.
I get so tired of people who think that other creatures are somehow fundamentally different from us, psychically, emotionally, whatever. EVERY theory (because they are all theories) stating this is nothing more than inherited religious bias MASQUERADING as science. Period. It's so unbelievably, ironically arrogant.
There's plenty of reason to hold this belief. Allow me to repeat what I've said elsewhere. Lets start off with two, reasonable assumptions. I will assume I am self-aware. I will assume that most matter in the Universe is not.
At what point, then, does an animal become self-aware? Clearly, there must be some things that are not self-aware, and some things that are.
I'm working from the skeptical angle. Whilst you claim that my skepticism is religious (odd choice of words), I'm inclined to disagree.
Starting skeptically, I start with the belief nothing is self-aware, and work from there. From assumption one (I-think-therefore-I-am), I can conclude that I am self-aware.
Now, there is a large volume of evidence to support the suggestion that I am human. If I am self-aware, and others of my species exhibit similar behaviour as me, then it is reasonable to conclude that the vast majority of humans are also, probably, self aware.
No other species has yet made a convincing enough case to me on its self-awareness. Any creature is welcome to try.
Its not arrogance. It's not religion. It skepticism.
No insect has ever been shown to recognize itself in the mirror. They respond to their image (if they can see it - some don't see in the visible spectrum, and sum mirrors don't reflect very well outside of it) the same way they respond to another bug in the room.
And no slashdot poster has ever been shown to comprehend simple points.
I simply meant, that an intelligent being with compound eyes might have difficulty with such a task, and I went further, with an intelligent species that was naturally blind. The "recognize itself in a mirror" test isn't useful to determine intelligence, and I would think the point should be obvious.
Europe tends to de-genericise geographical indicators such as CHEDDAR(tm) cheese for cheese made in Cheddar, England. On the other hand, Slashdot is run from the United States, which shows less of such tendency; geographical indicators have to meet the same standard of distinctiveness as any other USPTO registered trademark. In the United States, your "f___ing brand" is PILSNER URQUELL(tm), not just "pilsner" which appears to be a generic term meaning "golden beer". Even the web site promoting PILSNER URQUELL beer calls pilsner a "style of beer". Likewise, a "f___ing brand" of "cola" (generic for carbonated sugar water with phosphoric acid and a flavor base including citrus oil, cinnamon, and vanilla) is COCA-COLA(tm). Otherwise, how could SABMiller, which makes MILLER LITE(tm) beer, get away with claiming that MILLER LITE beer is a "true pilsner"?
but I don't really care because the topic is "Pilsner" and not cheese.
Then you go on to introduce an example of VELCRO hook-and-loop fastener, which has even less to do with golden beer than cheese. Aren't you admitting that the topic is broader than the trademark status of "Pilsner"?
it is an american simplification to take brand names for generic terms.
In many cases, I fault the producers for not including a suitably specific generic term on the packaging. Speakers may shorten "CHAMPAGNE wine" to just "champagne" but "CHAMPAGNE sparkling wine" to "sparkling wine".
Based on the only piece of evidence you included, it is not SABMiller directly who claims Miller Lite is a "true pilsner"
All Miller Brewing Company pages are robots.txt'd off to keep minors out, but I managed to dig up exhibit 2: Script of a commercial for MILLER LITE beer.
So is "golden beer" the accepted generic term for lagers of this type, just as "sparkling wine" is the generic term for wines produced in the Champagne region of France and imitations thereof?
When a language such as English does not have a formal codification
Granted in general, but with an important exception: Interstate brand names in American English do have a formal codification maintained by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
this kind of ignorance of proper usage of such words is practiced only by less than 5% of the world population.
If you claim that only Americans commit genericide against trademarks, then explain British "hoovering" for sweeping the carpet with a vacuum cleaner.
Male cats tend to be more people-oriented, whereas female cats tend to be more self-oriented, and far less flexible (thus tend to become schedule-bound). Dogs are the same way; in fact certain male vs female traits tend to be universal across warmblooded species. You've been fairly lucky with your female cats' affectionate behaviour, as it's more typical for females to want attention only when THEY want it, whereas males will take it any time you want to give it. There are exceptions, but them's the rules. :) The exceptions tend to be unusually intelligent cats, who are also far less instinct-driven than average.
:)
I dragged home a feral cat a couple months ago who rather rapidly became so social as to be a pest. Couple days ago she figured out that if she sits on the roof and howls above a window, a human will soon appear! She came with a load of kittens inside, one of which now lives next door, and at not quite 7wks shows every sign of being as bright and social as his dam.
My old cat Dust isn't a comedian, but he IS a "guard cat", or so he believes. He glowers at visitors from a safe distance [g], except for a few that he's decided qualify as Property. He chews on the phone cord when I'm talking on the phone (and can't be fooled by talking to nobody) which apparently is part of his "guard the human via isolation" behaviour. He doesn't like the cordless phone much.
Kittens' vision (both range, and ability to identify stuff) develops very slowly compared to puppies of the same age. At 6 weeks, kittens are at about the stage where puppies are at 3 to 4 weeks. And yes, in my observation a great deal of how cats track (or fail to track) motion is due to their lack of peripheral vision when the iris is closed to a slit. It's more obvious with kittens because they haven't yet learned to compensate.
I could ramble on all night, but it's late and my eyes are falling out of my head... and on that note --!! When I forget to put anti-dry-eye goop in my eyes at night, Dust doesn't come to bed, but instead sits in front of the bathroom door til I notice his absence. Ooops, forgot to goop my eyeballs! Once I do so, we ALL go to bed. -- I doubt he gets eye-goop, but he sure notices when something is missing from the routine.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Moderators! Flamebait! Flamebait!
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Ho does a language sound more "commanding" than other?
May it not be that kyou are pandering to certain stereotypes?
For what is worth, I have several blind friends in Germany and their guide dogs are all trained in English. So go figure..
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
There are many ways to determine if an animal is intelligent.
:-)
I think it's not fair to test whether an animal is "intelligent" or "stupid". This test will inherently be biased. We humans think we are the most intelligent beings out there only because we set the rules. So testing animal intelligence will only test intelligence by human standards.
Take the (somewhat over-used) example of ants: they build complex structures, they harvest, they breed other insects for food, they can become addicted to drugs, just like humans. Yet they are not self-conscious (hmm, though luck to prove it... Are there tests to try that?).
Next time you'll face a leopard in the jungle, having only your legs to run away and your bare hand to defend yourself, try to explain him you are superior
I think we are superior in some way just as lots of animals can be seen as superior in some category, be it brain-power, speed, strenght, sight or whatever you may think about.
main(char O){O++&&(((O-291)*O+27788)*O-868020?1:putchar(O++
Given the proper numbers, chances and time, maybe some primates might move to higher levels of intelligence in 100K years?They already have, and they're taking our jobs!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
There is no such thing as a sentient non-homosapien.
RRrriiight.
The few people I know who have ever taken that position were Christian. Are you? Does that mean God is a homo sapien? Or is he non-sentient? And don't forget angels: Happy, non-sentient robots of God.
What evidence is there for non-sentience? Statements of the form "there are no..." tend to assume 'absense of evidence' equates to 'evidence of absense'. In my book, making that comment about sentience equates to 'evidence of absense.'
Damn! I'm feeding the trolls again... final proof of my non-sentience.
Male vs. Female orientations; pretty much what I've observed. With Pook (my female cat) she's just people-affectionate nearly all the time, but when she doesn't want any, she'll walk away (*Hmph! Males!* :)
:) tomcat who just kind of walked into my life (then walked out again when it suited him).
:-)
My male tom (Bandit) borders on pest behavior with his affection; he can be quite annoying sometimes, but if one scolds him, he gives you that *look* and somehow you just can't be angry at him....
Many years ago I was graced for some months with the friendship of an absolutely enormous (30lb++?, couldn't be sure as he wouldn't sit on a scale or suffer being held while on one, but he weighed way more than the 28lb cat food sacks!
He was very much the Guard Cat; if people came to the door and he didn't recognize their sounds or scent he'd growl like a huge dog would, in an earsplitting manner. From his coloring and fur I think he was part bobcat, possibly; wish I still had some pictures, I never have really figured it out. He certainly wasn't all domestic cat. He was very friendly and protective of those he liked, and scared hell out of those he didn't. He'd "heel" - walk with me when I went for evening walks - and no dog dared come near him. Keeping him inside was impossible and I only tried a couple times, he would destroy aluminum screens.
He was quite a friend for a long time; then that summer ('93) I picked up and moved across the state job-hunting; stayed at a campground over the summer until I found a place. He stayed with me until I moved into the apartment, then awakened me early one morning, very talkative and snuggly. When I came home from work that day he'd gone thru the storm screen. I never saw him again. I suspect he simply couldn't handle living in a dinky apartment in the city - his last home had been on the outskirts of a small town, and the campground had been absolute heaven for him (he liked stalking and killing full-grown racoons and often came home that summer torn up; was patient with me and stitching but wouldn't let a vet near him; neither would any vet come near him!).
I miss him a great deal, even after nearly ten years, but have always felt privileged in that he chose to spend time with me. The neighbors at the campground always joked that nobody would dare rob me while I was gone!
*pause to pour a drink in remembrance of Tir*
My only real regret is I only ever took a couple pictures of him, and they are long gone now. Seems like it's all too seldom one gets graced with the honest friendship of someone like him. He was one tough hombre, and I'd bet that he's still around somewhere in N. Minnesota. I hope so.
Bandit shows every sign of being a close friend (he's still less than a year old, but growing up fast - one of the most remarkable experiences in life is seeing in a cat's (or dog's) eyes as they become more and more aware of the world around them over time - as they become conscious - very few people ever understand what I mean by that, but I suspect you do)
Always feel free to babble - when it comes to my furry family, I'm frequently guilty of same.
Cheers! (and a few tears)
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
he's better than having an stupid ,dog
That's some Guard Cat :) He does sound like he may have been a hybrid, rare as that would be. (The various cats are distinct species, whereas wolves, dogs, and coyotes are not, as they can freely interbreed and produce fertile offspring.) Any cat that can kill a raccoon is no mere domestic feline.
:)
.... "ooh, that feels good, do it again!!" And after that he followed me around with his tail just barely in grabbing distance, hoping to be "inspected" again! So I'd oblige, and within weeks he was tame enough to start sleeping indoors at night. (And claw the shit out of the door when he wanted out promptly at 6am.)
:)
:)
Dust started life as a feral. Cats can only count to three at best, so when a mama cat moves a litter, unless she happens to trip over the old nest again later, she'll always leave behind any beyond the first three kittens (and be surprised as hell if you bring the rest to her -- "Omighod, where did you find them?") Or often as not, forget she moved some of 'em, and go back to the old nest. That was the ranch cat's habit where I lived at the time -- she'd drag 3 over to my place, then forget she'd done so, go back to the old nest, and I'd have 3 wild more kittens living in the brush.
This litter was a little older thus much wilder when they showed up, and were a lot harder to catch and tame. Dust (I called 'em Dirt, Dust, and Grime) was clearly the smart one even at 6 weeks. Unlike the others, who'd only eat stuff I'd thrown out a little ways, he would come all the way to my hand, gnaw on the end of my finger as he pulled at the bits of meat, and growl to let me know he was one tough cat
Dust is actually a hermaphrodite (a lot of males in that line -- 5 generations that I knew -- had undersized or poorly formed genitals) and went from being clearly female at 6 weeks, to being sorta-male at about 3 months. At which point I trapped and neutered the now-him. (Anyone who can't castrate a cat in 30 seconds flat is a medical incompetent.) Because I was feeding him, he got so he'd follow me around, but seldom close enough to catch. When he was about a year old I grabbed his tail as he sneaked past and, ah, inspected my handiwork
When visitors came to the kennel, he'd sit on the hill behind the house and glare at 'em, then, um, fumigate the lawn where they'd been.
After I moved in '97, he abruptly lost all interest in going outdoors, and got so he never lets me out of his sight indoors. Tho we've had a little discussion about fumigating the couch after evil strangers have contaminated it
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
> I hope you don't seriously believe what you wrote?
Maybe you've just been surrounded by very bright people your whole life? And I don't mean bright at math or interior design, I mean bright at relationships, socialization, hi "EQ", awareness of self, etc.
Many times I feel sorry for somebody's dog. The dog wants a relationship, the sorry stupid owner wants an automaton as decoration or protection or whatever.
Many people have no business owning dogs yet they do. Depending on your priorities, it can be easy to scale a dog as smarter. You don't see many miserable dogs making the same mistakes over and over again and expecting different results do you? Yet ignorant owners think yelling at the dog might just work the 15th time, or 50th. But w/o any understanding, the dog just sees an angry idiot who's -always- yelling. Being yelled at becomes just another part of life, like having fur. Nothing to be done about it. Yet there the owner is getting red-faced again thinking "THIS time the dog will listen to what I'm saying!"
Some can do math and drive a car and cook dinner and still be so much 'dumber' than their dog on so many levels.
He was certainly unique in my experience. I'm not sure what he was, but given his appearance - (huge ear tufts and large feet, both front feet with extra toes(btw Pook also has extra front toes, 14 to be exact,tho she's obviously a domestic), grey/brown speckled with a ringed tail and approx 2-1/2 feet long from nose to rear not including tail) - I've always thought bobcat. IIRC I read a few things at the time that indicated that bobcat and domestic cat hybrids had occurred before. Curious, now, I'll have to go do some googling. The library there had very little on hybrid cats at the time.
:); but several times he hawked up coon-colored hairballs, and once brought home a coon paw and a fair amount of the forearm (left it on my bed, too, the brat! :)
:) Don't know how he got the (leather) collar off, but a couple hours later it was gone. Didn't ask :)
:) He could also knock the top off the Weber and burned his mouth quite badly once on too-hot meat. Never did it again, either.
:)
Tir had obviously had contact with people; he appeared in my life one morning in winter when I found him sleeping under the laundry room vent. Startled him when I walked up (Holy S---! Look at that cat!) but then he head-butted my hand, and after I fed him (he was pretty scrawny) he just sort of adopted me. Wouldn't come inside until the temp dropped to -40F one night, then he was there most every night. Had to build an insulated cat door into the window for him, as I didn't want him breaking glass.
I never found any of his victims at the campground, nor did I observe the fights (although everyone there certainly heard them
Where I was living, there was a leash law for cats; I tried that *once* with him, and while I was trying to get the collar back off he tore my hand open to the bone (27 stitches). After that I reasoned that if the authorities wanted to try to catch him, they could pay their own medical bills
I had one run-in with the locals about him when the ACO appeared at my door, something about a complaint from the neighbors that I was keeping a "wild animal" in my place. Remarkably, Tir was on his best behavior then, and I think it was that which convinced the ACO to leave me alone (although I did get a stern warning about the leash laws, to which I showed him my scarred hand and explained. He got a good chuckle out of it). I suspected at the time that Tir had had a run-in or two with the ACO; or perhaps could just smell something. Lord knows he was a damned smart cat; he was quite adept at operating screen door latches and refrigerator doors, and no unlocked cupboard was safe
That's extremely interesting about Dust; I wasn't aware that hermaphrodite genes occurred in cats; tho now that I think of it, they are mammals, so of course it does. Sounds like he was pretty territorial too
I'll have to dig up all my old negatives and see if he's on any of them sometime. He was handsome and very formidable looking.
(In case you're wondering, I named him after a child character in one of Barbara Hambly's fantasy books; this character had inherited memories going back generations - the name seemed obvious)
Cheers!
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
Yeah, I've heard of bobcat hybrids, but don't know if they're apocryphal. I know there have been dog/fox hybrids, but that's extremely rare (chromosome mismatch) and the offspring are sterile.
:) Funny story here about that! Dust had a nephew, named Skunk (manx with a big white cross on the middle of his back, evidently a local SoCal mutation since I've never seen it anywhere else) who was about the same age, died at 4 yrs due to screwed-up urinary tract (probably hereditary, given the hermaphrodite issue). Skunk was a brat and wore a collar for rapid grabbing purposes. Anyway, after Skunk died, Dust did this weird tromping around act, and on a hunch I put Skunk's collar on him. The weird act immediately stopped. -- It falls off occasionally, then the act starts up again til I find it and put it back on him. And before this, Dust's reaction to any sort of collar was GET YOUR FRIGGIN' HANDS OFF ME! He clearly knew it had belonged to Skunk.
I don't think I'd have tried collaring that cat twice either
Skunk's notion of fun was "cat in a sack": being dropped into a plastic bag, whirled around a few times, then hung on a doorknob. Whatever turns you on...!!
A lot of males (or presumed males) in that line had undersized/misshapen testicles. And they were the product of up to 5 generations of mother/son inbreeding (being that's what cats there were around the ranch, and they pretty much did as they pleased) and evidently with SoCal's usual big glob of Siamese genes, which is a very dirty gene pool as cats go (lots of defects). Dust was the only one that I knew positively had changed visible gender, but a lot of the males had "female personalities". -- AFAIK Dust is the last of that direct line; what the coyotes and owls didn't get (we just about can't grow cats fast enough), my former-bitch-landlady-from-hell's dog did. But I've seen a lot of clearly-related cats elsewhere around L.A.
Rarely, hermaphrodites occur in dogs too, tho the one case I saw with my own eyes (a random dog at the vet) looked more like a generalized midline defect, ie. incomplete fetal development.
The Hambly connection didn't occur to me, tho it's been a while since I read her older stuff. As to the newer, I'm about tired of Benajmin January!! I've decided that I would now prefer to read about that scruffy Kaintuck policeman, whose name I can't remember when I'm staring at it.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Regarding hybrids;
:)
;0- Her Time of the Dark series of books remain my favorites of hers, however. From everything I've heard, Ms. Hambly is also a cat person...
Did a little googling over my lunch hour; thought you might be interested in this. Very fascinating. A ways down the page is a description of some bobcat hybrids found in the SD area in the '50s. Apparently the female in one case was actually fertile! Makes one wonder how close in time domestics and some of the smaller wild species are related. (There had to be some point in time in the past where they diverged; at least millions of years ago tho)
Tir didn't have a stub tail like the article mentions, but he does fit a lot of the other parts of the description. (Wish I'd had this info available ten+ y.o.- back then I thought hybrids were probably pretty common)
Sounds to me like Dust and Skunk were good buddies. Obviously the collar keeps the memory alive for him. (Some) cats do seem to have very good memories - Pook is one. Out of the several vets she's visited, the only one she likes is the one who spayed her - that vet worked out of her home and was a real kind person and animal lover. T'was the only time I saw Pook actually rubbing up to a vet!
What kind of "tromping around" was he doing? I can't visualize it except as a cat doing a goosestep sort of thing
"Cat in a Sack" - hee! That's a strange one.
Very interesting about SoCal cats. More Siamese makes sense, given the human demographics (*grin*). I've heard that about Siamese - and Bandit has Siamese genes in him; among other things (calico of some sort also, given his markings, but he's hard to figure - although he definitely inherited some hyperness from somewhere)
WRT to what we're talking about here, is hermaphroditism (sp-argh) genetic or simply the result of wildly varying hormone levels during development? I have to admit I've forgotten most of what I learned about genetics in mammals over the years. Not even related to my fields, so to say.
Hambly is one of my over-all favorite authors. Her ability to change genres is utterly amazing. I'm behind on the B.J. books, I have Fever Season here but haven't read it yet. Abishag Shaw...I can't ever remember his name either!
Cheers!
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
I teach in the university (financial management to 3rd year students) and I am pretty confident about a quarter of them are unable to pass any reasoning test. Some of them don't even know how to convert millions to thousands, how many 0s are there in 10 million, etc. When I read a book or see a program on Discovery about research on dolphin intelligence, I often doubt if those stupid^H^H^Hents (I honestly mistyped that first, BTW) will beat the dolphins.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
Why? Because YOU can differentiate things better by sight than by smell?
How about we blindfold you, have you sniff 10 different socks, and call you stupid when you can't pick out your own?
Really? Prove it.
Oh, right, that's what THEY are doing.
(completely ignoring what your definition of "high-functioning creature" might be; heck, these experiments are helping to define that)
So, you would be more impressed if they held a new toy up to his face, said its name, and he remembered it.
Somehow, that's harder than telling him to fetch X, where X is a word he's never heard before, and having him "realize" that X must refer to the item he doesn't recognize?
Or, maybe there's some other way to teach a dog the name of an item? One that never mentions the name of the item or shows him the new item. Maybe gene therapy?
No, it's not what "they" are doing. They are training an animal to respond to simple, memorized commands. By process of elimination, the dog can put together "thing I've never smelled" with "command I've never heard", since other objects are known in a prior environment. This action does not mean the dog understands "language". It is a one way interaction.
I work with young children (austic spectrum) who have trouble learning language. There is an obvious difference between following a rote command and getting feedback that proves active cognition. Other animals, such as Koko the gorilla who learned sign-language are much more impressive in this field. The animal could generate her own questions and pull answers together from a database of knowledge. There was active cognition involved in this.
The dog on the other hand merely memorized "new thing" and "new words". To prove that he truly understood the language itself, you would need to create a field of *all* new objects, then ask for it to choose something specific about one of them. If it was chosen right, you could then infer that there is a greater chance the basic concepts (the object + descriptor = target.. ex. ball + big = big ball) were being processed against other concepts.
With the children I work with, it is absolutely vital that we check question discrimination and comprehension of past memorization.. otherwise, it's just memory and answers to questions sound parroted, or robotic. As for "high-functioning creature", this would involve any animal that can perform problem solving tasks. Get fruit from jar, navigate through maze, respond to commands. It would not include animals that only respond on instinct, such as a fish that eats flakes when you feed him. High-functioning creatures have a good capacity for memory and problem-solving.
The fault of this experiment is that these "200 words" could have easily have been grunts, musical tones, or obscene hand gestures. There is nothing saying it has learned the words because there is nothing that has indicated they did any kind of discrimination trials. All they did was pair "new" with "new". [Additionally, the article even states that there is nothing that indicates the animal has an equally "rich" understanding of the phrases he *does* know.] That simply means the dog has a good memory. (He doesn't associate known names with unknown objects.) You test active cognition by presenting a field of objects, or worded question (depending on the desired response) by pairing something known with something unknown against wrong but similar answers.
To sum up, Rico essentially had a multiple choice test. Visually, it might have looked something like this:
1+1=
a) apple
b) dog
c) 2 !!! PICK THIS ONE !!!
d) car
And typically, when we test comprehension, we don't give away the answers as that completely defeats the point. Understanding the difference between memory and active cognition is important when you want to go trumpeting the language comprehension of any creature. If you want more proof, try working with humans who have difficulty with language, so that you can learn this crucial difference hands-on.
An explanation of my choices for friends
Its not arrogance. It's not religion. It skepticism.
Declaring that you are somehow special in this universe without any more proof than "I believe it to be so" isn't skeptical in any way. It's the antethisis of skeptisism! It *is*, however, arrogant. Religous? No, not necessarily, but it reeks of the arrogant fervor with which fanatics drug themselves.
More on arrogance: Any creature is welcome to try.
So, simply because other animals (nearly identical to us, considering the state of most of the other matter in the universe) cannot converse freely with you, they must prove their self-awareness. No. A more logical consequence of your "reasonable assumption" that you are self-aware would be that any organism with a complex (i.e., folded) brain like a human is self aware, or even that all (specifically animal?) life as we know it is self-aware. Making the cut-off line in the universe include only humans is not logical. Unless, of course, you can prove that being self-aware requires things you seem to think it does: namely, higher-order puzzle solving skills and language ability, and the ability to actually converse with humans (can't say "another species" here, because we'd fail that test ourselves and no longer be self-aware).
Frankly, your argument is akin to declaring that only humans feel 'cold'. "When the temperature drops, I know that I feel 'cold'. However, the shivering of any other animal is only a reflex reaction. Any creature is free to make a convincing case to prove that it feels cold, but since none has yet done so, I'm going to assume they don't." Making the declaration that animals (especially mammals, and especially those with complex brains) aren't aware of their own existence is just as silly.