Your dog might actually be no smarter than a pigeon, new study finds

In a new study that was not written by cats, researchers have found that maybe dogs aren’t as smart as we’ve all been led to believe by the science world, which just might have a bias toward Spot.

Researchers at two British universities examined more than 300 papers written about how smart dogs and other animals are and found several instances where the results were overinterpreted in favor of dogs, reports Phys.org.

“According to a new study on dog intelligence, any thoughts that your dog is exceptionally smart just aren’t true,” writes tech website Silicon Republic.

The study, published in the Learning & Behavior journal, asks “in what sense are dogs special?”

Compared to some other animals, not any, these researchers concluded.

The press release announcing the findings says that “people who think dogs are exceptionally intelligent are barking up the wrong tree.”

“We are doing dogs no favor by expecting too much of them,” researcher Britta Osthaus of Canterbury Christ Church University, said in the press release.

“Dogs are dogs, and we need to take their needs and true abilities into account when considering how we treat them.”

Osthaus and fellow researcher Stephen E. G. Lea wrote in the study that they assessed dog cognition from three perspectives: as domestic animals, social hunters and carnivorans, a category that includes wolves, lions and bears.

They wrote that they compared dog smarts to “what is known about cognition in species that fit into these three categories, with a particular emphasis on wolves, cats, spotted hyenas, chimpanzees, dolphins, horses, and pigeons.”

They considered sensory, physical, spatial and social cognition, and self-awareness, the study says, and concluded that, “taking all three groups into account, dog cognition does not look exceptional.”

They found “the cognitive abilities of dogs were at least matched by several species in each of these groups,” according to the press release.

“During our work it seemed to us that many studies in dog cognition research set out to ‘prove’ how clever dogs are,” Lea, from the University of Exeter, said in the press release.

“They are often compared to chimpanzees and whenever dogs ‘win’, this gets added to their reputation as something exceptional. Yet in each and every case we found other valid comparison species that do at least as well as dogs do in those tasks.”

Ruff.

This story was originally published October 1, 2018 at 3:15 PM.