I have to admit I’m a wee bit disappointed Murph fell in the Above Average category after his Pooch IQ Test. While I would have been thrilled if he scored even higher than Pretty Clever (at Smarty Pants, Top of the Class, or Absolute Genius), I wasn’t expecting that. I have to admit I was expecting Pretty Clever, though.
Maybe it’s just me being a mom who thinks her son’s smarter than he is, but I truly think he should have come in one category higher, at the Pretty Clever level.
Why?
Because there were descriptions after each IQ classing. Pretty Clever’s said things like: “He does tricks to entice you to give him treats. He nuzzles your hand when he wants you to play with him. He even has his own distinctive barks and whines to let you know when he’s hungry, thirsty, or needs to go for a walk.”
He does all of that.
When he wants a treat he does what we call “bellying up to the bar.” He always stands in front of the part of the counter where we keep his treats, looks at us, then puts his front paws on the counter to show he’s ready for a treat. (The pics below show the process. Notice his tongue sticking out in the bottom one!)
He keeps time better than our clocks. He wakes us up for his morning breakfast and always reminds me when it’s dinner time and bunny hunting walk time.
When he wants to play he’ll chose from his plethora of toys, bringing the one he wants and giving us a look and hopeful “will you play with me now?” tail wag.
He also knows his 40 toys by their different names and will bring you the one you request –-if it’s the one he feels like playing with too, mind you. (He is kind of particular about play time. He’s always up for it but he definitely makes it clear that some days he prefers certain toys over others.)
I think truly he would have scored higher if there had been either a few more or different answers to choose from on some of the exercises.
Like Exercise 9 for instance. I was supposed to leave him in a room, then come stomping back in pretending to be mad. I wasn’t mad and had a very hard time faking it.
Murph knows when I’m mad, and he knew I wasn’t right then. There wasn’t a selection like that to choose from, so I went with the closest one (which was acts like he/she normally does when I walk into a room). That resulted in one of his lower scores.
The other one was the exercise he scored the lowest on, Exercise 5. It involved taking him into a dark room and seeing if he’d chase the flashlight beam.
Murph is used to flashlights. We use them almost every night for our walks. He doesn’t chase the beam, but he will follow it with his eyes when we’re out and about because many times I’m using it to point out bunnies. (I think he probably thinks of flashlights as Bunny Revealers.)
And that’s something I kept thinking about when I was taking the test. If dog’s have prior experience with toys or situations, it could also taint their scores.
Like with the satellite plush ball included in the Pooch IQ Test Kit. It’s a puzzle ball, with four other balls stuffed inside the middle. Murph has a puzzle toy, his Hide ‘N Seek Squirrel Toy. It’s not exactly the same but the principle is.
He knew what to do when I gave him the satellite toy to play with. And, interestingly, he only pulled out three of the four balls. (His squirrel puzzle only has three squirrels to root out.) If he’d pulled out all four from the satellite toy he would have scored higher. So maybe while having prior experience helped him score fairly well on that exercise, it might have also hurt him.
Oh well. He’s a very good dog, a very smart dog, and a very handsome dog. Maybe I don’t have the test results I want to reflect that, but him and I both know it’s true.
Courtney Mroch writes about animals great and small in Pets and the harmony and strife that encompasses married life in Marriage. For a full listing of her articles click here.
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