| Friday, November 14, 2008 |
08:24 - A pointless "me too" post
http://www.lileks.com/bleats/archive/08/1108/111408.html
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James, as he is wont to do, observes:
You live with dogs long enough, you get used to how smart they are. Relatively speaking. Jasper always expects a Frosty Paws after his walk – an expense I lament, but it gives him such joy – and he BARKS when we get home, demanding what he knows is imminent. Today the fridge was empty, so I went to the downstairs freezer for the back-up reserve. He followed, barking: THIS HAD BETTER RESULT IN WHAT WE ALL KNOW IT HAD BETTER RESULT IN. I showed him the box; he licked his lips. That’s a rather high level of cognition, no? He recognized the box in which the treat was kept. When I gave him the treat it rolled under the counter, and he couldn’t get it out with snout or paws – whereupon he stopped, looked at me, and waited. YOU DO IT.
I'm sure everyone who read that and also has a dog immediately burst out with followup examples; and I'm no exception. This is Banzai:
Many dogs chase laser pointers. I don't know, however, how many dogs understand how laser pointers work.
You shine the laser on the ground and the dog pounces right on it like a coyote jumping on a mouse. You move the little red dot around and he scrambles about, trying to pin it to the floor. No matter how hard he jumps on it, it always manages to get away. Yet he doesn't tire of it.
But what happens when you turn the laser off? Does the dog keep staring at the floor where the light was? Or does he look up at you, waiting for you to bring it back?
Banzai knows where the laser pointer is kept; he'll lead you down the hall and then point his nose at the little black cylinder sitting on the edge of the table, and he'll raise one front paw into the air—which is his "Laser time?" signal. So you pick it up (really, resisting against that kind of body language is patently impossible), and you aim it at the floor.
Don't turn it on yet. You'll notice that his eyes shifted from intently focused on your hands—to the floor—as soon as you aimed the laser, even though there's no beam yet.
Still, don't turn it on. He'll look back up at you, wondering what you're up to. So you start to tilt the laser pointer back and forth—to the left, then to the right. And he looks back down at the ground, in the direction that the laser is pointing.
He understands that the red dot comes out of that little black cylinder you're holding. Not only that, he understands how the device's orientation affects where the dot appears.
So he knows that the dot isn't something real that he can catch; but he loves to chase it anyway. He knows how the mechanism for its appearance works; but it doesn't become uninteresting to him. These both strike me as fairly advanced levels of brain.
Ultimately, what it tells me is that he understands the concept of a "game". Which I guess is no surprise, since it seems so obvious to so many dog owners. But there are some pretty complex concepts underlying certain forms of games, like the one involving a laser pointer. Props add a whole new axis to the calculus, particularly props that seem to defy well-understood physics. So while most dogs know how to wrestle, I like to think Banzai knows about video games.
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Brian Tiemann
