As a very enthusiastic dog lover, I’m obviously inclined to think my beloved dog is capable of deep, meaningful thought and is able to understand and figure probably more than he actually is.
Pembroke Welsh Corgis, while still fairly lesser known outside of the UK, are often touted as extremely intelligent and full of personality by those who own or fancy them. I agree entirely. I’ve never met a dog as clever and endearing as my Spider… and I’ve owned and known a lot of dogs in my life.
Curious, I did a quick google search to see what breeds were ranked amongst the smartest. To my dismay, corgis (both pembroke and cardigan) are only listed in the top 10 on ONE site, and they’re tied with Australian Cattle Dogs for the tenth slot.
On all the other lists I found, corgis don’t rank in the top 10 at all, instead being replaced by the likes of Poodles, Golden Retrievers, Labradors and Rottweilers. I can’t say I agree with these choices. Poodles may be trainable, but I’ve never met one that really impressed me with a grand show of actual reasoning ability, problem solving or improvisation in any situation. As for Golden and Labrador Retrievers? Goldens are pretty simple, in my experience, and I wholly believe this is a byproduct of the rampant inbreeding that’s employed to maintain a consistency in qualities and traits. I’ve known incredibly sweet Labradors, but they weren’t the brightest bulbs.
Rottweilers I don’t agree with because we had a Rottie pup once, and she was a very loving dog, but had a lot of trouble picking up any kind of command or trick we tried to teach her. Some may say, “Well, maybe you were no good at training the dog,” but considering it was one fault out of over a half-dozen dogs who’ve lived in my home with little trouble with house training, basic commands and tricks, I don’t think I was the problem.
I’m not even all that convinced about the Australian Cattle Dog, to be entirely honest. I have experience with one, who admittedly comes from a troubled puppyhood before my mother-in-law adopted her, but her overall smarts still fall short of Spider’s. In addition, my own mother owned an ACD alongside Spider before she passed away. The ACD was older than Spider, but wasn’t quite as clever as he was. He wasn’t stupid, but he didn’t shine as brightly.
I think my problem with these rankings is that its mostly entirely based on how easily the dog picks up on TRICKS and complies with the command when issued. Intelligence is not simply the parlor tricks you can perform unquestioningly on command. The real exhibitions of intelligence I see in my dog are in his problem solving… the fact he’s figured out how to neatly untie knots in scraps of fabric he gets to play with and that he one time managed to get his mouth on a mostly empty take-out container and figured out how to open it, eat the contents and leave it without making a mess of it or tearing it apart.
He knows his fair share of tricks and commands, and usually complies faithfully… but sometimes he feels sassy and will hesitate, or will actually try to take shortcuts. An example would be a version of play-dead we use with him, where we tell him to sit up and then we make a gun gesture with our hand and say, “BANG!”. Ideally, he’s to then roll over, as if dead. But if he’s overly excited or just not in the mood, we’ll tell him to sit up and instead, he will bypass that step and roll over, as if we’ll simply settle for that and move on.
In my opinion, that behavior shows more intelligence than simply mindlessly performing tricks for the amusement of humans.
on Apr 2nd, 2008 at 4:40 am
I think the main reason the Australian cattle dog is up there is one of the smartest dogs in the world happens to be an ACD. He has a nearly human vocabulary… I saw him on Animal Planet. NOW OF COURSE I CAN’T FIND SHIT but seriously, he could understand complex commands like “go left, then this, then that, then this,” and do it all in order and quickly.
Most working dogs have high intelligence because.. well they have to to work.
That’s why spidey is so smart. I’m sure he ‘play herds’ when he can. My dad’s border collie mix herds the kids. XD
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on Apr 2nd, 2008 at 8:52 am
Spider could always be higher than average in terms of intelligence for Corgis. I’m sure there’s some smart dogs of the same breed and some dumb dogs… Like this one!:
http://img266.imageshack.us/img266/6763/dumbdogmo8.gif
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on Apr 2nd, 2008 at 12:42 pm
Oh, I have considered that, but I also have experience with other corgi owners and breeders, as well as other peoples’ corgis who demonstrate intelligence close to Spider’s, if not higher. I’ve rarely heard an account of a dimwitted corgi, although they’re known to commonly do doofy or clumsy things.
I bet there are some out there, just like there are likely blazingly intelligent golden retrievers, I’m just going by the norm.
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on Apr 2nd, 2008 at 5:55 pm
Who did those studies? When was it done? How scientific are they? What sort of standards do they follow? How big was the sample size? From what I can tell, those ad-ridden sites mentioned none of that. Don’t forget people can pretty much put whatever they want up on the Internet.
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on Apr 3rd, 2008 at 10:57 am
Oh, I know. I’m definitely questioning the scientific validity of these sites listing this (as I think it is) garbage. I’m just having issues finding any that are what I would call trustworthy and contain more than a rundown of popular breeds that do tricks well, or else I probably wouldn’t have occasion to rant like that. I might be better off looking in some kind of veterinary journal or something of the sort, if I could track one down.
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on Apr 25th, 2008 at 1:26 am
I have bred dogs in the past and did the shows. I have a large amount of experience with many breeds. There are exceptions in every dog, so some ACDs are obviously smarter than others. However some breeds do shine higher than a lot. Most of the smart dog lists on the internet have far more to do with the direct owner who has never met a Border Collie and never knows what it can do and only knows what their poodle and doberman can do.
First off, if your dog breed is not in the work list it’s not smart. It’s probably sub par compared to those that are.
Corgies are in the working breed. Hands down breeds made to handle and court sheep and/or cattle are by far smarter on average than most. Border Collies are extremely smart in this, I have to admit this, as are Australian Sheperds(not the ACD), and yes corgis. When talking about the sheer volume of commands I do not find as many dogs in greater bulk as the Border Collie and Australian Shepherd do however but it doesn’t end there. They learn quickly, how to open doors, how to get around many things. However, what does it for me is they are amazingly good at reading people in a more complex means tha most breeds. Those two breeds are excessively smart but I will never short the corgi entirely they are easily in my top five, however it doesn’t seem to be as predominant as the breed as a whole as those other two, but when I say this, it’s like comparing Everest to the next biggest mountain when the rest are miles behind. Certainly in my top 5, and I’m very picky. I only like smart dogs, period.
Yet, I say all this and to this date the smartest dog I ever had was a mutt we rescued as a pup that was half Australian Shepherd and half something else. It was him being half shepherd that led me to look into the breed in the first place.
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