How smart is your dog?

Tomasello discovered that chimpanzees,our closest living relatives,typically fail to notice much of this social information. Pointing to the location of a hidden banana will usually not help a chimp find the banana,for example. Perhaps the pointing test revealed something important about how the human mind evolved.

But Hare had his doubts. I think my dog can do that, he declared. To persuade his mentor,he videotaped Oreo chasing after tennis balls. And indeed,when he pointed left or right,off the dog would run,in the indicated direction,to find a ball. He then followed up with a full-blown experiment,using food hidden under cups in his garage; Oreo consistently picked out the right cup after Hare pointed to it,and other dogs did well too.

After he got his doctorate in biological anthropology from Harvard,Hare and his colleagues finally published their results: Dogs could indeed pass the pointing test,while wolves,their wild relatives,could not.

Hare,now an associate professor at Duke,has continued to probe the canine mind,and he hopes to expand his research geometricallywith the help of dog owners around the world. He is the chief scientific officer of a new company called Dognition,which produces a website where people can test their dogs cognition,learn about their pets.

From his previous research,Hare has argued that dogs evolved their extraordinary social intelligence once their ancestors began lingering around early human settlements. As he and his wife,Vanessa Woods,explain in their new book,The Genius of Dogs,natural selection favoured the dogs that did a better job of figuring out the intentions of humans. While this evolution gave dogs one cognitive gift,it didnt make them more intelligent in general.

To explore dog cognition further,he set up the Duke Canine Cognition Center in 2009. He and his colleagues built a network of 1,000 dog owners willing to bring in their pets for tests. Hare began to investigate new questions about dogs with this willing pack of animals. With a grant from the US Office of Naval Research,for example,he is looking at ways to identify dogs for jobs like bomb detection. To do so,he and his colleagues have developed a battery of 30 tests. They have tested 200 dogs and are searching for hallmarks that set service dogs apart.

He helped form Dognition,he said,partly because of interest from dog trainers who asked him if they could test their own dogs cognitive style. The tests are now available online: For a fee,dog owners get video instructions for how to carry them out. Besides the pointing test,they include a test in which the owner yawns and then watches to see if the dog does too. The company then analyses how a given dog compares with others in its database for qualities like empathy and memory.

Not every expert is convinced,however,that such seemingly objective judgements can be gleaned from research that is still in its early stages. Hare agrees that dog owners should not look at the tests as a canine equivalent of the SATs. He says his main goal is to build a database that will shed light on long-standing questions about behaviour,breeding and geneticsfor example,whether the cognitive styles of various breeds can be linked to their genes.

One hypothesis has already emerged from Dognitions users,Hare said. A surprising link turned up between empathy in dogs and deception. The dogs that are most bonded to their owners turn out to be most likely to observe their owner in order to steal food.