Seguin, Texas—When a little girl sees a dog being walked by their owner, the first thing they might do is go and pet it. They probably think the dog is a cute fluffy friend, that can walk and eat. That little girl isn’t wrong, but dogs are much more intelligent than the world knows them to be. 

When Dr. Brian Hare decided to speak at the 2019 Krost Symposium, he knew exactly what to teach the TLU community. His presentation was focused on why mans best friend are actually very smart species. 

His resume speaks for it self as Dr. Hare is a scientist and New York Times bestselling author. Hare is a Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at Duke University. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University, founded the Hominoid Psychology Research Group while at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. He subsequently founded the Duke Canine Cognition Center when arriving at Duke University. In 2004 the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation named him a recipient of the Sofja Kovalevskaja Award, Germany’s most prestigious award for scientists under age 40. In 2007 Smithsonian magazine named him one of the top 37 U.S. scientists under 36 (dognition.com).

At the Krost Symposium, Hare introduced one of his biggest observations he’s came across during his years as a dog expert, which is social inference. In this study, The test subjects is a young infant boy, young chimpanzee, and a middle aged dog. Hare puts a red ball under one cup out of three cups and the subject must pick the right cup to which has the ball. The biggest step in this is that, Hare will point to the cup that has the ball, it is the subjects job to simply point to the same cup. When put to the test to see who could find the red ball, the human and dog were correct. The hypothesis before hand was that humans and chimpanzees are similar mammals, so they must beat the dogs out during this study. But in reality, the dog beat the chimpanzee.

Hare’s explanation for these conclusions were, “So when kids start understanding pointing, it’s right when the foundations of what leads to language and culture starts to develop. We looked at very young puppies who had interaction and no interaction with humans. We found that young puppies are really good at this as soon as you test them. After a few weeks in their lives, they’re already following human gestures. It was a big shock, it is like they’re prepared to figure out what we (humans) want. It doesn’t take lots of expose or practice for dogs” (Hare).

This observation that Hare discovered is a small example of what makes the genius of a dog. Hare’s career has included him running animal friendly experiments and tests to see what the certain animals cognition ceiling is. For dogs, it is much higher than humans give credit for.

But how did this come to be for our lovable dogs that we know today? Hare goes on to say that it started thanks to the natural predator, wolves.

“Dog evolution was kickstarted by individual wolves who were slightly friendlier and able to use human resources in a way that other wolves weren’t able to do. This game them an adaptive advantage. Those who left the original pack made the right decision because sadly there are not many wolves yet. They are endangered sadly but on the other hand, those dogs became to a population of millions” (Hare).

These pieces throughout this article are small pieces of a great presentation that Dr. Brian Hare presented at the 2019 Krost Symposium. It is obvious that Hare is passionate of his career and his future with not only dogs but all animals that he chooses to study. He works toward being that spokesman to bring awareness to humans that dogs are really intelligent species, all future and current owners should realize that.

Link to the entire Brian Hare presentation: https://livestream.com/accounts/14776640/events/8565063/videos/187758290