Is Your Dog Gifted? Animal Behaviorists Reveal How You Can Tell

Animal behaviorists have revealed how you can tell if your dogs are exceptionally gifted—whether they recognize the names of their toys.

It's no secret that dogs are able to pick up simple tricks such as "sit" or "fetch." But scientists have found that some rare dogs are able to display exceptional skill—for example, some dogs can learn hundreds of names and associate them to different dog toys. These dogs are known as Gifted Word Learners (GWL).

Before now, scientists knew little about these dogs and how they became so clever—a new study published in the journal Scientific Reports, by researchers from the Family Dog Project at the ELTE Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary, now sheds light into these rare dogs.

While finding dogs to study that had this level of talent was a challenge, they finally managed to find 41 dogs from across nine different countries.

They discovered that 56 percent of these dogs were border collies—a breed of dog known for being highly intelligent, as well as loyal and friendly.

But the scientists discovered that this talent was not exclusive to the breed. A couple of Pomeranians, one Shih Tzu, one Pekingese, a corgi, a poodle, and a few mixed breeds dogs were also found capable of learning the names of toys.

"This was a citizen science project," Claudia Fugazza, team leader of the project, said in a press release. "When a dog owner told us they thought their dog knew toy names, we gave them instructions on how to self-test their dog and asked them to send us the video of the test."

The owners of these dogs were then asked to fill out a questionnaire.

"In the questionnaire, we asked the owners about their dog's life experience, their own experience in raising and training dogs, and about the process by which the dog came to learn the names of his/her toys," Andrea Sommese, a co-author of the study, said in a press release.

Researchers were surprised to learn that most owners did not actually teach their dogs the names of their toys intentionally.

"But rather that the dogs just seemed to spontaneously pick up the toy names during unstructured play sessions," Shany Dror, a lead researcher of the project, said in a statement.

Most of the owners also did not have a professional dog training background. In fact, there appeared to be no link between the owners' training skills and the dogs' ability to learn the names of its toys.

It actually appeared that these dogs were so clever, that they did not need specific instruction to learn these dog names.

"In our previous studies we have shown that GWL dogs learn new object names very fast," Dror said. "So, it is not surprising that when we conducted the test with the dogs, the average number of toys known by the dogs was 29, but when we published the results, more than 50 percent of the owners reported that their dogs had already acquired a vocabulary of over 100 toy names."

The scientists hope that this study will help further research in understanding these dogs.

"Because GWL dogs are so rare, until now there were only anecdotes about their background," professor Adam Miklósi, head of the Ethology Department at ELTE and co-author of the study, said in a press release. "The rare ability to learn object names is the first documented case of talent in a non-human species. The relatively large sample of dogs documented in this study, helps us to identify the common characteristics that are shared among these dogs, and brings us one step closer in the quest of understanding their unique ability."

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