Kenai in an “adaptive intelligence” learning moment. 2 yrs

A comment came from a 6 mo old puppy’s owner. Their sweetie has decided bedtime and play time are not mutually exclusive *grin*. She’s waking them up for attention at night, which can grow old fast, huh? My advice was to completely ignore her once in bed. No getting up, no petting her, not even so much attention as a scolding or told to hush and go to sleep. Even once reinforces the wake up call.

It got me thinking how smart the four leggeds are! I surprised Mom by telling her she has a doggie genius called BB when she didn’t think he was as smart as Kenai. I really shocked her by saying he may be smarter than our beloved past love Shabah…how much of the time are our dogs learning without us noticing?

Dogs are vastly smarter than people may realize. They are hard-wired to adapt to their environment, but more than that, they are wired to adapt their environment to themselves whenever possible. It don’t take much for them to figure out they can, either.

Something as small as one self-initiated “do this-get that” episode is enough to teach a pup that they are able to have a cause and effect impact. If they annoy us enough, we get up. If they are rude enough, they can interrupt what we’re doing. It’s not malicious, it’s just dogs doing what dogs do–learning how to get what they want.

That ability dogs have to figure things out, and even train us at times, is called “adaptive intelligence”, one of the three categories of doggie smarts: (instinctive intelligence, adaptive intelligence, obedience-based intelligence). 

I’m not a behavoirist, I’m not even particularly observant. But I do like to read, and can assemble lots of information into an understandable format. So this post is for the scholastic among us: what I have come to understand about canine intelligence.

Instinctive Intelligence

A key difference between the intinctive and obedience types of intelligence is what the dog focuses on. Instinctive intelligence dogs are almost always focused on the environment: guarding breeds on the potential threats around them, hunting breeds on the prey nearby, and herding dogs on the herd are perfectly good examples.

Dogs high in this category are throwbacks to the days when dogs were less for companionship and more for doing a job. They learn best and most often through environmental cues and rewards, often without any human participation. Many of the breeds that fall into the high instictive intelligence group still work for a living today. 

• Malamutes: the epitome of a cold weather working dog, they are still earning a living at pulling sleds. A large number are non-working companions, but they have retained their desire to work, and take happily to hauling either a sled in Alaska or a backpack on a leashed walk.

• Bloodhounds–the nose that knows! Today’s applications are search & rescue, drug and bomb detection, both sport tracking and police tracking. Trainers say that these dogs are single minded once they’ve caught a scent, to the point they must remain on a leash or they will follow that scent right into traffic or other dangers.

• Rat Terriers–Confident, determined, and high energy, terriers were created to hunt small rodents. Anyone with critters in their back yard and a terrier in the house knows…Most people use D-con or an outdoor cat rather than a rat terrier these days, though a tendency to vocalize has made them a small version of home “protection”.  

Obedience Based Intelligence

A past love, Shabah, was scary smart in the obedience based intelligence–he was the one with a 200 word working vocabulary. Yikes. Obedience intelligence is noted by how enthusiastically and quickly a dog learns via human commands and rewards. These dogs live for doing what you want, willingly doing repetitive tasks, and are extremely interactive.

• Collies–like most herding breed dogs, they excell at just about any human orchestrated activity. Agility trials, flyball, and even still herding sheep are some of the ways these dogs get to use their type of intelligence today.

• Labs–the various retriever breeds make up the vast majority of working service dogs in this country because of their quickness to learn a skill and reliability at performing that skill repeatedly. Default behaviors are a way of life!

What Difference Does It Make?

Which of the 2 categories your dog comes down in will determine how you train them, what you can train them for, and what they want for a reward. Simply put, knowing if your dog is an instictive learner or an obedience learner tells you how to make the best use of their Adaptive Intelligence .

Adaptive intelligence is the ”do this-get that” learning we watch (and lament?) every day. Dogs with a good dose of adaptive intelligence are the problem solvers of the doggie kingdom. They adapt and learn, as they figure out how to get what they want. Anyone who’s had an “escape artist” or a lovable pest has run head first into adaptive intelligence! 

Adaptive intelligence manifests differently between the breeds known for instinctive intelligence and the breeds with obedience based intelligence. But it’s presence isn’t particularly tied to breed. It is found in most all dogs, with either of the other two types of intelligence.

Nearly all dogs have roughly the same amount of intelligence, according to Patricia McConnell. Barring the dog that really is dumb as rock, of course. Had one of those…lovable but empty headed. The question then is what kind of smart are they (and am I smart enough to figure out how to train them).

A key component to using a dog’s adaptive intelligence to train them is determined by whether a dog falls into the instinctive intelligence or obedience intelligence categories: knowing what the dog actually wants as a reward.

The lab may find a treat and pat for a sit more exciting than a squirrel, but a terrier won’t! The trick to the terrier is making the squirrel chase his reward. A bloodhound wants to find the source of a scent as his reward, so if it weakens in that direction, they will find and follow the path with the strongest scent to get what he wants.

Obedience intelligence dogs learn and adapt mostly via human responses.  Aussies will figure out what you want through cues such as a treat for a sit, a frown for a mistake, or even get up to go with a minor shift of your weight. The hound doesn’t pay that much attention to you, generally speaking!

One of Each

The poster boy for obedience based intelligence in my experience is BB. Howly Wows that boy will do anything for food and attention. I swear I could teach him to dust the piano and sharpen my pencils! What Beebers wants more than anything as reward is the treat and pat. He watches everything you do, in hopes of earning a treat and pat.

He is also off the charts when it comes to adaptive intelligence if you would allow me to brag a bit of our bent bottoms boy.  Beebs is an outstanding dog at discovering how to do this-get that. All it takes is one time of getting what he wants from doing a certain behavior and he will try it again and again. Here’s an example or two:

• with his gimpy leg, BB has a tendency to “clip” you behind the knee if he walks too close on the left side. Add to that his bump and wiggle nature…ka-splat goes the CFS weakened crazy aunt. So our trainer had a session where she used a dowel that would touch his body if he was too close and treats in an outstretched hand. One session was all it took, and it doesn’t need practice to maintain.

Now walking farther away on our left side than he does on our right is just what he does without being asked. It’s default. Treats and lots of affection was all he wanted, the influence of high obedience intelligence. How fast he learned it and how quickly it became a default behavior is the measure of his adaptive intelligence.

• while trying to figure out how BB knew when I was going to up before I actually got up out of the recliner, before I’d even put down the foot…finally it hit that he was watching me enough to notice when I moved my arm down between the recliner and the end table.

He was paying attention to me (obedience intelligence) while Kenai looked out the window. Now every time I am about to get up, BB gets up  in hopes of something fun (adaptive intelligence). It can get annoying, the pop-goes-the-puppy thing, especially since what he’s learned doesn’t go away if it’s not rewarded. But that’s our little wumps.

Then there’s Kenai, the poster boy for instinctive intelligence. Kenai scans his environment constantly, acutely aware of everything around him and every change in it. He can change pace during a leashed walk with me without ever breaking his attention from what’s around us. He notices if the objects on the dining room table have been moved.

Kenai also makes up his own mind about things, and I have far less influence on what he’s feeling than his instincts do. BB I can call off a scent in the field, but good luck with that if it’s Kenai with his nose to the ground. He’s got all the instincts of the hunting Danes of old, by the ton.

Unlike his brother, you often have to get Kenai’s attention if you want him to do something. He’s looking elsewhere. He’s a very easy and obedient dog in terms of a companion, being a quiet natured and tolerant fellow, but he’s more of a tracker than an obedience trial candidate.

That doesn’t make him less smart though. Kenai is also an off the charts boy when it comes to adaptive intelligence.  Like most instinctive dogs, teaching him a default behavior that doesn’t come naturally to him, which requires lots of repetition, can be a difficult endeavor. He gets bored.

If you understand an instictive dog’s desires, and reward what does come naturally (capturing), it will very quickly become default, not to mention stick like duct tape.  

• when he was about 10 wks old, Kenai noticed my breathing changed when the allergies were bothering me. I noticed that he noticed (boy wrinkles are so cute), and called him over so he could smell my face and get used to the sound. I rubbed his ears and gave him a bone to get him back out of my face.  I had inadvertantly created a medical alert dog, all the while thinking it was a simple interaction with a tiny tot.

Here’s how it happened: I rewarded for noticing, which comes naturally to him, by allowing him to investigate the strange new sound. I then unwittingly reinforced his tendency to lose interest after noticing and investigating by giving him an even more favorite thing, ie the good gnawing bone. All three are habits of intinctive intelligence. 

The adaptive intelligence shows up in how fast he learned it: just a couple more times of reward. Considering he was 10 wks old, that’s phenomenal. It was easy because it all just came so naturally to him, even at that age. Now he notices but doesn’t neccessarily come see or smell if all I’ve got are the lightweight sniffles.

Kenai will wake me up if a little sleep apnea hits because of the cold or allergies. It took a few days for the dumb human to figure that out. Mom actually did, when the both of them noticed I was doing the apnea trick, and he woke me up from a nap in front of her. He also gets up and comes if I’m coughing heavily. 

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My sweet “little” curious George here is listening for his Grammy to pop out from behind the kitchen island. Boo is fun, ya know. It is very near impossible to sneak up on him, not with that portable radar installation on top of his head!

He’s been having lots of outside time (oh the legs ache). With all the snow melt and recent rain it’s sorta like watching a bout of 4-wheeling, too. The nasty foot washing’s been happening every day too, poor prissy baby. The carpets would be a lovely shade of earth without it! (When I do start seeds, it’s not on the carpets…)

Hopefully it’ll dry up for awhile after this next rain Thursday. But it is late winter, and with spring coming, both he and I should just resign ourselves to the muddy hound stuff till May! He has such fun in the out of doors, I suppose the soapy toes is worth it to us both.