When my wife was growing up in Scotland, her father’s sheepdog, Major, would accompany her and her four older sisters to primary school every morning without adult supervision. In the afternoon, on command, he would trot to school alone and wait at the gate to escort the five of them home.
I often think of Major, that paragon of intelligence, loyalty and obedience, when I try to get our own dog Minnie to follow the simplest of commands, like “sit,” “heel,” or “stop begging those poor picnickers for a piece of sausage roll.” Then I marvel again at the thought that she is of the same species (if not the same breed) as the late Major.
Minnie, a cross between a Jack Russell and a Dachshund, tries to keep Tom Utley out of the pub – but she doesn’t always succeed, as this photo proves
For new readers, I should explain that Minnie is a small and extremely affectionate Jack Russell terrier/dachshund cross who was rescued from the Battersea Dogs and Cats Home nearly six years ago at the age of five months after being found abandoned on a London street.
Since then, she has resisted all our training efforts.
Infatuated
In fact, we are the doting owners of one of the most disobedient and unfaithful dogs in the country – and, I sometimes think, one of the dumbest too.
Let’s take an example: When I’m sitting stretched out on the sofa next to the glass door to the garden, she sits on the floor with a ball in her mouth, tilting her head now in one direction and now in the other, begging me to throw the ball for her.
But if I reach out my hand and say, “Drop it!” she invariably snatches it away from me. Then when I get up, she runs to the end of the garden with the ball in her mouth and apparently looks for it in Mrs. U’s lovingly tended bushes.
If she doesn’t find it, she looks at me reproachfully, as if to ask: “Where did you throw it this time?”
I wanted to try and scream at her: “IT’S STILL IN YOUR MOUTH, YOU STUPID ANIMAL!!” But honestly, what would be the point?
You might as well try to explain to the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, that wasting taxpayers’ money on strikers without giving them anything in return is a brilliant way to get workers to stop working, but it is not the best way to stimulate economic growth or plug holes in the public purse. Pointless.
But aren’t Jack Russells one of the most intelligent dog breeds? Think of Uggie, the brilliant star of the Oscar-winning film The Artist. I find it hard to believe that he and Minnie must be related in some way.
Uggie, a Jack Russell, fools around with his co-star Jean Dujardin in the Oscar-winning film “The Artist”
Well, maybe she got her defective mind – and also her clingy nature – from her dachshund mom and just her stubbornness from her dad.
(I’ve always assumed that she has Jack Russell blood on her father’s side, but that’s just based on the similar size of the two breeds and the logistics of the reproductive act. Real dog experts will enlighten me if I’m wrong.)
Still, I sometimes wonder if Minnie isn’t half as stupid as she pretends to be.
For example, as I wrote a few weeks ago, she has a great aversion to pubs – no doubt because she knows that as soon as her master sits down with a beer after his walk, she is condemned to an hour of boredom while he chats to the locals.
The unusual thing is that this applies to all bars, not just the ones she has suffered in before. As soon as she sees a bar sign, she clings to the anchors and refuses to move until I pick her up and carry her.
Scary
How on earth can a simple animal tell the difference between a pub and a post office or a bank?
And then there’s her apparent ability to read my mind. I’ve long since discovered that when we’re on the common land, the only way I can get her to drop her ball is to reach for one of the gravy bones in my pocket, whereupon she promptly lets it go.
But sometimes I try to deceive her. I put my hand in my pocket, just like before, but with no intention of giving her a treat. The scary thing is that she always knows without hesitation whether she’s about to get a gravy bone or not. If she is, she gives up the ball. But when I try to deceive her, she clings to it desperately.
I can’t help but think that she would be an unbeatable candidate on the BBC’s Would I Lie To You?
Observations like these convince me that there is far more going on in the brains of supposedly stupid animals than our own species has traditionally acknowledged. This view was reinforced by my colleague Christopher Stevens’ fascinating piece in yesterday’s Mail.
Inspired by new research from Nottingham Trent University – which appears to prove that horses are capable of more complex thinking than previously thought – he listed some amazing examples of the mental feats of animals.
His menagerie of animal Einsteins included crows that could solve logistical problems of enormous complexity, mafia-like macaques in Bali that demand ransom from tourists for the return of stolen possessions, rats that can recognize human faces, and elephants that can remember routes to watering holes over incredibly long periods of time and locations. Apparently the old adage has passed the scientific test: elephants really do never forget.
When I was a boy in the 1950s and 1960s, I was taught that humanity possessed several special characteristics that placed it far above the rest of the animal kingdom.
These were gifts from the God of Genesis, who created us in his own image and gave us dominion over the fish of the sea and the birds of the sky and over the livestock and all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.
Humans used tools, other animals did not. Unlike them, we communicated with each other through a highly developed language and were capable of abstract thought. We experienced real emotions such as love, guilt and grief, mourned our dead and created art for purely aesthetic reasons. They could not and did not do that.
Awards
But the more I have learned since then and the more science discovers, the more I realize that the differences between humans and our animal fellow creatures are far from as clear-cut as most of our ancestors believed.
Crows use tools, whales communicate beneath the ocean surface, all sorts of other creatures mourn their dead – and pigeons appear to have problem-solving skills reminiscent of artificial intelligence.
And as for feelings, you should see the guilt in Minnie’s eyes when she makes off with a picnicker’s sausage roll – or the annoyed and self-pitying look in her eyes when we go on holiday without her, leaving her to the loving mercy of our only remaining son.
It has even been found that we share 98 percent of our DNA with pigs! How long will it be before we discover that they too tell each other stories or make their own kind of music or art?
Whatever the truth, let’s be honest: we may not be quite as superior to the rest of the animal kingdom as some of us would like to believe. I don’t know about you, but for me, that’s almost enough to ruin my beloved sausage and mash.
So Mrs. U and I are off on our two-week dog-free summer vacation – and whether she’s an idiot or a manipulative genius, Minnie may like it or not.
