The More We Study Dogs, the More We Learn

 We know that some dogs are very smart - although our dogs have been more "devious" than smart. Anywho, there is an article in sciencenews.org about a new aspect of dog intelligence. ARTICLE

The gist of the article is that some dogs can easily retrieve toys based on either their name or the type of toy: tug of war, keep away, or fetch. 

What they have now discovered is that if given a new toy, but no information on its type, these dogs can identify the toy by type - even if they have never seen it before. While this may seem simple to us, it surpasses what we thought dogs could do. It means they have to visually identify what a toy is used for before it is used. 

Our dogs were able to do the same thing! Of course, they classified everything as something to be killed, but still.