Is Your Dog Smarter Than a 2-Year-Old?

I heard that, in intelligence, dogs are like 2-year-old children.”

One of my psychology students recently lobbed this statement at me. It’s an assertion I have heard — and dismissed — dozens of times, the reiteration of what must seem a profound, pithy truth about dogs’ mental abilities. From my perspective as a researcher of canine cognition, it at once overstates and understates dogs’ abilities to claim that they are equal in some unifying, cross-species “intelligence” to 2-year-olds.

But then the other day, sitting at home with my family, I was reminded of why the dog-child comparison is so often made. There was my 2-year-old child. Next to him lay our 4-year-old dog. There are undeniable similarities in their behavior.

For instance, they are both moderately impolite: my son stares unyieldingly at the large hairdo on an obese man on the sidewalk; my dog greets my friend at the door with a sniff right in his crotch. They both love many of the same things — squeaking objects, bagels, other dogs — and share a hatred of loud noises.

So I decided to get fully quasi-scientific about it. How are dog and child alike? How are they not? Herewith I report anecdotal instances of their behavior over one week, with some cherry-picked research to complete the story.

MONDAY Child (hereinafter “C”) rolls over in bed and into the dog (hereinafter “D”), also in bed, causing both to jump out of bed and commence running down the hall. In the bathroom, we all look in the mirror together: “Who’s that?” I ask. C identifies himself with a smile. D stands behind us, alert to his own reflection, but not, research indicates, identifying it as himself. Dogs don’t pass the “mirror mark test,” which examines if a subject looking in the mirror can identify that a secretly placed colored spot on his reflection’s head is actually on his own head.

Children pass this test around 18 months of age; it is part of their growing sense of self, of an “I” who is different from other people. C found the sticker I placed on his head one day by looking in the mirror and then touching his head. Dogs either do not care about the mark, or do not realize that the dog in the mirror is themselves.