Boning Up

”SIT! Lie down! Roll over! Play dead! Sniff another dog’s backside, frot the vicar’s leg and drop one in the garden! Theresagoodboy!’

‘D is for dandelion’

It’s as clear as the massive turd on your neighbour’s front lawn that dogs are every bit as intelligent as the average three-year-old human child.

And it’s now scientifically proven.

The Mail has leant this fact from a study carried out at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany.

In controlled experiments, researchers tested Rico, a nine-year-old border collie, to see how many words he could understand.

And some of the 200 that he could are listed for Mail readers to peer at and then look up in their dictionaries.

Most are words of other animals (’Beetle’, ‘Chimp’, ‘Cow’ and ‘Duck’), some are names of his toys (’Pinky’ and ‘Oscar’), while others display his Germanic roots (’Fritz’ and ‘Kafer’).

But surely the most impressive word in this lexicon of dog comprehension is ‘Quark’.

The Nobel Prize winning physicist Max Planck, after whom the institute was named, would have been delighted to note that a dog has such a grasp on the sciences.

And such a determined grip on the vicar’s leg…’

Posted: 11th, June 2004 | In: Tabloids Comment | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink