Canine Intelligence?

I have a lovely dog called Oscar, who happens to be a girl dog, but this blog post is not about why my dog has a boys name. Something quite different.

Suffice to say we have been together a long time, and many people remark how healthy she is considering her age, which is about 14 or 15. I really can't be certain, simply because she was a rescue dog, and although she was still young when we first met her, her exact birth date is unknown.

That would make her in human terms about 100 years of age.

She is of mixed breeding, which for a dog is probably a good thing, in that she is healthier than many pedigree dogs that have been overbred for the sake of their pedigree.

She is also, in my estimation, a very intelligent dog. Thanks to her having once no doubt gone hungry, from a very early age she could be taught all kinds of simple tricks for the sake of a treat.

One of my favorite films is Contact, starring Jodie Foster and with a script based on a book written by Carl Sagan.

It is about the idea of first contact between humankind and extra-terrestrial intelligence.

When that first contact is made, it is detected by dogged listening to radio transmissions, targeting large areas of the heavens.

When that first contact comes, it is determined that it must be intelligent contact, because what is detected cannot possibly be a natural phenomenon.

It is a series of pulses which register every prime number between 1 and 100 from the smallest through to 100. In order.

Prime numbers are those numbers which are divisible only by themselves and one, and although there are circumstances in which for example the number of petals of a flower can be found to be arranged so that if counted they are a prime number, prime numbers do not occur otherwise in nature.

This in the film leads to the conclusion that it must be contact in the language of mathematics, and the product therefore of intelligence.

Whatever the likelihood or otherwise of the film scenario, it is certainly an intelligently scripted film, and Carl Sagan was a highly respected scientist, with a particular interest in asking questions of the kind that the film raises.

His work did much to popularize scientific thinking among the general public, and there is no doubt that the basis of the film is well thought through, and quite believable, however unlikely it might be that we should live to see such contact take place. Or in this way.

What I have been particularly struck by recently is the way in which my dog seems to bark in prime numbers.

Every time she is let into my small back garden, she will bark, and I cannot help but make a mental note of the number of times that she barks.

This is hardly a scientific study, and in fact it is probably something that is subject to that strange capacity that the brain has for making sense of things where there is no sense. Something that is described in the film The Da Vinci Code as scotoma.

In the context of that film, this is implied to be the capacity that the brain has to fill a vacuum with what it expects to perceive.

When I have checked for a dictionary definition of this, I have only been able to find it described as a condition where sight is partial in part of the eye, and I am reminded from my science education at school of how we all have a blind spot at the back of each eye where the optic nerve enters the back of the eye.

We do not perceive this generally as a blank spot in vision, and this is because the brain is able to make sense of the missing area of vision, filling in the gaps of our otherwise imperfect sight so that we see perfectly, or at least, think that we do.

Anyway, one two and three are all prime numbers, as is five, and so I suppose it may well be the case that there is nothing unusual in what I have perceived to be the case, and my dog is not performing some exceptional feat of mathematical exposition. It is just coincidence combined with my tendency to perceive occasional longer barks as if they are a combination of say any of those small numbers.

However, it does make me wonder the extent to which in nature prime numbers may occur as some accidental factor in such things as how many times a dog might bark.

This is probably something to do with the fact that I don't have enough to keep me active, and as a disabled person, I spend too much time staying around the house, and listening on the occasions when my dog hurls herself into the garden and behaves territorially.

But it is curious that I should continue to notice a tendency towards prime numbers in the frequency of my dogs’ bark frequency, and I would be interested to hear of any other circumstances in which anyone reading this might report similar occurrences.

I would not go so far as to imagine that this is an indication of some greater intelligence at play, more likely simply my tendency to rationalize something that doesn't require rationalization.