I’m always impressed by the logic that grades dogs on an intelligence scale, because it seems obvious to me such scales are more about dogs doing what the person making the scale wants than anything. The most intelligent dogs, in my estimation, would be dogs that get their own way about what they want to do. The Old Man’s pack of hounds is a good case in point.
The Old Man kept a pack of the smaller-scale beagles — the breed that stand about a foot high at the shoulder. These dogs did what they wanted to do, all the time, and without any input or instruction from us. We were on hand to find them places to run rabbits, take them there, bring them back to their kennels when they were through and, occasionally, shoot some of the rabbits that were found. These dogs never did anything that didn’t come to them naturally and that was not, just at that moment, what they wanted to do. Nonetheless, pretty much every dog IQ scale I’ve seen puts these beagles in the 70s of a list 79 breeds long. That just can’t be so. At least, it can’t be measured, anyway.
Topping such a list is always some combination of border collies, poodles and retrievers, all of which thrive on positive feedback from their people. Beagles, on the scale’s other end, care nothing for pleasing their people — a trait that only increases my respect for the breed. They’ve already figured out most folks aren’t worth fooling with, and so group all of us together and disregard the lot.
The beagles I have known were intelligent, and in a crafty sort of way. A border collie is the straight-A student of the dog world. A beagle is the guy who knows a guy. They’ve made enough acquaintance with the rough side of life to have a healthy appreciation for a shortcut here and there.
A lot of the dog IQ list judgement hangs on a dog’s responsiveness to voice and hand commands. I concede this is important for a hunting partner in any pursuit depending on sight – on finding birds in the air or marking which way they fell for a retrieve. The beagle’s job is 100 percent scent-oriented though, which means there’s not a thing you can tell him that will help him do his job. You can see the ducks circling, and you may know which way the rest of the covey of quail came down, but if you can’t smell the rabbit, what good is any input from you?
You might want him to obey your vocal and hand signal commands to hunt the thicket alongside the railroad track instead of the wide-open pasture next to it but, if you can’t smell a rabbit and you don’t currently see a rabbit, why should the dog care that you suspect a rabbit?
You may claim to have just seen a rabbit dive into that thicket, but, it’s your eyesight, after all. Think about all the times the dogs have had to watch you miss. How well can you really see?
Of course, if people knew the full extent to which beagles truly are intelligent, the dogs would be expected to perform in front of live audiences and do lots and lots more work. Sliding onto the scale as they do, well under the wire but nowhere near the top, may be the most intelligent thing they could have done.
Kevin Tate is a freelance writer. Email [email protected].
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