Dog Culture

Some people dismiss the idea that dogs can do the most rudimentary type of quantitative reasoning, such as determining which of two plates contains more kibble. Early researchers claimed that dogs couldn’t discriminate between a plate with three and another with eight kibbles. The studies demonstrating this, however, were flawed, since the dogs’ strategy turned out to be simply “Grab the food from the closest plate.” More careful studies have used pairs of panels, each of which had dots painted on it. Dogs were trained to always press the panel with the largest (or smallest) number of dots. The training was slow but the dogs did learn this task.

The history of animals as artistic subject matter goes as far back as the bison paintings in the Lascaux caves in Dordogne, France. Artist Wendy Grossman notes, “[Since] the dog has shared its life with humans, from prehistoric times to now, they have been depicted in carvings and paintings in early Egyptian, Greek, Mesopotamian and Roman art.”