Dogs. Even the word leaps up and is full of fun. It bounds up at you like a five year old child and then tears around the back yard until its exhausted and falls at your feet for a pat.

But there is much more to domestic dogs than my anthropomorphic introduction.

My interest in dogs has sharpened due to relatively recent findings about domestic dog cognition. While dogs are man’s best friend, there is now considerable evidence that there’s more to a mutt than a wagging tail.

I studied how humans use language and the anthropology of organisations – how they worked, why they worked – or didn’t work. It was through this work that I stumbled on research on canine cognition.

The origin of dogs goes back about 15,000-20,000 years. Some researchers believe they evolved from just a handful of wolves tamed by humans living in or near modern day China.

A simple experiment designed to compare domestic dogs behaviour to those of wolves and chimpanzees, showed that dogs, even young puppies, were far better at interpreting human social cues.

An authority on animal communication, Professor Brian Hare from the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences in the States, said that during domestication over many generations, a dog’s cognitive ability developed which allowed them to figure out what humans wanted using social cues such as pointing.

But surely wolves, the progenitor of all dogs, could perform these tasks? Professor Adam Miklosi and researchers from Eotvos University in Budapest conducted ‘shell game’ tests on wolves.

The test wolves were raised by humans and socialised to a comparable level as their dog counterparts. But although they could follow some signals, the wolves could not perform to the level of domestic dogs.

Miklosi’s test also included an important second function. He presented the animals with an unsolvable problem – a bowl of food that that was impossible to access. The team found that while wolves continued to work at the unsolvable problem for long periods, dogs quickly looked at humans for help.

Miklosi said that based on his observations, he suggested that the key difference between dog and wolf behavior was the dogs’ ability to look at the human face.

“Since looking behaviour has an important function in initialising and maintaining communicative interaction in human communication systems, we suppose that … the readiness of dogs to look at the human face has led to complex form of dog-human communication that cannot be achieved in wolves even after extended socialisation.”

So how did the dog/wolf split allow dogs to develop superior people skills?

This question led Hare to Siberia where scientists are running an evolutionary experiment that’s decades old.

Back in 1959 Russian researcher Dimitir Balyaev and his colleagues began domesticating foxes in Siberia. Since that time a population of foxes had been selectively bred on one factor alone – their behaviour towards humans.

Foxes who approached humans at a seven-month-old trial meeting were allowed to breed while others who appeared afraid or aggressive were not.

After 20 generations, the fox population began showing signs of domestication, such as approaching humans and even wagging their tails. The animals are now tame enough to serve as house pets.

But the trial did more than note their behavior. The foxes, like many domesticated animals, began to exhibit curly tails, floppy ears, and smaller tooth and bone size, although none of these were selection criteria.

Hare asked himself, could cognition be a breeding by-product like these physical changes in the foxes? Just as you have accidental byproducts like curly tails and floppy ears, could you become smarter as an accidental byproduct of selection on ‘niceness’?

In 2004, Science published a break through paper by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany after they tested Rico, a German border collie.

Rico was shown to have an extensive vocabulary and could do something scientists thought only humans could do – figure out by elimination that a sound he has never heard before must be the name of a toy he has never seen before.

The owners of nine year-old Rico said the dog knew the names of about 200 objects – his collection of toys, balls and stuffed animals.

In the first experiment, the researchers put 10 of Rico’s toys in one room and Rico and his owner in the other room. The researchers then instructed the owner to order Rico to fetch two randomly selected objects.

In 40 tests Rico got it right 37 times, demonstrating he had a vocabulary comparable to dolphins, apes, sea lions and parrots that have undergone extensive training.

The researchers then repeated the test. This time they put seven of Rico’s toys in the other room along with one toy he had never seen. His owner called out the unfamiliar name of the new toy.

Rico correctly retrieved the new item seven out of ten times. Rico demonstrated, at least on those tests, that he could perform simple logic.

This feat suggests that dog owners, who claim their pets understand what their masters are saying and are trying to respond, may be right.

Yet we have to be careful about findings such as this. At the turn of the 20^th century a horse named Clever Hans that supposedly could add and subtract became infamous when researchers showed the stallion was really just responding to subtle cues from his owner.

Researchers have replicated Rico’s success in a number of other dogs but if you try this at home with your pooch, you may be disappointed. It appears that the experiment only works in a small minority of canines.

Even so, this research poses some interesting questions. Can dogs distinguish between accidental and intentional actions? Does a dog understand that a picture is both an object, and an object that refers to another object?

Researchers in the US and Europe are currently putting our four legged friends through these tests to try and find the answers.

If a dog can understand that a picture of a bone is just a picture, then we are one step closer to being really able to, as Doctor Doolittle sang, ‘talk to the animals’ – or at least the domestic dog.