Unfortunately, the strongest chapters are those that many readers will be tempted to skip, and the weakest are the ones that have received the most attention on the talk-show circuit
...Coren's analysis of working or obedience intelligence is by far the weakest link in his book. In attempting to rank the various breeds in terms of working intelligence, Coren found no laboratory research at all. He quickly realized how expensive a scientific study of canine intelligence would be: by his conservative estimate, a grant of at least $14 million would be necessary to acquire, house, train, and test enough individuals of the various breeds to make the study useful. Coren also attempted several sophisticated means of analyzing AKC obedience trial results before abandoning this line entirely. Ultimately, he decided to send out a survey to all obedience judges in the United States and Canada.
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Unfortunately, the methodology underlying Coren's conclusions is extremely faulty. All Coren has managed to do is to obtain a rough list of the success of various breeds in the sport of dog obedience in North America; jumping from that to the number of repetitions it took the various dogs to learn commands is impossible. We can even use Coren himself to challenge his own methodology. In his analysis of adaptive intelligence, Coren includes an interesting canine IQ test. The "CIQ" consists of twelve separate tests, designed to assess the dog's learning and problem-solving ability. I tested two dogs: Connie, my own basset hound (a breed ranked in the bottom tier of intelligence) and Dream, a border collie (a member of the top echelon). The results were interesting. Connie scored in the "brilliant" category, a group that fewer than five percent of the dogs in Coren's standardization group reached (no, I didn't skew the results!). Dream, on the other hand, scored in the low average range of intelligence, where, according to Coren, a dog will need to work rather hard to understand what is required of it. Connie has obedience scores which range from a low of 173 to a high of 186; she currently has two legs on her UD (and plenty of NQ's in our quest for that elusive third leg). Dream is an OTCH who has garnered many high in trials and placed at this year's Gaines Classic. Clearly, an obedience judge seeing the two dogs in the ring would conclude that Dream was by far the easier dog to train. Yet such was not the case. Connie is an extremely quick study who retains what she learns. Dream, according to her handler, always has difficulty learning and retaining new behaviors. Obviously, only erroneous conclusions could be drawn from their respective ring performances as to the amount of time and repetition it took them to learn the commands. The most striking difference between the two dogs is a personality issue, not a matter of anything that can be labeled "intelligence." Although Coren devotes a full chapter to what he terms the "personality factor," he does not seem to realize how critical a role it plays in the obedience ring. Connie is like many bassets: she's bright and happy to learn if you can convince her that the learning was her idea in the first place (i.e., if you train with food). But she doesn't have a strong sense of duty; if she's under stress or a bit distracted, she'd as soon not obey a command as obey it. Let's indulge in speculation and generalization for a moment, dangerous though it might be. Bassets are perfectly capable of shutting down entirely under stress; more than anything else, their tendency toward negative stress management is the reason why judges see so many slow-moving, tail-drooping, lagging bassets in the ring. Border collies are an entirely different story. Once a behavior is learned, most border collies seem to perform regardless of stress; indeed, many respond to stress by getting sharper and sharper. Dream is not such a successful obedience dog because of her learning ability. She has excelled because, quite simply, she loves to perform in the ring in front of a crowd of spectators. It is this showy sparkle--a je ne sais quoi which would never appear on a personality or intelligence test--that makes Dream unusually good; her learning pattern is all but irrelevant. My basset loves to learn new things and loves to practice but gets a bit overwhelmed in stressful situations, freezing and refusing to work at all. Again, her learning pattern would be impossible to predict in an assessment of her ring performance. In both cases, an obedience judge, based on what she sees at a trial, would be unable to make any meaningful statement about these dogs' trainability. In general, the difference between bassets and border collies is far more a difference of intensity, energy level, and desire to obey commands in the face of adversity than it is a difference of trainability or problem-solving aptitude. Coren would have done much better to follow his initial survey with phone interviews about the temperaments and personalities of particular breeds for obedience, rather than attempting to ask the judges to comment on individual learning patterns.
...I think that the book would have been far stronger if this chapter were deleted entirely. In a review in the Wall Street Journal, Manuela Hoelterhoff writes that we can all spare ourselves the trouble of assessing our dogs' intelligence and "just accept Mr. Coren's ranking of breeds in descending order of dimness. After years of observation and interrogating hundreds of vets and trainers, he has fearlessly rated 79 breeds, and the news is not good for proud owners of Afghans, basenjis and bulldogs. They are the Igors of dogdom, occupying the bottom of the list, far away from the genius-level border collies, poodles, German shepherds, and golden retrievers" (Wall Street Journal May 11, 1994: A18). It is such reasoning, however lighthearted, that makes Coren's conclusions extremely dangerous. The inherent problems in the consultation of obedience judges as "experts" are far too deep, and the influence of his conclusions in the minds of the general public is far too profound, to have allowed the rankings to stand as even a rough approximation of reality.
