4 thoughts on ““Tests show dogs are almost human””

  1. Excellent.  I’ll print this story and show it to people at work tomorrow (I work for the Humane Society).

    See also this story:

    Sit!  Stay!  Testify!
    Dogs have identified suspects in thousands of criminal cases.&nbps; But how can we be sure that they’re telling the truth?
    By Grainger David
    The first thing most people notice about TinkerBelle is her nose.  A female bloodhound, TinkerBelle has a fabulous snout, and like any dog, when she isn’t sniffing garbage or a chew toy, she might sniff you in places you’d rather not be sniffed.  It could be worse.  Some of the people TinkerBelle sniffs end up in jail.  That’s because TinkerBelle is an expert for the South Pasadena Police Department and the FBI in what’s called a “dog scent lineup.”
    Dog scent lineups have played a role in thousands of criminal cases in the U.S. since 1923.  In a scent lineup, dogs match the smell on an item from a crime scene to a suspect in a group.  Though dogs don’t actually perform in court (anymore, at least), their scent identifications are admitted as evidence in most states.  People have been convicted of robbery, rape, and even murder when the primary evidence against them is, effectively, a bark.
    You would think that the scientific and legal work supporting a dog’s ability to actually do this — match odors from all kinds of objects (clothes, doorknobs, even a bullet casing) to a criminal days or months later, in a room filled with other smells — must be pretty strong.  It’s not.  In fact, the most comprehensive scent-lineup studies done so far show that highly trained dogs are wrong a whopping 30% to 40% of the time.
    That’s dangerous stuff when it finds its way to the courtroom.  Just ask Jeffrey Allen Grant, a softball coach whom TinkerBelle identified as the Belmont Shore rapist in 1999.  She followed a scent from a crime scene to his door and later picked him from a crowd at the Long Beach Police Department.  Grant was arrested and imprisoned—and then, three months later, proved innocent by DNA tests and awarded $1.7 million in damages.  (The real Belmont Shore rapist was caught in 2002.)  “I’ve been studying dogs a long time,” says I. Lehr Brisbin, a scientist at the University of Georgia, “and when I test dogs that are supposed to be able to do this very well, they fail.  Invariably.”
    [rest of article snipped]

    To view the whole article, click on the following link while holding down your “shift” key to force a new browser window:

    http://www.marijuana.com/article.php?sid=8484

    (Disclaimer: I’m only linking to the pro-marijuana site because the article is reprinted there.  The original appeared in Fortune magazine — where I first read it — but Fortune doesn’t make the article freely available on-line.)

  2. I think I read a story in the Smithsonian mag by a researcher in Central America about his experience with pigs. Seems that down there the farmers use the pigs as 4 legged sewer systems. The outhouse is built over the pig pin. The researcher found that if he would leave the house with #1 in mind the pigs remained static. If on the other hand, #2 was the most urgent problem the pigs would get up an hurry to drop zone. He ran a few experiments to see if he could fool the pigs. Not a chance. Was this observation of body language or ESP? BTW the farmers sold the pigs to the city folks. Interesting how all these coevolved animals can read us like a book.

  3. Dilbert, that sounds an awful lot like an urban legend.  It seems unlikely to me that pigs would eat human shit.  Do you have a source?

  4. Alex, it’s true. A friend of a friend of mine read the same story. It wasn’t the Smithsonian mag though, what was it? Oh, yeah, it was in PETA Monthly.

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