I heard on the news the other day that canines are smarter than first thought. Canines have the intelligence of a 2 year old child and can understand up to 180 words. They are also capable of decision making—and canines have the capacity to understand a human’s facial expression and can make decisions based on body language.
Until my mother got her dog Samson, Jasper, my Wheaton, was her world. My mother loved him---particularly when he was getting reprimanded by me and he would hide behind her for protection. She called Jasper her grandson. And she carried around pictures of him to show off to her friends at bridge. And my mother believed that Jasper was as smart as her other human grandchildren---and she was comfortable telling everyone as such. And she really didn’t care if her bridge friends thought she was totally nuts.
My Aunt Mary Petrucelli—who was not my real Aunt—she was a comare of my mother’s—had a Siamese cat named Teeta. And every day my Aunt Mary would call home from work right around lunchtime. And Teeta would hear the phone ring and would jump on to the wall phone and knock the receiver off of the hook. And my Aunt Mary would say from her end of the phone Hi Teeta. How are you doing today baby? Do you miss Mommy? And the cat would meow and meow into the phone. I am not lying. This really happened.
My house has an alarm system. And if the alarm goes off, and if no one answers the phone and/or if the correct code word is not given to the alarm company, the police are called. The alarm company also calls my mother—who is first on the list of “people to call if the alarm goes off.”
When we first got Jasper I had to remember to put the proper code into the alarm such that once the alarm was set, Jasper would not mistakenly trip it. Not everyone in my family was as diligent as I about programming the alarm correctly so sometimes we had false alarms.
One day while I was out my mother called my cell phone. And she was very upset. It seemed that the alarm company had called her to say that my alarm had gone off. And my mother (I am not sure why) called my house. And my mother told me that Jasper had answered the phone and that he was barking and upset. Okay stop. Say that again? You called the house and Jasper answered? Yes my mother said. And I thought she had lost it. So I asked again what do you mean Jasper answered the phone? And angrily she said I called the house twice after the alarm company called me and both times Jasper answered the phone—the phone rang, he picked up, and he was barking. I am not crazy. Jasper answered the phone and you better get home right away and find out what is going on.
Hmm maybe one of the policeman was in my house checking things out and he had perhaps answered the phone? And then I was concerned for an all together different reason-- Jasper, when left to his own devices would bite first and ask questions later—and I did not need a dog bite to one of Garden City’s finest.
I arrived home just in time for the Garden City police officer to issue me a summons for a false alarm. And my house was locked. No one—including the police had entered (wheew—no dog bites). It also meant no human had picked up the phone’s receiver to answer my mother’s phone call. And the kitchen phone—which was part of a brand new phone system-- was on the countertop untouched and on the hook---so there had been no accidental answering from a phone that had dropped on the floor in all the ruckus. And Jasper was indeed, like my mother described, wound up and panting and barking and pacing back and forth. And I had to decide whether my mother was insane or Jasper was smart enough to get the phone off of the countertop, press the speak button, and then replace it back on the hook.
So I decided to use my cell phone to call my house phone. And after one ring the house phone picked up on its own and went to speakerphone. Apparently my new phone system had an added feature I was unaware of—auto answer. The phone answered all on its own. Mystery solved.
I was relieved to discover dementia had not set in with my mother. She was merely a victim of a common fallacy in logic called post hoc ergo propter hoc—it’s the fallacious belief that 2 closely related events are connected by cause and effect: the phone picked up, Jasper was barking, therefore Jasper picked up the phone.
And I think my mother was a little disappointed--she wanted Jasper to be so smart as to be able to answer the phone. I think my mother would have liked to have called up Aunt Mary and told her that her fur grandson was as smart as Teeta the cat. But it wasn’t meant to be. Jasper was just a dog—and dogs cannot jump from countertop to countertop knocking receivers off of phones like cats can. But that’s okay--canines are the smarter animal---the data proves it--and so too are the owners (and doggie grandmothers) that love them.
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