You may call your dog dumb, but how many times have his soulful eyes and beseeching paw made you pass him a treat under the table? The truth is that even dogs who are a little short on brains can be very clever!

The relationship between dogs and humans goes back thousands of years, and one reason that it has been so successful is because we communicate in a way that they understand. Consider your dog bringing a tennis ball to lay at your feet. Without any words being said, you know that it is time to play fetch!

These are just two ways that your dog can tell you what he wants and what he is thinking and this shows that indeed, he can learn!

Through language and body posture, they communicate with us, but remember that they process it very differently from the ways than we do.

Their eyes will take in light and color differently than we do, and they can see in low light much more easily. Thanks to the muscles on their head, they can rotate their ears to figure out where the sounds are coming from, and let’s not forget that great sense of smell.

These basic differences will tell you a lot about how different their mental functioning is. They understand cause and effect, but it’s much different from how we understand it.

When it comes to classic consideration, where the subject figures out the connection between cause and effect, we can beat it pretty easily if it was just a coincidence. On the other hand, dogs create a very persistent relation between cause and effect.

Operand conditioning is where we learn about cause and effect through positive and negative reinforcement and is something that is even more different between humans and dogs.

For example, consider my Golden Retrievers. Whenever we go to play fetch, we go out the back door. Whenever I am just going to let them out for half an hour without joining them, I send them out the side door. Because of this, they know that the back door is for games of fetch and that this is where they should go when I have the ball.

With every command that I give them, I always use a very specific tone and hand gesture. This helps them learn a lot of desirable behaviors, which means that they can sit, stay, lie down, come, roll over, let go of something, fetch and release, even eliminate at my say so.

However, remember that if too much time passes between cause and effect, they are going to lose it. For instance, how many times can you tell them that eating something off the ground is bad for them? The stomachaches that result have no connection in their heads to the food because it was too long ago!

Whether your dog is a Retriever or a Shepherd, a Basset Hound or a Dachshund, you’ll find that you can get him to learn a lot of different things, as long as you know what is possible and what to expect

For instance, consider people on the show circuit who can teach their dogs to go through a complex dance routine, or search and rescue dogs that can pull children from avalanches of snow and flooded rivers. Service dogs can fetch a container of water without spilling a drop, or open a door or pull a wheelchair.

Remember, though, that they are not people, and that even when they try to act like us and communicate like us, they are still going to do things like eat little dead critters they find in the yard and turn around three times before they sleep!

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