Page 100 - Showsight March 2013

Dogs can
functional extension of mouth or beak,
hand or claw, in the attainment of an
immediate goal.” Keep in mind that
the “external object” doesn’t necessarily
have to be an inanimate object. Such a
realization will greatly broaden the scope
of tool use.
One documented incident of a
dog manipulating his environment
(i.e., using a tool) involves the dingo,
Sterling. Bradley Smith of theUniversity
of South Australia and his colleagues
work at Melbourne’s Dingo Discovery
and Research Center where Sterling
lives. At the center, every enclosure
has name tags listing the names of the
occupants of that pen, and these tags
are hung 5 ½-feet high on the fencing.
The name card on Sterling’s enclosure
disappeared every night. In themorning
a new card was attached to his pen,
but by the following morning, it had
vanished. This was a mystery that had
to be solved! During the day, Sterling
gave no clue in his behavior as to how
he might be stealing the tags. Smith
and his team set up a night vision video
camera to discover just how Sterling
managed to remove all those name tags.
They attached a bit of food to the tag
just to give Sterling more motivation to
demonstrate his prowess.
The video camera plainly revealed
Sterling’s method. At first he tried
to jump up to reach the treat, but it
remained tantalizingly out of reach.
Pausing only a moment to work out
his plan, Sterling then walked over to a
trestle table that was in his enclosure.
Clamping his teeth on one of the legs of
the table, Sterling walked backwards,
dragging it over six feet to a place
near the fence where the name tag
and treat were hanging. He jumped
up onto the table, but he was still a
bit too short. Sterling then leaned his
front feet on the wire mesh of his pen
and “walked” his front feet up the wire.
On his second try he snatched first the
treat and then the name tag. Mystery
solved. Smith and his team published
a scientific paper detailing Sterling’s
achievement.
Importantly, Sterling had never
been trained or encouraged in this
sort of behavior. He had no prior
experience that would have guided
him in his manipulation of the table
and the fencing mesh as tools to
obtain what he wanted. His behavior
was spontaneous. Sterling obviously
thought his way to a solution to gain
the high value treat, using tools in his
environment to accomplish that goal.
Actually, this incident was not the
first time that Sterling had used his
ESSENTIAL ELEMENTS
Yes, Dogs Can Do That, Too!!
I’ m old enough to remember
when the scientific world was rocked
by Jane Goodall’s discovery that
the wild chimpanzees that she was
observing could make tools to aid in
procuring food. Before that, my high
school science text books taught us
that tool making and tool use were two
of the abilities that defined humans.
Ignorant and egotistical? No doubt.
We now know that many different
animals can and do make tools and
use tools: the many species of corvids
(birds in the crow and jay family),
several different species of monkeys
and gibbons, sea otters, porpoises and
dolphins, chimpanzees, of course, and
now dogs. Dogs?!? Yes, dogs! No, dogs
don’t have the hands of primates nor
the combination of beak and claws for
manipulating objects that birds have,
but they can still manipulate their
environment well enough to qualify as
tool makers and tool users.
In researching a working definition
of what constitutes a tool and tool
use, several scientists have given
explanations, but Jane Goodall’s
remains the clearest and most concise:
“the use of an external object as a
Sandra Murray
“We now know that many
different animals can and do
MAKE TOOLS AND
USE TOOLS...”
100 • ShowSight Magazine, March 2013