 One other surprising early result that we found was that dogs living in animal shelters performed very poorly on these kinds of tasks. Even though we chose dogs at shelters that seemed very happy to be playing with us, not a single one was inclined to follow a simple human pointing gesture. And we were able to show that this wasn't anything to do with some kind of genetic defect in these dogs. It was just that dogs living in shelters lack recent experience around people where the movement of people's limbs predicts that things that are valuable to the dog are about to occur. All of this led us to reassess what we were being told by others about dog intelligence. We realized there was nothing special about dogs when it came to their intellect. Dogs were just doing what any animal would that has been raised around people and is completely dependent on people for the fulfillment of all of its needs. Dogs pay close attention to everything people do that produces an outcome that matters to the dog. There's no special intelligence involved in doing that. Several years of research like this, debunking successively one claim for dogs uniquely human-like intelligence after another, gave me a bit of a reputation. One journalist called me the Debbie Downer of canine cognition research. I didn't mind. I hadn't got involved in this to win some kind of popularity contest. And yet there was something that nagged at me. Dogs might not possess special forms of intelligence, but I still thought there was something remarkable about dogs. But what was it? Some of our studies began to give me an inkling. In one experiment we gave dogs a choice between two people. One person provided treats, the other person just provided petting. Now, not surprisingly, if the person providing treats handed out the treats as quickly as she could, the dogs preferred to stay with the person who was handing out treats. But if the person handing out the treats slowed down even a little bit, the dog started preferring to spend time with the person who was giving out pets and praise. Another study was one of the very simplest we ever attempted. We just had a person sit in a chair and we marked out a one meter circle around that chair. And then we let a familiar dog come into the room for two minutes. And we simply measured what portion of a two minute interval did the dog spend inside this one meter circle as close to the person as they could. And we went back out to Wolf Park in Indiana and we repeated this test with hand-reared wolves and the person in the chair was a person who was very familiar to the wolves, a friend of the wolves. Now, when we did the experiment with wolves out of the two minutes, that's 120 seconds, the wolves chose to spend around 25 seconds inside the circle with the familiar person. When we did the experiment with dogs, the dogs spend every second of the two minutes. They spent a full 120 seconds inside the circle with this person, a person who wasn't giving them anything tangible at all, nothing but praise and petting. But that is what they wanted. That's what mattered to them. And that's when the penny dropped. In different ways these studies show the exact same thing. And actually we all know what's remarkable about dogs. Dogs have a tremendous capacity to form relationships with members of other species. I want to call this hypersociability. Now a biologist might call it social promiscuity. But the truth is we might as well call it love. Dogs have an exaggerated, embellient capacity for love. Our very latest research is even uncovering the genes that underlie this exaggerated capacity for love in dogs. Sometimes I find it slightly embarrassing. After all these years of trying to study animal intelligence in the most hard-nosed way I could think of, I find it slightly embarrassing to have to admit that what actually makes dogs special is something as soppy as affection. But I can live with that because it's also tremendously emotionally satisfying to realize that what I experienced with Benji all those years ago was a real thing. It was the true essence of the dog-human relationship. I'm not suggesting that there aren't differences between dog love and human love. But what's so wonderful is that there's enough overlap that dogs and people can live together in a very rich and rewarding way. Dogs, for example, they don't actually run and get help when children fall down wells. Trust me, a research group in Canada actually carried out that experiment. It was mildly modified so that no children were harmed. But they did test whether dogs would try and get help when an important person appeared to be in difficulty. And they don't. Dogs find it easier to form new bonds than people do. They're more readily able and willing to move on to new relationships. And that's actually a very good thing. Abandoned dogs can be very happily rehomed. If the original story of Lassie, the book, which is the story of a dog that nearly died three times, struggling over hundreds of miles to get home to her original family, if that story were true, then the millions of adoptions of dogs from shelters, dogs most of whom had already lived in a human family, those wouldn't work out as well as they certainly do. Our current dog came to us after a year of living with another family. Recently, just as an experiment, I said the name I know that she had for that period of her life. I honestly wasn't sure how she'd react. Thyra, I said. Thyra? She didn't even look at me. And then I said the name that she enjoys in her life with us, and she came running towards me with the boundless love that characterizes her kind. Zefos! Zefos! Yay! There you are, sweetie! You're such a star!