Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/04/09/tessie-and-binnie-the-us-army.html
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Do they stare at goats?
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No, but they knew you would ask that.
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You’d think they’d be fatter, what with the ability to constantly ask for treats.
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All dogs are psychic. They know just when you sat down to come over and ask to be let outside.
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I knew a dog who could retrieve stones from the river. You could scratch a cross on to mark it, and he’d retreive it every time.
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I don’t trust 'em, grinning all the time…
“Dolphins have never hurt anyone!”
Yeah, that just means dolphins don’t leave any evidence.
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I love all these stories about “psychic dogs” because every time I read one, the explanation is quite clearly that the dog has far better senses - and is smarter - than they’re being given credit for. Dogs have really, really good smell and hearing, so beyond human capabilities that we can’t conceive of what they’re aware of.
A lot of dog owners believe their pets to be psychic because the dogs can anticipate when they come home from work - even when they come home at unpredictably varied times. It doesn’t occur to them that the dog can hear - and recognize - their car at a far greater distance than humans at the home can, and thus be prepared for their return long before the actual arrival.
A dog’s sense of smell is so good they can identify an individual based on a single fingerprint that’s on a surface exposed directly to the elements, even after a couple weeks. “Cadaver dogs” can sniff out buried bodies - even when those bodies were buried 3000 years ago. Identifying a buried “mine” would be easily done. Even, I suspect, when it’s under a bit of water.
But dogs are also responsive to humans, so if a handler knew where the “mines” were, it would tip off the dogs without the humans being aware. It’s a problem with drug-sniffing dogs; if handlers want to find something, the dogs will want to indicate, regardless of what they smell.
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If its from a book or movie, I have to know what it is!
If it isn’t then I encourage your writing muse to expand upon it.
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I guess the people who buried them probably had a scent that lingered, the mines did too. Bloodhounds and some others can track people across water even days after they passed.
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This! It’s called the Clever Hans Effect (named for the horse who could do math), and it ends up being at the end of pretty much every “amazing” animal ability, once the test is properly blinded and controlled… which military tests like this never are, and is how we end up spending billions on fake bomb detectors and goats).
Drug and bomb sniffing dogs fail every properly controlled test, but like wine tasting, we all like the idea so much that we’ve decided to collectively pretend it is real.
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Whoa.
And the “Clever Hans Effect” was known about since, when, 1907? It is rather shocking how sloppy these “tests” were. I can’t imagine they tried burying different kinds of objects (fake mines and random items, which I’m guessing the dogs would treat identically), for example, much less did any double blind studies.
For drug sniffing dogs, I’d go further and say that the dog’s ability to indicate when the handlers want them to, rather than just when they detect something, is entirely the point.
The sensory universe of the dog, with their unbelievably amazing senses of hearing and smell, is mysterious enough that we really don’t need to invoke some sort of magic “sixth-sense.”
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Shuck’s law?
Any sufficiently superior sensory perception is indistinguishable from ESP.
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Although part of it is also assuming the animals are stupid, when they aren’t.
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