Category: Factual
& Arts TV
Date: 08.05.2004
Printable version
The results are in from BBC ONE's Test Your Pet survey and pet IQ Tests.
Pet owners joined in the biggest ever survey of pet
intelligence and dogs have earned their place as the cleverest group
of pets.
Thousands of cats, dogs, birds, rodents and horses have spent the last
week flipping tins, pulling strings and quite literally going round
the bend… in a bid to find Britain's cleverest pets.
A whopping 40,000 owners responded to Britain's biggest
ever pet survey online and 25,000 pets and their owners tried out the
series of six pet IQ tests presented by Rolf Harris
and Kate Humble on Test Your Pet on Saturday 1 May.
Based on average scores for each group of pets, dogs ranked first, followed
by horses, parrots, cats and rats.
It's the first time that cleverness in pets has been
recorded on such a scale, and for Tim Guilford, reader in Animal Behaviour
at Oxford University, the results have led to new insights into the
animals we share our homes with and have uncovered some genuinely new
scientific evidence.
One of the tests, set for all animals, asked pet owners to test whether
their pets were right or left-handed (pawed or clawed).
This test revealed that most pets are right-handed.
Biased handedness was traditionally thought to be a uniquely human trait,
thought to relate to the separate functions for the two halves of the
brain.
This is the first time that it has been recorded on
such a large sample size of pets and gives an indication that pets are
perhaps not that different to us after all.
"It's a huge sample that will need more analysis but what it seems
to show is a small, but clear bias towards right-handedness.
"Exactly how this matches up with scientific research
on handedness in animals obviously needs further investigation.
"Some American research has already shown that
right-footed African Grey parrots can learn and remember significantly
more human words than left-footed ones.
"There are many other reasons
why handedness might be interesting."
Other results from the Pet Survey showed that there was no distinction
between pedigree and mongrel dogs although pedigree cats performed better
than cross-breed cats.
What is also interesting with the dogs is that farm
dogs like collies came out well ahead in the cleverness stakes than
other working dogs like retrievers and terriers, with the toy breeds
trailing behind.
It would seem we know our dogs very well but we overestimate the intelligence
of our cats.
Asked to predict which would be the cleverest pet, people
ranked dogs as the top scorer, followed by cats. In
actuality, our feline friends ranked below horses and parrots.
But the title of Britain's Cleverest Individual Pet went to Baggio,
the Cockateil from Bristol.
Baggio watches his owner, tailor Jack Territo, sewing
suits. So Baggio has learnt to copy Jack by using his beak, tongue and
claws. He can pick up a needle and thread it through material.
Baggio demonstrates all the skills of problem-solving,
memory and ability to learn and so claims his title.
This remarkably clever behaviour appears to be demonstrating
social learning.
As part of Test Your Pet, digital, cable, and satellite viewers were
invited to take part in a unique experiment to find out what our pets
react to on television.
By pressing the red button, pet owners could access
a running loop of images specially designed for their pet's enjoyment.
Over 2000 people responded to the interactive experiment,
proving above all that animals love to watch their fellow creatures
on the box.
We found colour had the weakest impact, movement is
important and animal sounds got the greatest response.
Dogs responded to other dogs on TV, cats to cats, birds
to birds, and rats to other rodents.
Parrots could even tell the difference between film
of macaws and budgies.
Cats and dogs also demonstrated their natural hunting
instincts pricking up their ears when cats, mice and budgies came on
the screen.
But even if your pet is not as intelligent as you anticipated, there
is no need to feel disappointed.
As presenter Rolf Harris sees it: "The whole point
of the survey and the tests is to get you to spend more time with your
pet - and that's good for both of you."
