Is Your Dog Smarter than a Two-Year-Old?


Illustration by Nishant Choksi for the New York Times.

A great story in Sunday’s New York Times tries to discover if there’s any truth to the saying that dogs are about as intelligent as a two-year-old human. Alexandra Horowitz—author of “Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell and Know” and a term assistant professor of psychology at Barnard College—at first dismissed the notion, but then she started noticing similarities between her own two-year-old and the family dog:

So I decided to get fully quasi-scientific about it. How are dog and child alike? How are they not? Herewith I report anecdotal instances of their behavior over one week, with some cherry-picked research to complete the story.

Both her observations and her conclusions are fascinating.

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