Hey everyone, welcome to Houndations. I'm your host, Tony Peterson, and today's episode is all about how smart dogs really are and why that should matter to all of us.

Look, I know you have the smartest dog out there, but the other guys who you see hunting

the sluze before you definitely have some total blockheads.

The intelligence of dogs in general is as varied as it is in humans.

And it's also something that is part genetic, part good luck, and part practice.

It's a fun topic to explore.

But there are also some lessons in it that everyone

can take away and use to help sort of level up the dog ownership experience, which is what

I'm going to talk about right now.

Way back in 1904, a French fellow by the name of Alfred Bonaix, was tasked by the Paris School Board to develop a test for children to see which ones would need special education.

He partnered up with a colleague Theodore Simon on the project.

They realized quickly that the test needs to show whether the kids could handle intellectual

tasks, not just recall information they might have learned in school.

The test they developed involved having the kids imitate specific gestures, name objects

and pictures, repeat sentences of 15 words, and follow simple commands.

It worked, at least to establish a base level of intellectual capability in kids.

So B'nai and Simon expanded their testing procedures into bigger categories and to address a wider range in children.

Well, their tests would go through quite a bit of evolution over the years,

and it did eventually deliver unto the world a way to score intelligence,

which we now know as the IQ score.

With the framework built, testers would factor in a subject's age and then their abilities,

and it would spit out a specific

...