To illustrate its lead story on animal intelligence, Time magazine chose a Pug to grace its August 16, 2010 cover. We don’t know much about the Pug other than her (his?) name was Bibi, an eight-year-old Pug from New York. If memory serves, the crux of the article was that animals have intelligence that manifests in surprising ways.

Mind you, as we write, the article is only eleven years old. Anyone devoted to, or who has lived and/or worked in daily and close proximity to an animal could have told the writer as much thirty years earlier, if not before that.  Some people, it seems, are slow to acknowledge certain traits in animals that have long been held to be the purview of humans.  We realized this in 1980 when we shared a row of seats on an airplane with a couple of fellows from a science institute. They were discussing whether or not animals could feel pain.

It was a very long flight.

When we couldn’t take it anymore, we leaned over, inserted ourselves into their conversation, and pointed out that a research study from the year before had found that earthworms (earthworms!) produce two kinds of chemicals — enkephalins and beta endorphins. Both had been identified in human brains as similar to opiates in their ability to affect to help an animal endure pain. The science chaps didn’t need to know that we had recently read the article and it was fresh in our mind. Better to let them be in awe of our smarts, we thought.

Mercifully, it was time to land and all conversation ended.

Science (short of Pavlov), and history, for that matter, have given short shrift to investigating dogs and how they tick. Canines have been our companions and/or helpers for as long as we have recorded history, but they were always taken for granted while Chimps and dolphins and elephants and whales captured the curiosity of scientists. As far as we can tell, it was researchers at Eotvos Lorand University (ELU) in Budapest, Hungary who finally turned their attention to dogs, and we’ve learned a good deal from their work including the fact that dogs use same parts of their brain to process speech as humans do, and that they understand both the content of our words and their desired meaning.

We’ve gotten far afield of where we started, but now that we’re here, we pose a question, and we ask it with the caveat that “smart” in a dog means different things to different people. We’ll ask anyway: What was the occasion when you realized that your dog was smart?