THE FUSE

A recent essay by award-winning science writer Emily Anthes titled "In Defense of Dumb Dogs: Your pet is (probably) not a genius, and that’s OK" has generated countless emails, texts, and in-person comments and discussions so I decided it would be useful to: (1) clarify what Anthes is saying (or at least lay out what I think she is trying to communicate), (2) stress that some people seem not to have carefully read what she wrote, (3) revisit other myths about the behavior of dogs, and (4) explain why cross-species comparisons about the cognitive and emotional lives of animals are fraught with error, including those in which dogs and other animals are compared to humans of different ages.