If you think your dog is intelligent and yet still have a lot of trouble communicating your wishes to it, what is going wrong? It may be that you assume your dog can 'think' and 'reason' in a similar way to humans. Can it? Let's compare them.
There are three divisions in the human brain and they developed in the following evolutionary sequence: a) the primitive cerebellum, used to control balance and movement - enough for primitive creatures to get by with; b) the mid-brain, used to form associations - such as 'fire is hot'; c) the fore-brain developed and enabled logical thinking. Well, guess what, the dog has not got the latter: but it does have cerebellum and mid-brain, and it is the mid-brain that allows the dog to remember associations such as 'fire is hot'. More significantly, it learns associations like you picking up his lead means a walk about top happen; you reaching for the dog bowl means food is about to come, etc. But a dog does not have the fore-brain reasoning power to think 'Aha, since the lead is being picked up I
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Here is an example. Your dog soon learns that picking up his lead means a walk is coming; this is the first association. Later on he learns that you putting your walking shoes on mean you will be picking up his lead meaning he is going for a walk. Clever stuff. But it can get even more clever if you have a set routine. Like the bang of you closing a window, or locking a door, before putting on your walking shoes, before picking up his lead... Get the idea? Dogs are great with sequences like this, which is what the mid-brain does for them. When the dog was wild, it learned to keep away from predators because the link was soon made with probable death - as he had seen happen to other pack