How clever is your dog? Take these tests to find out... 

Dog with biscuit
Can your dog see beyond the biscuit in front of his nose?  Credit: Alamy

Telegraph vet Pete Wedderburn selects five exercises to test your faithful companion’s brainpower. 

1. Observational learning

Choose a time of day that is not the normal time when you walk your dog. When the dog is looking at you, silently pick up your coat and keys, and the dog’s leash, then stop where you are, without moving toward the door.

 Grade dog from 1 (no reaction at all) to 5 (excitedly goes to door, obviously ready to go for walk).

2. Problem solving

Show the dog a tasty morsel of food, then while the dog is watching, place this beneath an inverted empty tin can on the ground. Record the time the dog takes to find and retrieve the food.

Grade dog from 0 (no interest) to 1 (takes more than a minute to find food) to 5 (takes less than five seconds to find food).

3. Short-term memory

Get a helper to hold the dog still in the middle of the room. While the dog watches you, show him a desirable morsel of food, and let him sniff it. Make sure the dog watches you while you place the bait in a corner of the room. Take the dog out of the room, wait for a few seconds, and come back in. Let the dog loose and record the time taken to find the food.

Grade dog from 0 (no interest) to 1 (tries but doesn’t succeed within 45 seconds) to 5 (immediately goes to the bait), with 2-4 given depending on how actively the dog seeks out the treat and how rapidly it’s found.

4. Long-term memory

This should be done immediately after the short-term memory test. The set-up is exactly the same, but this time place the treat in a different corner to before, and keep the dog out of the room for a full five minutes, rather than just a few seconds.

 Grade dog as above.

5. Language comprehension

Wait until the dog is settled comfortably around two metres away from you. In the voice tone that you usually use to call your dog, call “refrigerator”. If no response, call “movies”. If no response, call dog’s name.

Grade from 1 (no response) to 2-3 (comes in response to random words) to 4-5 (comes slowly or promptly to dog’s name.



May be a perfect pet, but not a Mastermind candidate.


An average mutt’s mind.


Dr Dog: a potential PhD student.

For more canine intelligence tests, see The Intelligence of Dogs by Prof Stanley Coren (Bantam Books, 1995)