Our golden retriever knows the difference between her tug toys, plushie toys and chew toys. When we ask her to put her toys away she used to only collect the plushies and put them in the basket. We had to do extra training to get her to associate clean up with all types.
They can learn a lot but it's hard work. Also, "intelligence" and "obeying commands" are very orthogonal in dogs. In fact, sometimes a very intelligent dog is very difficult to train.
I've done this. The goal is to first demonstrate and reward them, so they associate good feelings with the whole thing. Step two is to kind of put the toy in their mouth, drag them over to where you wanna place it, then make them release it, and if everything worked, you reward them. Do this a couple of times, associate with some command like "clean up" and after a while they'll understand that if they do that they get an reward. After a while the reward can be switched from candies to head-pats, cuddles or whatever, and they should still be able to do it.
You can apply this to pretty much anything and if they're somewhat clever they can do it. Age doesn't seem to matter either, I've done this with 10 year old dogs too.
This post is downvoted but intruiging to me. Because a large part of this thread is people explaining what their pet can do, has learned, has been willing to learn. The thing that came to my mind is that we are interpreting the dogs behaviour, but that the dogs are interpreting our behaviour as well. We like to play with dogs, but the dog has separate preferences as well. Some dogs not only can classify, but also have their humans act differently according to their preferences. And that is exactly the Uplift angle! Who uplifts whom?
Our German Shepherd is as particular about her toys as her food.
She mainly likes squeaky plush toys, doesn't like rope toys at all. She also likes tennis balls which is a completely different game to the ones she plays with the plushies.
The smell factor might explain why she initially turns completely off a favourite toy after it goes through the wash.
Wife has a guide dog Labrador trained from a puppy incredibly well behaved and when on harness total worker focused and its interesting what she does and doesnt play with when not working. She has a stuffed animal that she sleeps with and never carries anywhere then another that she does. She loves a donut nylabone but not a bone shaped one. Shes also learned that there are toys she can bring over like a tennis ball to you that will distract YOU and therefor she can get a sneak of a lick off your plate. We’ve had to correct that a few times but she is just too smart she keeps learning new methods.
Guide dogs really are on another level. It's always wild to see how they can switch so seamlessly between "serious work mode" and "clever little gremlin with a mission."
I have a doodle and he knows each of his toys by name; the monkey, the ball, the lama etc. He's very picky with what he wants to play with so if he brings a specific toy over and you choose another one he'll respond by whining and make a big deal about it lol
Several years ago, two people were leaving the local dog park with their respective dogs. Person A loaded Dog A into his dark blue Jeep Wrangler and began to pull out. Person B was walking to his dark blue Suzuki Samurai. Dog B looked over, saw the Jeep driving away, and thought it was Person B abandoning her. She took off running after the wrong vehicle.
I've known dogs to identify the sound of their favorite human's car engine pulling up, but that was the first time I saw a dog identify a vehicle by color (dark blue) and general category (jeep-style).
My dog knows (though she's probably forgotten as now she's old and we don't practice any more) her toys by name and actions by name too. If I say "point to the ball" she'll paw at the ball, if I say "fetch the bone" she'll do that.
I didn't even know it was possible before I tried and saw that she actually responded to it. Amazing.
I was playing with my friend's dog who liked to bring you sticks. I asked him to bring my a stick, and when he did, I just as a joke said, "no, silly, not that stick, the one by your ball." and was absolutely shocked when he dropped the stick and went and retrieved the one by the ball.
I guess it’s an even bigger generalization; not just: “is this a fetch toy or not”, but: “which of the available objects me and the human can use for a given activity”.
Also, I now suspect that dogs that selected “pull” toys for fetching (or vice versa) didn’t care about the experiment and only wanted to play with these toys in that specific way.
I have known a lot of smart critters, but to stay on topic, there was Lefty, a very large mackenzie husky who belonged ,heart and soul,to my girlfriend, and lived in terror of bumping into things and/or clearing off a table if he should wag his tail, lefty and I were strangers, except when in or near the water, and he would swim and dive with me, and on one particular day he began wading out into a small river and picking up rocks from the bottom and carrying the ashore, which he placed in two disticnct compact piles, one for large rocks, the size of his head, and another pile 20' away for small rocks he could hold completly in his mouth, the is whole procedure was spontainious, and went on for over an hour till he had two good sized neat piles, one of only large rocks carried precariously, and the other of small rocks gotten somewhat easier, but still his head was under water while getting all of them.
There was another large dog in the household and we had a strict no leash, no tied dogs, no collar policy and for the most part they ate what we ate, and were generaly on there own recognisence, and so on the occasion of lefty's rock piling project, it was given due respect and we waited till he was done and he never did it again, and didn't have toys, or balls,play stick, or anything else, and was otherwise giant,reserved,quiet,except near water or in large open spaces around water.
We've spent decades assuming dogs were just reacting to tone or simple repetition, but here they are casually doing toddler-level categorization by function... just from playtime
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[ 1.4 ms ] story [ 55.2 ms ] threadWhenever we got a new toy for her we just had to throw it saying its name a few times and she would know it from then on.
We weren't able to train her on most stuff but her toy game was clutch.
You can apply this to pretty much anything and if they're somewhat clever they can do it. Age doesn't seem to matter either, I've done this with 10 year old dogs too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_(novel)
She mainly likes squeaky plush toys, doesn't like rope toys at all. She also likes tennis balls which is a completely different game to the ones she plays with the plushies.
The smell factor might explain why she initially turns completely off a favourite toy after it goes through the wash.
I've known dogs to identify the sound of their favorite human's car engine pulling up, but that was the first time I saw a dog identify a vehicle by color (dark blue) and general category (jeep-style).
I didn't even know it was possible before I tried and saw that she actually responded to it. Amazing.
Also, I now suspect that dogs that selected “pull” toys for fetching (or vice versa) didn’t care about the experiment and only wanted to play with these toys in that specific way.
EDIT: turns out I should have done some more reading, this was already considered over 20 years ago - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rico_(dog)