The News Leader
YJILL SUMMERVILLE
Staunton, Virginia
27 Oct 1988,
Five-year-old Hunter lives in
Alberta, Canada, with his human companions, Kenny Au, a computer engineer, and
Denise Lo, an ESL teacher. He is a Shiba Inu. Shiba Inus were named one of the
top ten smartest dog breeds in a 2018 article by CelebrityDogWatcher.com.
[Currently, humans only have methods for measuring working intelligence in
dogs, the ability to learn a new command in less than five repetitions and obey
it ninety-five percent of the time. Adaptive intelligence and instinctive
intelligence aren’t accounted for.] Since Hunter is the most intelligent dog Au
and Lo have ever owned, they regularly provide him with opportunities to learn
new skills. Hunter picks up his own toys, fetches his owners’ slippers, and
stacks toy rings. Most impressively, though, he paints.
Hunter’s first painting was a gift
to his family. In March of 2017, Au and Lo wanted to paint a design on one of
their walls. When neither Au nor Lo found a suitable design, they decided to
consult another family member. First, they taught Hunter to hold a paintbrush
in his mouth, then they taught him to put the paintbrush to a paper that was
taped to the wall and move the brush along the paper. Finally, they added paint
to Hunter’s paintbrush. Pleased with the result, they let Hunter paint the
design for their wall. “Since Hunter is such a huge part of our lives, ” said
Au and Lo “we thought it would be appropriate if he made some artwork for us.”
Now Hunter paints daily. “He seems to love having a job,” say Au and Lo, “and
it seems to make him calmer throughout the day.”
Hunter isn’t the only pooch who
has gained attention for his paintings. Arbor, a Las Vegas, Nevada rescue dog,
Dagger II, known professionally as Dog Vinci, a black lab and golden retriever
mix who became a painter after being told he was too anxious to become a
service dog, and blind, long-haired rescue dachshund, Hallie have all found
aficionados. While all of these dogs found loving homes, Hunter is the only dog
who has been with his current human companions since his puppyhood. There is
another way he differs from his canine competitors. While any proceeds Dog
Vinci and Hallie make from their paintings go to nonprofits that help canines,
Hunter competes on the open market. He has his own accounts on Instagram and
Etsy. Though his paintings were originally priced at thirty-eight U.S. dollars
each, his Etsy shop currently lists his asking price as roughly fifty U.S.
dollars per painting. As of 2019, Hunter has sold over one hundred fifty
paintings. His profits total roughly four thousand nine hundred three dollars
and fourteen cents in U.S. dollars. Au and Lo say they are considering donating
some of the future proceeds from Hunter’s work to their local animal shelters.
Hunter isn’t doing this for the
money. Instead, he’s motivated by the treats his humans give him when he uses
his paintbrush in a constructive way. He is learning the physical movements a
painter performs, and he is associating those movements with obtaining a
desired reward. Neither he nor any of his canine competitors are actually
learning the many abstract concepts associated with painting, such as
perspective, medium, and color palette. Much of a dog’s brain activity is
focused in the stratium, a dopamine rich area that focuses on reward, pleasure,
and expectation. In other words, it’s probably the expectation of a reward—a
reward that, as an intelligent dog, he likely quickly learned to expect—that is
a pleasure to Hunter, not the act of painting itself. The ability to take
pleasure in an abstract, emotionalized concept is a distinctly human ability. A
brain’s ability to perform complex functions is partially determined by its
size relative to a creature’s body. The average dog brain is roughly the size
of a tangerine. Gregory Berns, a neuroscientist who studies the canine brain
for Emory University in Atlanta, says, “Dogs’ brains just don’t have the real
estate to do the things ours do.”
Hunter is a motivated artist. He
simply doesn’t have human motivations. In the end, though, does that really
matter? Dogs can recognize partner bonds. In Berns’ research, dogs would
willingly feed other dogs they knew, even if they didn’t receive any food
themselves. Unlike most animals, apart from humans, dogs recognize pointing as
a meaningful gesture that indicates attention should be turned to something
other than themselves. They know how to use head and facial movements to
redirect their humans’ attention. Most impressively, dogs understand object
permanence. Object permanence is the psychological understanding that an object
moved out of sight has not disappeared, and it may appear elsewhere.
Dogs
understand this concept, and they can use object tracking to determine where
they should search for an object that has moved out of sight. For comparison,
four-year-old humans struggle with understanding object permanence. Hunter uses
his skill at object tracking when he paints. Not only does hr know performing
certain actions with a paintbrush will lead to his getting a treat. He uses his
object tracking ability to make sure he performs the same physical movements
with the brush each time he paints, both while he is dipping the brush and
while he is actually painting.
Perhaps that’s not how a human
artist approaches painting, but Hunter is still forming a genuine connection
with someone every time he pleases a human who loves him with one of his
paintings.
