Which Dog Breed Is the Most Intelligent?
What Science Says
How Do Scientists Measure a Dog’s Intelligence?
Before answering which breed is the most intelligent, it is worth asking a much more interesting question.
Imagine someone asked you to choose the most intelligent person in the world. How would you do it?
With a maths exam? A memory test? A chess tournament?
Or perhaps by asking them to assemble a piece of IKEA furniture without reading the instructions?
Probably none of those tests would be enough. And with dogs, it works exactly the same way.
Canine intelligence is not a single ability, but a set of different skills. Some breeds learn new commands with surprising speed. Others solve problems on their own, remember routes for years, or understand our gestures almost without needing words. So… what can we actually measure?
Learning Speed. How many repetitions does a dog need to learn a new exercise?
Memory. How long does a dog remember what it has learned?
Problem-Solving Ability. Can a dog find a solution on its own when nobody tells it what to do?
Working Intelligence. How effectively does a dog perform the job its breed was originally developed for?
Social Intelligence. How well does a dog interpret our gestures, the direction of our gaze, our tone of voice, or even our emotions?
Decision-Making Ability. Some breeds were developed to wait for instructions. Others were expected to work independently and make their own decisions. That independence is also a form of intelligence.
Adaptability. How quickly can a dog adjust to new situations, changes in its environment, or different tasks?
Attempts to Measure Dog Intelligence Have Been Going on for More Than 50 Years
At first glance, it may seem that the mystery has already been solved.
Just open any ranking online and there is the answer: Border Collie, Poodle, German Shepherd… almost as if someone had gathered all the dogs in the world, given them a final exam, and published the grades.
But if it were really that simple, why are scientists still looking for new ways to measure canine intelligence?
The answer is fairly simple: because every time someone seemed to have found the solution, a new question came along wagging its tail.
Over the past few decades, researchers have tried very different methods. Some assessed memory, others learning ability, others decision-making, and more recent studies have even managed to observe dogs’ brains using magnetic resonance imaging.
Each new step brought important discoveries. But it also made one thing clear: canine intelligence is far more complex than it first appeared.
Let’s look, step by step, at how our understanding of what it really means for a dog to be “intelligent” has changed.
Episode 1. It All Began with Reflexes
In the late 19th century, the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov was not trying to discover which dog breed was the most intelligent. In fact, that question was not even part of his research.
Dogs were the stars of his experiments because they helped him understand how living organisms learn. His famous studies on conditioned reflexes demonstrated that animals can form new associations between different stimuli and change their behaviour based on experience.
It was a revolutionary discovery. For the first time, learning no longer seemed mysterious—it could be explained scientifically.
Yet the more scientists learned about how dogs learn, the more another question began to emerge.
If all dogs are capable of learning... do they all learn in the same way?
Do some breeds learn faster than others?
And, above all... is learning the same thing as being more intelligent?
Episode 2. The Man Who Taught Scientists Not to Jump to Conclusions
By the end of the 19th century, many researchers were convinced that animals thought almost the same way humans did.
If a dog managed to open a complicated door, some concluded that it had reasoned through the problem just as a person would have.
But a British psychologist named Lloyd Morgan decided to ask a far more uncomfortable question. What if there was a much simpler explanation? After spending years observing the behavior of different animals, he formulated an idea that would change the study of animal intelligence forever. Today, we know it as Morgan's Canon. Its principle was surprisingly simple:
We should never attribute a complex mental ability to an animal if the same behavior can be explained by a simpler process, such as learning or experience.
That idea changed the way scientists studied dogs.
From that moment on, researchers stopped asking only what a dog was doing.
They began asking how it had learned to do it.
And that distinction remains, to this day, one of the fundamental principles of animal behavior science.
But the story did not end there.
If learning could be explained scientifically...
Could it also be measured?
The answer would come just a few years later, thanks to a researcher named Edward Thorndike.
Episode 3. The Boxes That Changed Forever the Way We Understand Animals
At the beginning of the 20th century, the American psychologist Edward Thorndike asked a very simple question:
How does an animal actually learn? Until then, many people believed that animals solved problems because, in some way, they "understood" the situation. Thorndike decided to put that idea to the test. He built a series of special boxes, now known as Puzzle Boxes.
Inside each box he placed a cat, a dog, or a chicken. Outside the box was food. To escape, the animal had to perform a very specific action: press a lever, pull a string, or activate a mechanism. The first attempt looked completely chaotic. The animal tried one thing after another.
It pushed. It scratched. It bit. It turned around in circles. Until, almost by accident, it found the solution. But then something remarkable happened. The next time, it escaped more quickly. And the time after that, even faster.
After several attempts, the correct action appeared almost immediately.
Thorndike realized that animals did not solve the problem because they had reasoned like a human being. They learned because actions that led to success tended to be repeated.
Actions that did not work gradually disappeared. This became known as the Law of Effect.
In simple terms: Behaviors that produce a positive outcome are more likely to be repeated. Behaviors that bring no benefit gradually disappear. Today, this idea seems obvious.
But more than a hundred years ago, it was truly revolutionary.
Without realizing it, Thorndike had laid one of the foundations of modern learning theory.
And also one of the foundations of much of the dog training we use today.
Yet one important question still remained.
If all animals can learn... does that mean they are all equally intelligent?
The answer began to take shape several decades later, when two researchers decided to investigate something that almost no one had considered before:
the influence of genetics and development on canine behavior.
Episode 4. The Two Scientists Who Discovered That Not All Dogs Start the Race from the Same Place
In the middle of the 20th century, the American researchers John Paul Scott and John L. Fuller decided to investigate a question that almost no one had asked before. Are all dogs born with the same abilities? Or do breed and genetics also influence the way they learn and behave?
To answer this question, they launched one of the most ambitious studies in the history of canine science. For more than a decade, they bred and observed hundreds of dogs from different breeds under exactly the same conditions. They all received the same care. The same diet.
They lived in the same environment. And they completed exactly the same tests. The only difference was their genetic inheritance.
The results surprised even the researchers themselves.
They discovered that behavior does not depend solely on upbringing. Genetics also plays an important role. Some breeds learned certain tasks more easily. Others displayed specific
instincts much earlier. Most importantly, they discovered that puppies go through critical
periods of development. During those first weeks of life, there is a unique window of
opportunity to explore the world, meet people, interact with other dogs, and learn how to live alongside them. If these experiences do not happen at the right time, they can become
much more difficult to acquire later in life. These discoveries forever changed the way dogs
are bred, socialized, and trained.
Their book, Genetics and the Social Behavior of the Dog, published in 1965, is still considered
one of the most important scientific works ever written on canine behavior.
But one great question still remained.If genetics plays a role...
How can we compare the intelligence of different breeds without oversimplifying it?
Years later, that question would make a Canadian professor the world's best-known researcher
on canine intelligence.His name was Stanley Coren.
Episode 5. Stanley Coren: Was the Podium Already Decided?
Almost a hundred years had passed since Pavlov's experiments. Scientists had gained a much better understanding of how dogs learn, but one equally fascinating question still remained unanswered. Are some dog breeds more intelligent than others?
In 1994, American psychologist Stanley Coren decided to find out. His idea was as simple as it was brilliant.
Instead of personally evaluating thousands of dogs from every breed, he turned to the people who had spent years watching them work: obedience trial judges from the United States and Canada.
More than 200 experts answered a simple questionnaire based on just two questions.
How many repetitions does the average dog need to learn a new command?
And how often does it obey that command the first time it is given?
Using those answers, Coren created the ranking that would eventually become the most famous in the world.
At the top were the Border Collie, the Poodle, the German Shepherd, and other breeds with an extraordinary ability to learn.
His book, The Intelligence of Dogs, became an international bestseller, and the ranking soon appeared in magazines, books, television programmes, and, years later, on thousands of websites.
It seemed that the case had been closed. The podium had its winners.
But then an uncomfortable question emerged.
Does learning faster really mean being more intelligent?
Episode 6. The Scientist Who Stopped Asking Which Dog Was the Smartest
For many years, most researchers kept trying to answer the same question: Which dog is the most intelligent? They compared breeds.
They measured how quickly dogs learned commands. They designed new tests. They published rankings. It seemed that intelligence was simply a matter of solving problems faster than everyone else. But a British researcher named Clive Wynne proposed a completely different idea. What if we had been asking the wrong question? Perhaps a dog's greatest strength was not solving puzzles. Not memorizing more commands. Not learning faster than other species.
Perhaps its greatest talent was something else.
Understanding people. According to Wynne, dogs did not conquer the world because they were the most intelligent animals. They did it because they learned something even more valuable. They learned to live alongside us. To understand our gestures.
Our voice. Our gaze. Our emotions. While other species evolved skills to survive in the wild, dogs developed an extraordinary ability to cooperate with human beings.
And that ability changed the history of both.
Today, we know that a dog does not need to win an intelligence contest to do something that very few animals can achieve.
To understand us better than we often understand them.
That idea opened a whole new chapter in science. Researchers stopped asking only how much a dog knows.
They began asking how a dog thinks, what it feels, and what happens inside its brain.
The answers would begin to emerge thanks to a technology that, until not so long ago, seemed like science fiction.
Episode 7. Brian Hare. The 2000s
What If Dogs Understand People Better Than They Obey Commands?
For years, Stanley Coren's ranking was considered the best way to compare the intelligence of different dog breeds.
Then, in the early 2000s, an entirely different question emerged.
American researcher Brian Hare was not interested in discovering which breed learned the fastest.
He wanted to understand how dogs think.
And to answer that question, he completely changed the rules of the game.
Instead of measuring how quickly a dog learned a command, Hare designed experiments in which dogs had to interpret human behaviour. Could they follow a finger pointing to the container with food?
Did they understand where a person was looking?
Would they ask for help when they couldn't solve a problem on their own?
Over the years, thousands of dogs from many different breeds took part in these studies, along with human-raised wolves and even chimpanzees, allowing researchers to compare their cognitive abilities.
The results surprised the scientific community. Many dogs understood human gestures with remarkable ease. In some social cognition tests, they even outperformed chimpanzees—our closest living evolutionary relatives. The question itself had changed. Until then, many researchers had been asking:
"What can a dog learn?" After Brian Hare's work, a far more intriguing question took centre stage:
"How well can a dog understand people?" And once again, a new mystery appeared.
If intelligence is made up of many different abilities... does it still make sense to search for a single breed that is "the most intelligent" of them all?
The researcher did not touch the correct container. He gave no command. He simply pointed to it with
his finger. To most of us, that seems like an obvious clue. Yet understanding that a human gesture conveys
useful information is an extraordinarily complex cognitive ability. The dogs solved the task with remarkable ease.
This reinforced an idea that was beginning to emerge in research laboratories around the world: a dog's greatest strength is not simply learning commands, but understanding and interpreting people. But Miklósi went one step further. His research showed that memory, communication, problem-solving, learning ability, and social skills do not always develop at the same pace.
Perhaps we had been searching for one single kind of intelligence...when, in reality, there were many different cognitive abilities.
And that inevitably led to another question.
If intelligence is made up of different abilities... is it really possible to rank every dog breed in a single intelligence chart?
Episode 8. The 2000s. Ádám Miklósi: What If Intelligence Isn't Just One Thing?
While Brian Hare was studying how dogs understand people, another researcher in Hungary was reaching a very similar conclusion—by following a completely different path.
Ethologist Ádám Miklósi, founder of the Family Dog Project at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, had spent years investigating how dogs think and how they communicate with humans.
Over the past three decades, thousands of dogs from many different breeds have taken part in the project's studies, which is now regarded as one of the world's leading research programmes in canine cognition.
One of its best-known experiments was remarkably simple.
Two identical containers. Only one contained food.
Episode 9. 2012. Technology Enters the Scene: Gregory Berns and the Dog's Brain
Up to that point, scientists could only observe dogs' behaviour.
They learned. They remembered. They solved problems. They responded to our gestures.
But all of that happened on the outside. What was happening inside the brain remained a mystery.
In 2012, American neuroscientist Gregory Berns, from Emory University (Atlanta, USA), decided to take a step that many considered impossible.
Instead of anaesthetising dogs to study their brains, he trained them to walk voluntarily into an MRI scanner and remain completely still throughout the scan.
The first stars of the project were Callie, a mixed-breed rescue dog, and McKenzie, a Border Collie trained in agility.
After months of training, they achieved something extraordinary:
they became the first dogs in the world to voluntarily participate in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies while fully awake.
For the first time, scientists could observe what was happening inside a dog's brain while it was waiting for a reward, listening to its owner's voice, or processing different stimuli. Research was no longer limited to observing behaviour alone.
It had become possible to study brain activity directly. And once again, a new question emerged.
If different regions of the brain are responsible for memory, emotions, motivation, and learning... can all that complexity really be reduced to a single intelligence ranking?
Episode 10. 2022. University of Helsinki: The Final Attempt to Find the Most Intelligent Dog Breed?
After more than fifty years of research, it seemed that the moment had finally come to answer the big question.
Is there really one dog breed that is more intelligent than all the others?
In 2022, a team of researchers from the University of Helsinki, led by Saara Junttila and Katriina Tiira, took on the challenge with one of the most ambitious studies ever conducted. The project included 1,002 dogs from 13 different breeds. But this time there was one crucial difference. The researchers were not looking for a single winner. Each dog completed a comprehensive battery of cognitive tests.
Some assessed the ability to understand human gestures. Others measured self-control, short-term memory, spatial awareness, or problem-solving skills. It was probably the most comprehensive attempt yet to answer a question that had fascinated scientists and dog lovers for decades. And then the results arrived. Yes, there were differences between the breeds. But there was no overall champion.
Some breeds excelled at understanding people. Others performed better in spatial tasks. Others demonstrated greater self-control.
However, in tests of short-term memory and logical reasoning, researchers found very few significant differences between the breeds.
The study seemed to point towards an unexpected conclusion. Perhaps the real question was never: "Which dog breed is the most intelligent?" Perhaps the better question is: "What kind of intelligence does each breed excel at?"
So… Which Dog Breed Is the Most Intelligent?
After taking this journey through more than fifty years of scientific research, you may have expected this article to end with the name of one breed. Sorry… it isn't quite that simple. 😉
Science has shown that there is no single type of intelligence. Some dogs learn new commands at an astonishing speed.
Others make decisions independently when no one is there to guide them. Some seem to read our gestures and emotions almost as if they could guess what we are thinking. And others can follow a scent trail for miles where we see nothing more than... an ordinary path.
Come to think of it, wouldn't it be rather strange if there really were one perfect breed for everything?
If that were true, we probably wouldn't have more than 400 dog breeds today. Why develop the Border Collie if the Husky were better at everything? Why breed the Bloodhound if the Labrador could track scents with the same precision? Or the Poodle, if every other breed could do exactly the same things? The reality is far more interesting.
Every breed has been selectively developed over generations to solve different kinds of problems.
A Husky that drives its family crazy by escaping over and over again may seem like an absolute troublemaker...
...until you imagine that same dog crossing the Arctic tundra, pulling a sled for miles through the snow, making life-or-death decisions far from any human help. Suddenly, the "escape artist" becomes a true specialist. The dog hasn't changed. The job it was bred to do has.
And that's true of almost every breed. So perhaps the real question isn't: "Which dog breed is the most intelligent?"
Perhaps a much more useful question is: "Intelligent... for what?" Because when people choose a dog, very few base their decision on a scientific ranking. We choose a lifelong companion. A friend. A sporting partner. A working dog.
Or simply that puppy who steals our heart from the very first moment—without us ever quite knowing why.
And perhaps that's the best answer of all. A dog's intelligence is measured not only by what it is capable of doing, but by how well those abilities fit the life it is going to share with you.
And What About the Poodle?
After this entire journey, you may be wondering: "Alright... but what about the Poodle?" Well... it's still right up there.
Not because it is the undisputed champion in a single test, but because very few breeds combine so many different strengths so well. Poodles learn quickly, enjoy solving problems, work exceptionally well with people, and possess an almost endless curiosity.
Poodle owners know exactly what we mean.
If you wake up one morning and discover that every single pair of shoes in the house has been carefully lined up beside your bed, don't be too quick to assume your dog has been mischievous.
There's a good chance your Poodle has simply decided—in its own unique way—to make sure you understand that it's time for a walk. 😄
Perhaps that's why the Poodle has spent decades ranking among the world's most intelligent dog breeds.
And if you've read this far, you probably already know why.