Is Trainability of animals a measure of their intelligence?

Cats might say the opposite.

Reply to Jacob-B

It's a measure of a kind of intelligence in animals with certain predispositions. Not all kinds for all animals.

Cats are hard to train, because in part, they just don't give a hoot about your reward system or following orders.

Frans DeWals wrote an excellent book showcasing some of the ways we have underestimated the intelligence of animals simply because we have a hard time thinking like them and creating tests that are tailored to the animals and not humans. For example, using a human-sized mirror to see how an elephant reacts to her own image. The book is called "Are we smart enough to know how smart animals are."

Good dog name! There’s been research on how greatly canine behaviours have been modified by 60k+ years of human co-habitation. Actually I remember an article that even the musculature around the eyes is different in domestic dogs to enable them to generate human-friendly faces (see here.)

So whether this has any bearing on wild dog behaviour - don’t know! I guess that’s a question for a field biologist rather than a philosophy forum. Although one anecdote I do have - in my youth I travelled to an island off the QLD coast with a population of dingos, Australian wild dogs. I saw a small group up close, like, less than ten meters away (they were being enticed by a local fisherman who would give them fish scraps.) It was immediately evident how completely different these animals were to domestic dogs - their physiology was extremely wiry with very long legs and small bodies; but also their disposition, which was - how shall we say - alien, like another species altogether. There was nothing about them that recognised or responded to human contact, they were very cagey, aloof, distant, watchful - very different creatures to your domestic breeds. But, as I noted, over 60,000 plus years of domestication, they’ve become radically different.

Philosophically, I do believe that animals are beings, that is, subjects of experience, and I do also think they’re much more intelligent than we often give them credit for. Birds, I’m sure, a much smarter than we think, and dogs, horses, and elephants also.

Years ago as a math tutor in college, I saw first hand that intelligence is mufti-dimensional. You cannot squish it down to a single metric. Different people learn different methods of thinking. So many of them struggled with the rigid logic of mathematics but excelled in other ways of thinking. As a tutor, I focused on observing their thinking and doing my best to adapt to it, and that was surprisingly successful.

Considering that, I claim that trainability may be one way to measure one aspect of intelligence, but not overall intelligence.

Also, there is the challenge of measuring trainability. Your dog may enjoy the training you provide so it is eager to go along with it. Another pet may not be so motivated for various reasons, such as personality, health (e.g. distraction from physical discomforts), etc. can factor in as well. Therefore, observing training results is not good measure of trainability.

Reply to Wayfarer Quite an interesting episode.
Apparently, genetically dingos are not different from the domestic dog and can be trained if starting from puppyhood. Conversely, it does not take long for domestic dogs to go feral. I wonder whether the 60.000 years of domestication. Is it possible that the domestication process just added a veneer on an unchangeable underlay?

Reply to Jacob-B It is said that you can domesticate dingos but they are very difficult to train and still retain many characteristics associated with wild dogs, especially proclivity for hunting. Domestication is an interesting study on evolutionary dynamics and genetics but again more a question for biologists than philosophy as such.

Reply to Terrapin Station Beat me to it. Hence the answer to the titular question is "No".

Further, in humans, the more intelligent ones seem to be the ones that are hardest to train. They keep going off and doing other things.

Reply to Banno I agree in part. The title of the thread is Is Trainability of animals a measure of their intelligence? I would say it is 'a' measure, but not the only one. And cats train, a lot, though they tend to do with it with peers as kittens and then as loners, mainly as adults. They play fight and play hunt. They do that bite reflex thing when watching prey. It also depends, here, on what we mean by trainability: do we mean, willing to do exercises someone else gives them (for a reward or not) and here cats are pretty damn disinterested: But if if it means, repeats certain activities to gain skills, cats will do this. And intelligent humans will also, they just are often more likely to want to control that training themselves. I think it has to be a measure of intelligence because the more you can either train yourself or be trained or both, the more you can learn. And humans, who are the most trainable, since we are capable of the redoing our nerve pathways more than any other creature so far, train themselves or are trained in a wider range of activities and skills than any other species. We are vastly more trainable in terms of breadth and depth.

Quoting Coben

It also depends, here, on what we mean by trainability: do we mean, willing to do exercises someone else gives them (for a reward or not) and here cats are pretty damn disinterested: But if if it means, repeats certain activities to gain skills, cats will do this.

A worthy distinction.

I disagree.
By judging animals by their trainability: ie. their ability to learn human commands is inherently anthropocentric, we are judging animals based on their ability to follow HUMAN commands...how can that be a natural assessment of their cognitive abilities? A flimsy metaphor for this is that this is like asking a person who only speaks Russian, to write a physics exam in Chinese...this is a flimsy metaphor because at least humans are the same species...
Also I believe dogs are a bad example of intelligence re: human training, not because dogs aren't smart, I love dogs and they certainly are jesus, they are intuitive, compassionate, eager, and generally lovely companions for their ability to cohabit with humans and in human societies so successfully, but one must remember the domestication history of dogs; their close association with humans to the point where this domestication process changed many of their physical and psychological features to make them better to serve as human companions, hunting partners, and guard dogs. So is that really a measure of "intelligence" in the purse sense of the word? Or rather of trainability or malleability? I don't think trainability is necessarily an element of intelligence at all, I mean computers can be trained...does that mean they possess spontaneous and creative intelligence, consciousness and cognition in our understanding of the word?

Reply to Jacob-B It really depends on the method of training. For instance, a parrot can learn to say words, but does it understand what the words mean?

Artemis said there are types of intelligence. That's quite useful, because we see the same effect in humans who have rote knowledge versus those who have understanding. It also explains how cats can be intelligent, curious and clever but not easy to train. One type is very brainy (thinking accurately, is not corrupted by a bribe), the other is sensual (will perform for a reward).

I think that trainability provides some measure of an animal's intelligence. It is a facet of adaptability to changing circumstances which essentially does not differ from that required to adapt to a changing habitat. An animal needs certain intelligence to perceive how to respond to a person's command for its own good. You can train several species of mammals but I don't think you can train iguanas or pythons.
I am not of course condoning some aspects of animal training.