Student: Natalia Portal | Course: Advanced 11 | Date: Wednesday, October 6, 2021

WRITING 1
In the article “Extreme perception and animal intelligence”, the authors Temple Grandin
and Catherine Johnson state that as well as humans, animals also have the ability to
understand the world that surrounds them through their senses, whether it be by
smelling, touching, seeing or hearing.
These signs of high perception can be found in dogs. The authors point out that these
cognition abilities dogs possess allow them to find accurate solutions when they found
themselves in a totally new environment. As an example, Grandin and Johnson explain
about the perceptual abilities between two categories of seizure dogs, in which seizure
response dogs are the ones that provide assistance after an epileptic episode, while
seizure alert dogs, are those that can anticipate an oncoming seizure.
However, it’s possible that some seizure response dogs eventually become seizure
alert dogs. Even though in the beginning seizure response dogs were trained as only
with the purpose of providing assistance after a seizure, they can choose to turn into
seizure alert dogs by showing a better performance when facing this kind of situations,
so that now they not only give assistance while or after the seizure episode but also,
being able to manage how to prevent it.
From the writer’s point of view, seizure alert dogs have something in common with
Clever Hans, which was a famous German horse whose popularity increased thanks to
his abilities to accurately answer any mathematical question. However, later it was
found by the psychologist Oskar Pfungst that his mathematical intelligence was fake
because the animal wasn’t able to answer questions when the person asking was out
of his view. Despite the animal’s reputation went down since the discovery, Hans
showed to be intelligent. He made a good use of his senses when perceiving the
unconscious signs people were giving when questioning him, because of that he
achieved something not any horse could have accomplished.
The author concludes the text by saying “what makes the actions of the seizure alert
dogs, and probably of Hans, too, a sign of high intelligence is the fact that they didn’t
have to do what they did.” In other words, these animals have shown through their
actions and behavior that they aren’t ordinary but unique, the author believes that these
animals have a high intelligence because they were able to acquired their skills by
themselves, they figured out how in their own to act when a sign that they could only
perceive appeared and they decided to use it so that they can developed new abilities
with it.
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