“If you really want to know about dog intelligence, you have to look at non-dogs as well to understand what's special to dogs and what is just typical of groups they belong to.” Stephen Lea, a retired professor of psychology from the University of Exeter in the U.K. He and colleagues looked at dog intelligence in an animal intelligence context for a report in the journal Learning & Behavior. Lea and his team looked at hundreds of published studies to compare dog cognition with that of other animals. They found that dogs are adept at picking up on social cues. “They're good, for example, at using human pointing or following human gaze, uh, looking at what you're looking at. We’re not saying dogs aren’t good at those tasks, they are. What we were saying is that there are some other animals that are just as good at them.” Like bottlenose dolphins and gray seals. “It’s not something that's unique to dogs or indeed that unexpected in dogs, given the sorts of animals dogs are. Namely, they’re domesticated, they’re derived from at least social hunters. And important, they’re carnivores.