Dog's Best Friend

A couple of years ago I dared to suggest in print that dogs were fundamentally con artists — adept manipulators who merely pretended to like us as part of a clever evolutionary scheme of survival. Honestly, I was joking. Or anyway, mostly joking. But had I paraded around in a T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan "I love to kick puppies," I could scarcely have done a more thorough job of infuriating a certain segment of the dog-loving public. I got a lot of irate mail about dogs' "unconditional love," whatever that means.

Now it turns out I was right. In fact, according to a number of recently released scientific studies, dogs are not merely emotional con artists: they are also intellectual con artists. They've learned not only to fake love; they've managed to convince us that they are a lot smarter than they really are. In both cases they play us for the saps we are.
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