I just finished reading this fascinating article in the
New York Times about "helper" dogs. I was amazed at the many ways they can be trained to intervene in order to assist their owners. The discussion about just HOW they are able to know when to help was equally interesting to me. I debated putting this in the "This, That, & Everything Else" thread, but I feel that things there get pushed off the front page there so quickly, plus some folks don't even go there...
Anyhow, enjoy.
Good Dog, Smart Dog By SARAH KERSHAW
Published: October 31, 2009
Life as a Labradoodle may sound free and easy, but if you’re Jet, who lives in New Jersey, there is a lot of work to be done.
He is both a seizure alert dog and a psychiatric service dog whose owner has epilepsy, severe anxiety, depression, various phobias and hypoglycemia. Jet has been trained to anticipate seizures, panic attacks and plunging blood sugar and will alert his owner to these things by staring intently at her until she does something about the problem. He will drop a toy in her lap to snap her out of a dissociative state. If she has a seizure, he will position himself so that his body is under her head to cushion a fall.
Jet seems like a genius, but is he really so smart? In fact, is any of it in his brain, or is it mostly in his sniff?
The matter of what exactly goes on in the mind of a dog is a tricky one, and until recently much of the research on canine intelligence has been met with large doses of skepticism. But over the last several years a growing body of evidence, culled from small scientific studies of dogs’ abilities to do things like detect cancer or seizures, solve complex problems (complex for a dog, anyway), and learn language suggests that they may know more than we thought they did.
Article continues here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/weekinreview/01kershaw.html 
