Lassie, Where is Jimmy?

As a dog lover and my experience with the various dogs over my lifetime, I firmly believe that dogs have individual personalities and understand us better than most people believe. It appears the scientific community is starting to agree with what dog lovers have known.

It is precisely their proximity to people -- which disqualified our four-legged
friends as a model for so long -- that now makes them interesting to animal
researchers. "When it comes to understanding human behavior, no mammal comes
even close to the dog," says Kaminski. Her Leipzig research team has
demonstrated that dogs are far better than the supposedly clever apes at
interpreting human gestures.

Having four dogs currently, I have a lot of opportunity to study their behavior and train them. Also being a crazy dog owner, tend to talk to them as if they can understand. It doesn’t seem crazy to me, because too many times I have had them responded correctly to what I am saying or pointing to. The key thing to communicating to a dog is to be consistent and of course rewards treats for re-enforcement (Dog have always thought with their stomachs).

By the way:

Osthaus repeated the test with a group of cats, a species that loves playing
with strings. The cats, says Osthaus, "did far worse than the dogs."