It seems, and I'll assume, that there is a cognitive ability here and the dog isn't simply mapping a sound (sentence) to an action Pavlovian style. In which case are we to think that dogs in their natural social groups have this level of communication being able to code 1000s of different individual things?
We it seems obvious that to interact in the world (putting a bone here, picking up some meat etc) a dog must have this level of complexity in their world. Being able to link this complexity with an audio world (of command sounds) seems not so extraordinary. Why should decoding the audio world be any more important that decoding the physical world? A stone marking the place where a bone is, or a coloured button, or a researcher saying "go to bone" which both give the desired outcome. I'm impressed by the dog but not so much by the remarkableness of the skills which seem essential to any creature that can live "in" the world. That world becomes a human world and the creature simply adapts to human details rather than wild details and then we suddenly applaud their cognisance which was always there. Am I missing something here? I blog this so I am reminded to think about it again...
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