Brains and barks

The world's smartest dogs: Wait until you see which tops the list!

Image: Cookie the Pom

Every dog has its own unique traits that make it stand out. At the same time, pups of the same breed often share common characteristics, such as strength, speed, or sociability. Today, we're focusing on a peculiar feature: intelligence. If you're wondering how smart your dog is, love learning about different breeds, or are just intrigued by the idea of canine IQs, this article is for you. Join us as we explore the 10 dog breeds considered the smartest in the world!

Image: Marcin Wojna

If you're looking for a tough, hardworking, and dependable dog, the Australian Cattle Dog is a top choice! Also known as the Blue Heeler, this breed is widely recognized as one of the most intelligent. Originally bred in the 19th century, it was developed to herd cattle across long distances and rugged terrain. Experts praise its strong problem-solving skills, quick learning ability, and independent thinking.

Image: Kevin Seibel

The Rottweiler is one of the oldest herding breeds, with origins dating back to the Roman Empire. Though often feared for their large size and powerful jaws, these dogs are much more than just muscle. Experts note that Rottweilers are quick learners, highly obedient, and excel in search, rescue, and protection work.

Image: Niko Nieminen

If dogs went to college, the Papillon would be on the honor roll. Also known as the Continental Toy Spaniel, this breed is easily recognized by the shape of its ear fringes, which resemble wings. Known for being smart and alert, this little pup is great at learning new commands and performing complex tricks. And there’s more: Papillons are highly social dogs that get along well with people and other pets. Did you know that this was Marie Antoinette's favorite dog breed?

Image: Vincent van Zalinge

These are the gentle souls of the neighborhood. Known for serving as guide and therapy dogs, this English breed is often praised for its energy, sociability, loyalty, sensitivity, anticipatory skills, and strong obedience. Perhaps that’s why the Labrador Retriever held the title of the most popular dog breed in the United States for more than 30 consecutive years!

Image: Kat van der Linden

As its name suggests, this beautiful breed was developed to herd sheep and protect livestock. Don’t let their small size fool you—Shelties have a surprisingly powerful bark that carries over long distances. Experts highlight their loyalty and their impressive ability to learn new commands quickly and respond with great precision. Additionally, their alertness and problem-solving skills make them ideal for herding tasks.

Image: Ryan Hyde

Let’s be honest: most of us feel a little intimidated by the piercing gaze of a Doberman Pinscher—and with good reason! These dogs are naturally protective and highly alert. The Doberman is fast, smart, and fearless, qualities that make it a preferred breed for police, military, and protection work. It might not be the friendliest dog on the block, but it's definitely sharp and focused.

Image: Taylor Sondgeroth

Here’s a true star: the Golden Retriever, one of the most popular dog breeds worldwide, especially as a family pet. Their friendly, affectionate, and trustworthy temperament pairs perfectly with their high intelligence and quick learning ability. Thanks to their emotional awareness and impressive cognitive skills, Golden Retrievers excel in therapy work and search-and-rescue missions.

Image: Yuriy Bogdanov

Do you remember Rin Tin Tin? Known worldwide as a "police dog," the German Shepherd is a hardworking and dedicated breed. While it sometimes gets a bad rap, this dog is actually very affectionate, loyal, and fiercely protective. Its intelligence ranks it among the top dog breeds, with experts highlighting its obedience, problem-solving skills, and ability to learn complex commands.

Image: RR Rivera

This adorable breed ranks number 2 out of 110 in intelligence! Friendly, athletic, highly obedient, and impressively smart, Poodles were recruited by European circuses in the 18th and 19th centuries to perform amazing tricks and routines. Among their most remarkable traits are exceptional learning ability, excellent memory, and strong problem-solving skills.

Image: Anna Dudkova

We have a winner! The Border Collie is widely recognized as the most intelligent of all dog breeds. It has it all: athleticism, energy, agility, speed, quick learning, sharp memory, excellent tracking skills, fast responses, intense focus, and outstanding problem-solving ability. In the early 2000s, a Border Collie named Chaser earned the title of "The smartest dog in the world." She shocked researchers by learning and remembering over 1,000 words linked to objects and actions!

Beloved lyrics

"For what is a man?": Some of the wisest lyric lines ever written

Paul Anka was terrified when he sat down to write the lyrics for a song that Frank Sinatra would be singing. Jokingly, he started with a dramatic, "And now, the end is near…" The rest is history. Who are the people who pen the words that others will spend decades repeating? How did they come up with words so precise and true that listeners would compare them with those of great philosophers? Here are 10 of people’s favorite lyrics of all time, decoded.

"For what is a man? What has he got? If not himself, then he has naught." The melody of "My Way" wasn't originally American. It began as a French song called Comme d'habitude, a number about a couple stuck in a stale marriage. Paul Anka heard it on the radio while in France and bought the rights on the spot, before he had any use for it.

That use arrived at a dinner in Miami, when Sinatra told him, almost in passing, that he was quitting the business. Anka flew home, sat down at a typewriter, and spent one night writing lyrics as if Sinatra himself were speaking them. Sinatra recorded it in two takes and later called it his "national anthem," and many agreed; Anka had written the exact words one wants to belt while closing an episode of their life.

In "Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)," John Lennon wrote: "Life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans." But the phrase originated with American writer and cartoonist Allen Saunders, who published it in a 1957 issue of Reader's Digest ("Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans").

The line outlived everything else about the song, repeated at graduations and eulogies for decades since. Lennon was murdered shortly after the album's release, which means the song now carries a weight of hindsight neither he nor his listeners could have intended at the time.

"How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?" A young Bob Dylan wrote "Blowin' in the Wind" in 1962. He later claimed he wrote the entire song in about ten minutes at the Gaslight Cafe in Greenwich Village, borrowing its melody from the old spiritual "No More Auction Block." He was twenty-one, barely a year into his New York career, and insisted at the time it wasn't a protest song at all.

The song never answers its questions, but keeps asking them. First published in the folk magazine Broadside in May 1962, it became the unofficial anthem of the civil rights and antiwar movements once Peter, Paul and Mary's cover shot to number two on the charts in 1963.

"... is equal to the love you make." This is the last song the four Beatles ever recorded together, and Paul McCartney built it deliberately as a farewell. He gave Ringo Starr his only drum solo in the band's history, a fight McCartney had to win through what he called "gentle persuasion," since Starr detested solos on principle.

For the closing line, McCartney said he'd been thinking about Shakespeare, who often ended a scene with a rhyming couplet so the audience would know it was truly over. Even John Lennon, who generally disliked the Abbey Road medley and rarely praised his old partner's work by 1980, admitted the closing thought was "a very cosmic, philosophical line."

"... but it’s better than drinking alone." "Piano Man", by Billy Joel, narrates a song in which the character is real. Joel wrote it about the six months he spent playing piano under the fake name "Bill Martin" at a Los Angeles lounge called The Executive Room. Even the waitress "practicing politics" was Elizabeth Weber, the woman who'd soon become his wife.

Joel wrote it while hiding out from a record label he was desperate to escape after his debut album flopped. It became a bittersweet anthem that many people love singing with others; it seems like, as the song suggests, singing sorrows together at the bar is better than feeling them at home.

The whole song "Both Sides Now," by Joni Mitchell, is often quoted as a deeply philosophical observation of life. It concludes that some mysteries of life are as unknowable as the clouds, or love, despite accumulating experience.

When she wrote it, Mitchell had recently given up a daughter for adoption after being left by the child's father. She was twenty-three, mid-flight, after a passage in Saul Bellow's novel Henderson the Rain King described its narrator looking down at clouds from an airplane, something human eyes had only been able to do for a few decades. Judy Collins released it first in 1967 and won a Grammy for it; Mitchell's own version didn't appear until her 1969 album Clouds.

Kris Kristofferson’s song, "Me and Bobby McGee", contains one of people’s favorite quotes from song lyrics. Its title came from producer Fred Foster, who suggested Kristofferson write a song about his colleague's secretary, Barbara "Bobbie" McKee.

Its most quoted idea about freedom and loss was inspired, Kristofferson later said, by the final scene of Fellini's La Strada, in which a man realizes too late what he threw away. Roger Miller released it first, but it was Janis Joplin's posthumous 1971 recording, finished mere days before her death, that turned it into a number one hit and an accidental epitaph.

"... and I'm getting older too." Nicks says she wrote "Landslide" in about five minutes, sitting in a rented house in Aspen while her partner and musical collaborator, Lindsey Buckingham, was on tour rehearsing with the Everly Brothers. The song's real subject isn't romance, but the vertigo of watching time pass. She was twenty-seven, broke, working as a waitress and a cleaner, and their duo album had just been dropped by its label.

Looking at the snow on the Rockies, she found herself deciding whether to keep chasing music at all. Three months later, Mick Fleetwood heard Buckingham's guitar work on a demo and invited the pair into Fleetwood Mac, which changed their lives. The song has now aged into an anthem for anyone facing a hinge point in their own life.

"You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometime you'll find you get what you need." Mick Jagger sketched this one alone on an acoustic guitar, calling it "one of those bedroom songs." It closed 1969's Let It Bleed just as the decade's peace-and-love optimism was cracking.

The song is upbeat and simple, and unexpectedly insists on an idea of acceptance or surrender that has more to do with Stoic philosophy than with pop rock optimism. But the listeners liked it, and many quote it often.

"...that's how the light gets in." Leonard Cohen worked on "Anthem" for roughly a decade, discarding draft after draft, before it finally appeared on his 1992 album The Future. He wasn't a man given to explaining his own lyrics, having spent years training as an ordained Zen Buddhist monk and generally preferring silence to self-analysis.

But "Anthem" has the clearest statement of a philosophy he'd circled his entire career: that brokenness can give way to grace. It has since been invoked by human rights activists, quoted at protests, and performed at civic ceremonies.