Betsy
Most dogs can learn and recognize maybe 15 commands or words. Betsy, (an Austrian Border Collie), learned 340!
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It is long recognised that Border Collies are intelligent. Very intelligent. Their historic and prolonged association working with humans going back many generations.
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Betsy is it a bit special - Betsy could 'sit' on command at 10 weeks of age and was soon running around retrieving items by name - ball, rope, paper, box, keys and dozens of other items. She knows at least 15 people by name, and when tested by scientists proved skilled at linking photographs with the very objects they represented. Yes, that's correct, she could link 2-dimensional images with real life objects!
In tests she retrieved the correct object 38 times out of 40, despite having never seen the object depicted in the image before.
Her vocabulary of 340 different words understood rivals that of the great apes in terms of intelligence.
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As an aside, you may well be thinking, (if you're considering and learning about Veganism or Vegetarianism, or perhaps from a different angle entirely; if you're a cynic let's say), that well you just wouldn't eat a dog anyhow, so how is this a relevant item? Well that's exactly the point! You wouldn't eat a dog (though some cultures do of course) because you know they're smart, they are 'man's best friend'. Understood. So why eat other intelligent creatures? Is not being 'best friend' make you lunch by default?
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Speciesism
Discrimination based on species membership.
The treatment of members of one species as morally more important than members of another species even when their interests are equivalent. Most precisely described as the failure to consider interests of equal extent because of the species the animal belongs to.
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