Is a dingo smarter than your dog?

We dote on our dogs, serve them meals and let them sleep inside on cozy beds. These once-wild beasts have taken easily to domesticated life, but new research shows that humans' close relationships with dogs have caused them to lose their non-social problem-solving skills.
Ph.D. candidate and lead author Bradley Philip Smith and his colleague Carla Litchfield from the School of Psychology at the University of South Australia, put domesticated dogs and dingoes through a problem-solving test known as "the detour task." Australia's native breed, dingoes have adapted to life in the outback after their ancestors arrived on the continent with humans thousands of years ago. As a result, they have developed more wild characteristics than Max or Sadie.

The detour task requires the animals to travel around a transparent barrier to obtain a reward, in this case, a bowl of food. The barrier was a V-shaped fence with detour doors that either swing inward or outward. Researchers placed the food bowl inside or just outside the intersection point of the V barrier.
All of the dingoes found the food reward in about 20 seconds, using the detour doors whenever possible.
Domesticated dogs, on the other hand, looked puzzled and confused. They pawed at the fence, dug at it and even barked, likely out of frustration and to call for help.
Smith and Litchfield published their findings, titled "How well do dingoes (Canis dingo) perform on the detour task?" in the journal Animal Behaviour {Vol 80, Issue 1; 155-162).

Prior research showed that wolves, like the dingoes, aced this test. "Wolves will outperform dogs on any problem-solving tasks that are non-social," Smith says. "Dogs are great at social tasks - communicating with humans, using humans as tools, learning from humans via observation - whereas wolves are much better at general problem solving."