Airedale Terrier Poet

One Very Smart Airedale Terrier

According to Rolf’s owner, Paula Moekel of Mannheim, Germany, the dog could communicate with humans by tapping out letters with his paw. He assigned the highest number of taps to less common letters. According to Moekel, the dog was a poet,a bibliophileand a ‘speaker’ of several languages. In her biography of Rolf she even claimed that the dog dabbled in deep theology and philosophy. These claims attracted attention in Germany, as they came at the height of the ‘New Animal Psychology’ movement. The ‘New Animal Psychologists’, led by Dr. Karl Krall, believed that certain animals, such as dogs and horses, were nearly as intelligent as humans and could be trained to unlock their intellectual potential.