Last week, in what seems to be a recurring series of stories probing one of the most pressing issues of our -- or any -- time, The New York Times ran a story about the intelligence of dogs that included a passage that makes your dog look like a moron.

That seems to be the purpose of these stories, as near as I can tell. You read all about these dogs that are able to do amazing things -- such as sniff out cancer, turn on lights in dark rooms, trade credit default swaps -- and then you look at your dog out in the yard, eating his own feces, and it makes you wonder where your dog was when the canine brains were handed out. Well, besides out in the yard, eating his own feces.

This particular story -- which reviewed recent advances in the quest to understand what dogs are thinking beyond "Is that food?" -- included a description of a Labradoodle named Jet who, despite living in New Jersey, is smarter than your average Pittsburgh Steelers fan.

And while the story did not convey Jet's knowledge of the two-deep defense or the zone blitz or the amazing talent and hair of Steelers safety Troy Polamalu, it did paint a picture of a canine so incredibly intelligent and skilled that it makes Lassie and many members of Congress look like they've suffered brain damage from huffing industrial solvents.

Jet is a seizure alert dog and a psychiatric service dog, the Times reported. His owner is a woman who suffers from epilepsy, severe anxiety, depression, hypoglycemia and

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various phobias. The Times reported, "Jet has been trained to anticipate seizures, panic attacks and plunging blood sugar and will alert his owner to these things by staring intently at her until she does something about the problem."

Now, I know something about this. I have two dogs -- retired racing greyhounds named Norman and Lester -- who frequently stare intently at me, usually when I'm eating a sandwich or sitting on their couch, in which case Norman gets on the couch and stares at me until I move so he can lie down.

But I digress.

Jet, the Times reported, "will drop a toy in her lap to snap her out of a disassociative state. If she has a seizure, he will position himself so that his body is under her head to cushion a fall."

If you're a dog owner, please pause now to consider that. Her dog can sense when she's going to fall down and cushion her fall. Your dog, on the other hand, knocks you over when you inadvertently get between him and his food and regularly sticks his snout in the personal regions of your in-laws.

Jet, by your dog's standards, is a genius. And while Jet is probably the only reason this woman is still alive, he is really wasting his talents. Seriously, this dog could be the Majority Leader of the Senate.

The Times story used Jet as an example of how dogs' brains work, and noted that recent research has concluded that dogs, instead of merely reacting to stimulus, can "solve complex problems."

I know exactly what the Times is talking about. My dogs spend much of the day solving complex problems and doing the Sudoku and trading stocks on margin. And then when they're bored with that, and perhaps re-reading "The Sound and the Fury" for the fourth time and finishing their doctoral thesis on post-modern subtexts in Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow," they spent the rest of the day eating a dog bed.

OK, that was unfair. They didn't eat a dog bed. They ate only half of a dog bed. And a pillow. And something else that I was unable to identify but am pretty sure was not alive when they ate it because all of the cats were accounted for.

Perhaps I'm misunderestimating my dogs' mental acuities. Stanley Coren, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia -- the Thunderbirds -- who has written books about dogs, told the Times, "I believe that so much research has come out lately suggesting that we may have underestimated certain aspects of the mental ability of dogs that even the most hardened cynic has to think twice before rejecting the possibilities."

I think our dogs have been sandbagging us. They may appear to have the intelligence of an eggplant, but really, deep down, they're geniuses. They're just waiting for their opportunity to take over, to cast aside the oppressive yoke of human oppression and its condescending blather about being "a good boy" and take their rightful spot at the pinnacle of the food chain.

And then they will survey the human wreckage left in the wake of their seizure of power and create an orderly and just civilization and bring peace and harmony to the globe.

Once that task is complete, and they successfully build intergalactic spaceships and time machines, they will throw up half a dog bed on the living room rug.

Because that's what they do.


Mike Argento's column appears Mondays and Fridays in Living and Sundays in Viewpoints. Reach him at mike@ydr.com or 771-2046. Read more Argento columns at www.inyork.com/ydr -- click on the opinion section -- or visit his blog at www.mikeargento.com.