ANN ARBOR -- Barbara Smuts thought this dog owner must be a crackpot. The woman from Maryland kept insisting her dog was going into the backyard and arranging his many plush toys into geometric shapes of circles, parallel lines and triangles.

Come on, you must be helping him, responded Smuts, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan who studies canine social behavior.

And if you're not, the neighbors must be playing a trick on you, she said.

The woman steadfastly ruled out Smuts's reservations, and the professor eventually flew to Maryland to visit the woman and her dog, Donnie. Smuts now believes Donnie is, in fact, creating the displays.

FIND OUT MORE Smuts has a Web site at www.sitemaker.umich.edu/barbara.smuts/home. You can e-mail her at bsmuts@umich.edu. A show about her dog research will air on the National Geographic Channel at 1 p.m. Dec. 30, 7 p.m. Feb. 1 and 2 a.m. Feb. 2.



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will be able to make up their minds about Donnie on Sunday, when he and Smuts will be featured on a National Geographic Channel documentary called "Dog Genius." The show airs at 8 and 11 p.m.

Donnie, a male Doberman, was at first reluctant to perform for Smuts, probably because he was more excited about having a new person in the house.

So she suggested the woman install a few security cameras, which recorded Donnie in the act, moving his more than 80 plush toys into geometric shapes and creating social vignettes with them.

"She actually got some significant footage of him," Smuts said. "Not as much as I would like, but enough to show that he's doing it, and it's not something he has been trained to do, and it's completely spontaneous."

Smuts also went to Maryland a second time to visit Donnie. "I was watching from the den, and he picked up a toy, and put it in the right place," she said.

Donnie's owner has many photographs of his creations and had Smuts review them. Smuts said they appear genuine.

"I'm 99 percent certain that they're all his," she said.

For the show, National Geographic interviewed scientists and dog trainers to explore dog smarts. Smuts is one of the people to appear on film, confirmed Erin Smith, a spokesperson.

So how smart are dogs? It's a tricky question, Smuts said.

Dogs are brilliant in navigating social relationships and in communicating with body language, she said. They're also good at reading human cues and understanding what humans are trying to communicate - even better than chimpanzees, she said.

"It's an evolutionary phenomenon," Smuts said. "The dogs who could understand what the people wanted or were feeling would be the ones the people would feed, and they would survive."

Now, that could explain why your dog knows you're about to take him for a walk even before you start for the door.

As for Donnie, Smuts says his past may hold some clues. He was rescued by his owner, but had spent a year in a cage in a kennel, with just a single toy. Donnie may be entertaining himself with his backyard arrangements while his owner is preoccupied. He also creates relationships between his toys as he moves them, she said.

"Donnie can't be the only dog in the world who does this," Smuts said. "I'm hoping that people will see this show and say, 'Hey, that's like my dog, or I know a dog that does that,' and e-mail me. We need a larger sample to find out what's going on."