Dogs certainly think for themselves, they just don't necessarily think like us. Every so often I get an insight into how my dog's brain works, and I find it abs

Dogs certainly think for themselves, they just don't necessarily think like us. Every so often I get an insight into how my dog's brain works, and I find it absolutely fascinating. For example, recently I had to carry a big heavy bag of stuff from home to a couple of streets away, and I took the dog with me. As we walked along, he kept going up to random parked cars and stopping by their doors. I couldn't understand why he was doing that. Did he smell something interesting? Was there a small critter hiding under the car? Then it dawned on me. We don't have a car of our own, but from time to time we use a carsharing scheme. Particularly when I need to transport stuff. He saw me carrying a big bag and figured that meant we were getting in a car. So he was just going up to any old car and saying "This one?" I realised he'd been observing this over time and he thought he understood it. So if he's spotted and figured out this pattern with a fairly rare event, it's reasonable to infer that he does this with everything else too. What's his motivation? I don't know, but he seems to really enjoy anticipating things, like he gets satisfaction from understanding how things work. He's visibly excited when he "gets it right". Like many of us, I'm sure. Related to that is his propensity for steering people and events in a direction favourable to his interests. "Oh, while you're on your feet, if you would just follow me I'd like to draw your attention to this food bowl over here which doesn't seem to have any food in it". "Please lift this blanket so I can get under it and snuggle". And so on. I don't think it's anthropomorphising at all to say he's got goals, can plan ways to achieve those goals, and communicate with us to get us to play along. Quite the opposite, in fact. He communicates these messages very clearly, he just does it in a doggie way that takes a bit of effort on our part to understand.