Dachshund Owners who get frustrated with dachshund intelligence tests usually make the same mistake: they treat the test like a school exam instead of a game with snacks on the line.
The ones who get good results figure out something else entirely. A dachshund does not perform for approval. A dachshund performs for incentive, and preferably a smelly one.
That distinction changes everything about how these seven challenges go.
Because here is the thing about the breed you live with. Dachshunds were bred to go underground alone, make decisions without a human shouting directions, and stand their ground against an angry badger in a dark tunnel. Independent thinking is not a bug in the design. It is the entire point.
So when your sausage dog stares at you blankly during a test, the honest question is not "is he dumb?" It is "has he decided this is worth his time?"
Let’s find out.
1. The Towel Test (Problem Solving Under Fabric)
This one is the classic, and it is beautifully simple.
Toss a bath towel over your dachshund’s head while she is standing calmly. Start your timer. Then watch.
A genius-level dachshund shrugs the towel off in under 15 seconds, usually with a backward shuffle and a small head shake. Average dogs take 15 to 30 seconds. Anything past 30 seconds and you may be dealing with a dog who genuinely enjoys the towel.
A dachshund who stays under the towel is not always failing the test. Sometimes she has simply found a warm, dark, quiet place and decided you can wait.
What the results actually mean
Speed here measures spatial awareness and comfort with problem solving under mild stress.
Some doxies freeze entirely. That is not stupidity, that is caution, and caution kept this breed alive underground for a few hundred years.
2. The Cup Shuffle (Object Permanence and Memory)
Grab three identical cups. Put a treat under one while your dog watches. Then shuffle them slowly.
Release your dachshund and see which cup she goes to first.
Correct on the first try is impressive. Correct within two tries is solid. Going straight for the cup she saw you touch last, regardless of the treat, means she is watching you rather than the object, which is its own kind of clever.
The cheat move here is scent. Dachshunds are scent hounds with roughly 125 million olfactory receptors, so a good number of them will simply sniff their way to the answer and skip the memory portion entirely.
Honestly? That still counts. Using the better tool available is exactly what a smart animal does.
3. The Blanket Tunnel (Instinct Meets Innovation)
Drape a blanket over two chairs to create a low tunnel. Put a treat at the far end. Do not coach, do not point, do not narrate.
Just wait.
Most dachshunds go through this one like they were born for it, because they roughly were. The badger hunting heritage means tunnels feel like home rather than like a puzzle.
Making it harder
Once she nails the basic version, add a bend. Then add a second layer of blanket so she cannot see daylight at the exit.
A truly sharp dog commits to the dark tunnel anyway, because she has built a mental map and trusts it.
That is genuine spatial reasoning, and it is far more impressive than any sit or stay you will ever teach her.
4. The Frozen Treat Puzzle (Patience and Persistence)
Freeze a treat inside a small container of low sodium broth. Set it down. Walk away.
You are measuring two things: how long she works at it, and whether her strategy changes.
The unremarkable response is licking the ice for four minutes and giving up. The clever response is licking, then pawing, then picking the whole thing up, then dropping it on a hard floor to see what happens.
Persistence is measurable intelligence. The dog who tries a second approach after the first one fails is doing something a lot of dogs never do.
Track her total engagement time. Anything over six minutes with at least two different tactics puts her in genuinely bright territory.
5. The Name Recognition Challenge (Vocabulary Depth)
Sit on the floor with three toys your dachshund knows by name. If she does not know toys by name yet, teach two of them over a week and come back.
Ask for one specific toy. No pointing, no eye movement toward the right one, no leaning.
Dogs at the top of the vocabulary curve learn dozens of object names. The famous ones learn hundreds. Your dachshund probably lands somewhere modest, and that is fine, because the interesting metric is not how many but how fast she adds a new one.
The two week retest
Wait fourteen days without practicing. Then ask again.
Retention is the real signal. Learning a word in a session is common; still owning it two weeks later without reinforcement is not.
6. The Human Reading Test (Social Intelligence)
Stand in the kitchen holding nothing. Look at a cabinet. Say nothing at all.
Does your dachshund look at the cabinet too?
This is called gaze following, and it separates dogs who track human attention from dogs who only track human hands. It is one of the sharpest measures of social cognition we have for a domestic animal.
Level two: get your shoes out of the closet at a random hour and see whether she anticipates a walk versus a car ride versus you leaving without her.
A dachshund who can tell those three apart from context clues alone is reading you like a paperback.
Why this matters more than the puzzle tests
Dogs did not evolve alongside us by being good at cups and towels.
They got here by being unnervingly good at predicting what the tall primate is about to do next. Your dachshund’s ability to forecast your behavior is arguably her most sophisticated skill, and it is the one you notice least because it works so smoothly.
7. The Detour Problem (Impulse Control Versus Logic)
You will need a baby gate or a low barrier with a gap at one end.
Stand on the far side. Show her a treat through the barrier. Then hold still.
The impulsive response is scratching at the barrier directly in front of the treat. The intelligent response is turning away from the visible reward, walking to the gap, and coming around.
That turn away is genuinely hard. It requires overriding a very loud instinct in favor of a slower plan, and plenty of dogs never manage it without help.
Walking away from what you want in order to get what you want is the most human thing a dog can do.
Time it. Under 20 seconds is excellent. Under a minute is good. Repeated failure across several attempts usually means the treat is too exciting rather than the dog being slow, so try again with something more boring.
Scoring Your Dachshund (Sort Of)
Give one point for every challenge she handled well.
Five to seven points: you live with a strategist. Invest in better locks on the treat cabinet.
Three to four points: completely normal, thoroughly capable, occasionally selective about effort.
Zero to two points: either she is young, unmotivated, or she has correctly identified that none of this benefits her and has opted out.
That last category deserves defending, by the way.
Refusal is not the same as inability, and dachshunds are famous for the difference. The breed ranks low on traditional obedience intelligence scales precisely because those scales measure how quickly a dog does what it is told, which is a metric this breed treats as optional.
Running these tests without wrecking them
Keep every session under ten minutes. Stop while she is still interested rather than when she gets bored.
Never repeat the same challenge twice in one day, because she will remember the solution and you will be testing memory instead of reasoning.
And use high value rewards. Kibble will not cut it for a dog who was bred to fight badgers; you need cheese, chicken, or something that makes her forget you exist.
Run all seven over a few weeks, keep notes, and you will end up with something more useful than a score. You will end up understanding exactly which currency your particular dachshund accepts, which is the only real key to training this breed anyway.