Boss Radio

So there was this dog on TV and it could count. In fact it could do anything arithmetical that you cared to put to it provided the answer was within the realm of its ability to answer, which means 0 to 6 basically. Naturally it was a trick just like any other trick, it's just that no one had yet worked out how it was done.

The programme makers had bought an animal behaviourist to study the dog to see if he could crack it. He carefully explained why it was impossible for a dog to solve numberic problems and set to proving it. The dog had him beat every time. It ran the gamut from 1+2 and 12-7 right through to the cube root of 81. In the entire programme it only got one answer wrong, but it couldn't answer if it's owner wasn't in the room.

The owner was an animal trainer for the movies, which has to send alarm bells ringing, but she was good. She really seemed to believe that she had a magic dog here, after all it did appear to be several degrees smarter than all her other animals. The behaviourist set a series of questions, slowly moving the trainer away as the programme makers posed the questions. When she was finally out of sight behind a closed door the dog stopped answering.

The behaviourist was satisfied. The dog wasn't answering the questions, he was getting the answers from the trainer. So how, asked the presenter, was the trick worked? The dog was answering even when the trainer's back was turned and no amount of high res slomo tape replays revealed so much as a twitching eyebrow. The behaviourist said he didn't know, the animal was probably reading its trainer's mind somehow, the important thing was, it wasn't doing maths.

Probably reading its trainer's mind?

Am I alone in thinking that that would be even more amazing than if it were doing 6th year arithmetic?