'Good girl!' Florida dog can do math, like add, subtract and calculate square roots

Melliana was on a hot streak.

With a primo blackjack hand … well, maybe a paw ... of 20, the 3-year-old dog knew it was time to hold ‘em.

“Does Mellie want a card?” owner Mark Bello asked.

Her answer: An emphatic no.

“Because that’s 20 and that’s a good hand,” he said. “She knows. She knows.”

Sure, a card-playing Labrador retriever might raise eyebrows and doubts, but Bello, a Fort Myers contractor, is ready to meet them head-on. The dog is just that special, and he wants the world to see that.

What started as a surprise gift for his wife has launched Bello on a journey he says he could never have anticipated.

“The dog is a phenomenon,” he says. Blackjack is just the beginning. Addition, subtraction, square roots – she does it all, Bello says, including spelling words with an alphabet-to-digit translating white board.

Raising her paw to pat her owner’s knee, Mellie taps the corresponding number of each letter to spell words. “Babe” (as in Babe Ruth, whose batting average Bello says she also knows) would be two pats for the letter B, one for A, two more for B and five for E. She also barks once for yes or twice for no.

On a recent afternoon, Bello brought his pup to The News-Press’ studio for a photo shoot, putting her through her paces with the occasional pause for kisses. She’s a naturally charismatic performer – a sleek, eager-to-please creature, quick with a whole-body wag and wide doggy grins.

In short order, Bello had her answering math equations, spelling answers to questions – “If I ask her what she wants for dinner, she will invariably spell out STEAK"  – and playing cards.

 “Good girl,” Bello says each time she answers correctly, which is almost always, offering a crunchy treat from a plastic bag he keeps handy. He swears it’s all her, that he’s not somehow touching her, blinking or signaling when she’s gotten something right.

And indeed, there don’t seem to be any obvious (or even not-so-obvious) human-to-dog cues.

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However, even something as subtle as a change in respiration might let a dog know when a correct answer has been reached, said researcher Zachary Silver, a graduate student with Yale University’s Canine Cognition Center.  “Because of the way that dogs have evolved, partially through their domestication history, and then also partially due to the experiences dogs have throughout their life span, living with humans as part of their natural environment, they are very, very good at following cues from us.”

In fact, Silver said, “They’re so good at that, sometimes we don’t even know we’re giving off those cues, but the dogs are still picking up on them … What could be happening is the owner may be exhibiting some body language signs, maybe some change in his breathing pattern or something that he’s consciously unaware of that’s signaling when to stop barking or when to stop giving her paw.”

Bello insists this is pure talent, not trickery.

He noticed his 8-week-old puppy’s gifts immediately after buying her from a central Florida breeder as a surprise for his wife.

“I hadn’t even had her half a day, and I said to her, ‘I love you’ and she barked three times.” Next, he said, “ ‘I love Daddy,’ (she) barked four times,” he says, “And so on. I’d had the dog 12 hours maybe and she’s doing this.

By the end of the week, Bello said, he could ask “How many fingers am I holding up?’ and she barked that many times. At ten-and-a-half to 11 weeks, I’d say ‘How many this plus this?’" and she would bark out the answers, he says.

As for learning the difference between addition and subtraction, he says, “She just picked it up. I just showed her a couple of times, a little repetition of course … and it just lodged in her head and there you go. At four-and-a-half months, she was doing flash cards. At a year and a half, we won Bass Pro Shop’s best dog trick contest. And it just goes on.”

Now, Bello is on a mission to show the world his extraordinary pet. That is, when things open up again post-COVID.

Bello knows convincing people of the 3-year-old’s abilities may be a tough sell. “People don’t want to hear this … They don’t want to accept this. It’s not an easy road, because when you get on the phone and say, ‘Hey I’ve got a dog that’s doing math, square roots and what have you, nobody’s listening to that. Click. I was hung up on twice by Harvard University, trying to get in touch with Dr. Irene Pepperberg (an animal cognition scientist focusing on parrots of 'Alex and Me' fame).”

He’s not letting that stop him.

 “She’s unique in that she’s the only one doing this. I’ve searched the internet over,“ he says. “Some dogs have the ability to think on a higher level, just like people. I mean there’s Albert Einstein and then there’s people who barely get out of bed in the morning.”

Last year, he asked Arizona educator Elba Iris Reyes, a PhD in language and cognitive development, to spend some time with Mellie. After two hours with the dog, Reyes wrote she found her “amazing in her overall cognitive abilities, especially in the areas of math and memory skills … (she) can solve math functions including problems with algebra of multiple operations and responds correctly within seconds. She spells, reads, and remembers everything she has been taught.”

In her written summary of the encounter, Reyes admits she initially found Bello’s claims hard to believe “until I experienced Melliana for myself. I looked for the tricks, for her owner’s cuing and for other behaviors that would indicate that Melliana was not acting on her own. What I found after several hours of interacting with her is that Melliana possesses abilities that are unprecedented in any animal.”

Reyes would “encourage experts in the field of animal behavior, particularly in the study of the development of language and thinking abilities in non-humans to observe Melliana.”

So far, Bello has taken Melliana to a few birthday parties and holiday gatherings, but that’s just a warm-up for the big time, he says. The goal is to get her on TV, maybe the morning shows, maybe the evening shows. And he’d like a canine cognition scientist to spend some quality time with her, especially to watch her doing math, something researcher Silver admits has been little-studied. 

"The reality is we actually don’t know very much about how dogs perceive numbers. This is an area that’s certainly in its early stages – canine cognition in general is a fairly young field," said Silver, the Yale expert. "So our understanding of canine numerical cognition is fairly limited, though it seems unlikely that they’d be able to be computing mathematical expressions.

“But you know, maybe there’s a dog here that’s really exceptional," Silver said. "Anything’s possible."