He has appeared on the
National Geographic Channel’s
Dog Genius show. On the show, he is shown arranging some of his 80 plush toys into evenly spaced triangles and lines, and chooses to use, for example, only stuffed frogs or monkeys for a particular design. He is shown creating his arrangements in his large yard in
Maryland on remote video cameras without humans being present. He is even said to create social vignettes with the toys. For example, the day after he first allowed his owner to put her arm around him, he placed a large bear with its arm around a smaller frog. Dr.
Barbara Smuts, a professor of
psychology and specialist in
animal behavior at the
University of Michigan who studied Donnie and captured his activities on
video, suggests that these behaviors may be linked to self-entertainment, or to past experiences such as his time spent in a
shelter for a year with only a single toy. In her view, there have not been enough examples of behavior like Donnie's, to decide scientifically what they may mean. ==See also==