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Oliver Dunn Data Analyst

Oliver Dunn

Data Analyst & Pet Science Researcher

📐 Data-Driven Analysis 🧪 Comparative Cognition 📊 Research Methodology 🐾 Pet Intelligence

About Oliver

Oliver Dunn's path into pet science started in data, not animals. After studying statistics and cognitive science, he spent his early career working in behavioral research labs, building datasets and running analyses for studies on learning, memory, and decision-making. It was only when a colleague asked him to help analyze a large-scale canine cognition dataset that he realized the questions he found most interesting were the ones about animals — specifically, the question of how we measure intelligence in creatures that can't take a test.

That question became the foundation of his work. Over the past seven years, Oliver has focused on the methodology behind pet intelligence claims: what the data actually says, where the gaps are, and how popular narratives about "smart" and "dumb" breeds often misrepresent the underlying research. He is deeply skeptical of simple rankings and deeply interested in the nuances they flatten — the difference between adaptive intelligence and obedience, between problem-solving and social cognition, between what a breed was designed to do and what we ask it to do in a living room.

At The Cosmic Pet, Oliver writes the analytical and methodology-focused articles. His pieces tend to ask the questions that other writers take for granted: What does "pet IQ" actually measure? Can pointing comprehension tell us something real about a dog's cognitive architecture? What do tower tests reveal about how cats think? His writing is careful, evidence-based, and occasionally contrarian — he is the team member most likely to push back on a claim that sounds too clean to be true.

Oliver also contributes zodiac-themed personality profiles, bringing his characteristic precision to a format that benefits from it. His dog and pet-owner profiles are notable for their specificity: instead of broad generalizations, they draw on documented behavioral patterns and temperament data to build portraits that feel grounded even within an astrological framework. Readers consistently note that his profiles feel unusually accurate, which Oliver attributes not to the stars but to the behavioral data that informs them.

When he's not writing, Oliver maintains an open-source spreadsheet of breed cognition studies that he updates quarterly, and he occasionally consults for animal welfare organizations on how to interpret behavioral assessment data. He considers himself a translator — someone who sits between the research and the public and tries to make the handoff as honest as possible.

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His animals

Oliver lives with Byte, a five-year-old Pembroke Welsh Corgi whose herding instincts manifest primarily as an obsession with organizing shoes by the front door, and Pixel, a domestic shorthair cat who has, according to Oliver's own tracking spreadsheet, learned to open exactly four different types of door latches.

Articles by Oliver