Return with us now to the days of Buddy, the wonder dog, the hero of Caswell Lakes, who left thinking people struggling with a difficult question:

Are Alaska State Troopers this stupid, or do they think we are?

They certainly managed to sucker NBC's Brian Williams, ABC's George Stephanopoulos and more than a few other media types with the Buddy charade. Maybe half-term former Alaska Gov. Sarah Plain is right about that "lamestream media" stuff she's got goin' there.

Buddy, in case anyone has forgotten, is the dog who supposedly went to get a policeman after his owner sparked a disaster by washing truck parts in gasoline, leading to the inevitable ka-boom, the predictable fire, and Buddy's leap into stardom.

"I told him, 'We need to get help'," Buddy's 23-year-old owner, Ben Heinrichs, said at a press conference convened by the troopers three weeks after the fire. And Buddy got help, or so the story goes.

"This story is like the old TV series Lassie" is how anchorman Williams later reported it all.

Yoo-hoo, Brian, Lassie was fiction. Here in reality, dogs don't do abstract thought and higher order reasoning. They don't think like us. Brian Hare, a professor at the Canine Cognition Center at Duke University, thinks you probably knew that, but ran with the Buddy story anyway.

"They (Palin's lamestream media) just know that people love that stuff," said Hare, "That's all they care about."

I'm more charitable. I'm willing to believe NBC got snookered. In fact, as someone in the same business as Williams, Stephanopoulos and other media types who swallowed the Buddy story, I'm almost hoping this is the case. Ignorance here would seem preferable to a knowing decision to mislead.

"I hope that's true," Hare added. "I hope I'm wrong. I'd love to be wrong."

Hare, in case you didn't figure out from his title, studies the thinking of dogs at the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences. He has concluded dogs are in many ways smarter than people think, but they are not as smart as Buddy has been portrayed by troopers. Not even close.

"Is it that the dog had a plan?" Hare asked. "No. That's well beyond the realm of what a dog is capable of."

If you doubt this, let me suggest an experiment: Set your house on fire, and then send your dog to find the fire department.

No? Yeah, I thought so. That does sound crazy, doesn't it? And it is crazy. Buddy didn't save the Heinrichs house from the fire that started in the nearby workshop. The Willow and Sunshine volunteer fire departments saved the house after Ben's mom and a neighbor called 911 to report a blaze.

Weeks later, though, troopers decided to make a hero of Buddy, which brings us back to the original question: Are they that stupid or do they think we are?

"You're being the killjoy," Hare said. "The generous interpretation here is that in some ways people are right."

Or at least they're right to the extent Buddy did lead a trooper back to the Heinrichs' home. Hare was so busy with his research he never saw the dash-cam video the trooper shot of Buddy loping down the road to the Heinrichs' flaming workshop, but Hare said it's not hard to imagine an already nervous dog spooked by a car on a dark road running for the safest place it knows — home. Likewise, he said, it would be normal for a dog to get panicky and run away from a fire. If you know dogs, it's hard to argue the logic of any of that.

The shed was on fire. Buddy's owner was screaming and agitated. Buddy ran away. He got some distance from the house, settled down and started wondering what he was doing out on the road. Then a car startled him and he started running for home. But the car followed. It was a little unsettling for Buddy. He kept looking over his shoulder to see if the car was still chasing. And pretty soon the car was in his yard.

These are the events, it should be noted, that led Trooper Col. Audie Holloway to call a press conference in Anchorage to declare Buddy a "hero," "who for some reason recognized the severity of the situation and acted valiantly in getting help for his family."