Chaser_Unlocking the Genius of the Dog Who Knows a Thousand Words

by John W. Pilley

  At this point, I asked Aidan to go back to his seat and I called Chaser over to me. Then I said, “Chaser, find Mongrel.” Chaser found Mongrel among the toys. And then I asked her to find other familiar toys by the names she’d learned for them. She found them all without a glitch, ignoring the unfamiliar object and demonstrating that she had no baseline preference for novelty. After each trial with a familiar toy, we put it back in the pile and jumbled all the toys up again.

  Finally I said, “Chaser, find Woosh. Find Woosh.”

  Chaser went over to the toys and looked them over carefully. She pawed them a bit, and then bent down and picked up the red plastic coin purse.

  “Yes! Good girl, Chaser! Good girl! Chaser, bring Woosh. Bring Woosh.”

  She brought the red purse over to me and dropped it in the bin.

  The kids loved that, and they gave Chaser their biggest cheers. She responded with body wiggles and tail wags, ears up, eyes wide open, tongue lolling out of her mouth—all signs of how pleased she was to win the kids’ attention and affection. Then I said it was unfortunately time for us to leave and suggested that everyone come to the front of the room and have their picture taken with Chaser. Chaos erupted, and the children crowded so tightly around Chaser that she couldn’t be seen. She didn’t mind. She loved being petted and stroked by the children. But the chaos had to end, and Mrs. Tapper and Mrs. Scarlato good-humoredly restored order and arranged the children around Chaser for a photograph.

  My last words to the class were to remind them that play was Chaser’s reward. I told them that they should always reward their dogs for good behavior by playing with them and petting and praising them. We all learn better and faster when learning is fun.

  A couple of days later, before Sally and I drove home to South Carolina with Chaser, Aidan came home from school with giant thank-you cards that he and his classmates had made, each with a drawing of Chaser and a signature. One little boy put himself in the picture with Chaser, giving himself a big red heart for a body and big stars for eyes. It was such an eloquent way of saying that he loved Chaser and she was a star in his eyes. A little girl drew a smiling Chaser with her toys, giving her a gold “Chaser” nametag on a pink collar that matched the pink of the insides of her ears. It was really touching to receive all of the children’s drawings.

  Throughout the classroom demonstration, Chaser had been in her element. Finding objects, herding them, learning new objects and names, interacting with the children—in all these things Chaser was expressing her intensely social nature, a characteristic that all domestic dogs share in different ways, as well as her strong Border collie instincts and drives. Her unprecedented language learning rests on these two factors and on the relationship that Sally and I have built with her around them.

  Together the three of us have gone on a journey of discovery we could never have anticipated. I had been retired for eight years when Chaser came into our family and reawakened my passion for discovery—really, reawakened me as a person as well as a scientist. But Chaser was not my first Border collie, and not the first dog to be my co-investigator and research assistant. Twenty years before Chaser, there was Yasha.

  2

  Goodbye

  I CANNOT TELL CHASER’S story without first telling Yasha’s story. Yasha was as pivotal as Chaser in my efforts to understand canine intelligence. A brilliant and adventurous Border collie–German shepherd mix, Yasha was—outside of Sally, Debbie, and our other daughter, Robin—my best friend for sixteen years. Where I went, Yasha went. A faithful companion, he taught me infinitely more than I taught him.

  Yasha joined the Pilley family late in the spring of 1978, taking up residence in our two-story, three-bedroom home in Spartanburg, South Carolina, just a few miles from Wofford College, where I’d been a psychology professor since 1969. Bimbo, our big, floppy-eared red and brown German shepherd mix, had recently passed away from old age and cancer. Rough-and-tumble if need be, but a sweetheart in the family, Bimbo had ridden shotgun on Robin and Deb’s horseback riding adventures growing up, and we all missed him. The girls were settling into summer jobs after their latest college semesters, and they complained that things weren’t the same without a dog to liven things up. We’d always had a dog in the family, and both girls were begging us to get a new puppy.

  Sally knew I’d become more and more intrigued by Border collies since I’d met the local breeder and trainer Wayne West a few years earlier. Their problem-solving ability and receptiveness to complex sequences of verbal commands fascinated me.

  When she was at the office of Rice McFee, our longtime vet, writing out a check to pay off the bill for Bimbo’s care, she half scolded, half teased him: “You haven’t forgotten about us, have you? Remember, you have to tell us if you know of any good puppies being available.”

  Rice McFee’s face went blank for a second, then lit up with a huge smile. “As a matter of fact, Doug Chappell’s Border collie just had a litter of puppies. They are a mixed breed, so he’s not sure who the daddy is, but I understand a neighbor’s German shepherd is the likeliest candidate, or culprit,” he said with another smile. “In any case, they are ready to be weaned, and I bet you can go over right now.”

  When I came home a couple of hours later, I found Robin and Deb playing with a little brown and white ball of fur with legs. My entrance immediately attracted the puppy’s attention. Tail wagging, he trotted over to me to say hello, and I knelt down to pet him. I lifted him up and held him close to my face, responding to his face licks with kisses and soft coos.

  Robin said, “His name should be Jascha, Dad.”

  Debbie chimed in, “We’re already calling him that, so you will just confuse him if you change it.”

  Jascha, the girls explained, was for Jascha Heifetz, whose recording of Mendelssohn’s violin concerto was a family favorite. But I have a tendency to misspell names, especially when it comes to our family pets. “He looks like a Yasha,” I said, and the name stuck.

  Sally sidled up to give me a hug. With a grin she asked, “What do you think?”

  “I think he’s wonderful. You chose the pick of the litter, babe,” I said, giving her a squeeze.

  Although we all wanted the puppy, I was the one with the most time to devote to him over the next few weeks. Sally had to be at the hospital early every morning for her head nurse shift in the critical care department, and in addition to starting their summer jobs on the right foot, the girls were busy reconnecting with old friends. Rather than leave the puppy alone for long stretches, I took him with me to my lab at Wofford.

  Eight-week-old Yasha was the brightest puppy I had ever encountered. He picked up the basic obedience commands as if he’d always known them. He was also eager to engage with people and quickly made himself at ease with strangers. The dean of Wofford at that time had an old hound dog who went anywhere he pleased, and he became Yasha’s canine guide to the campus.

  A few weeks after Yasha joined the family, Sally and I were due to leave on a three-week trip to Eastern Europe. The timing was unfortunate. Neither of us wanted to tear ourselves away from our new puppy. As our departure date approached, I started prepping the girls with work that I wanted them to do with Yasha while Sally and I were gone. Robin and Debbie were sure to take good care of him, but I didn’t want his training to lapse. I gave the girls strict instructions to continue his early obedience work and teach him something new every day.

  The trip behind what was still the Iron Curtain was incredible. But it was great to get home to Spartanburg and reunite with Robin, Debbie, and Yasha. I didn’t waste any time in asking the girls, “Did you teach Yasha something new every day?”

  Brunette, hazel-eyed Robin and blond, blue-eyed Deb shared a smirk, displaying the high cheekbones they inherited from Sally and the dimples they got from my mother, and replied, “We taught him a lot!”

  The girls gave us a performance of Yasha’s new repertoire. Most of their teaching ended up being what David Letterman refers to as �
�stupid pet tricks.” Yasha was so eager and fast to learn that the girls quickly started teaching undignified tasks such as “crawl,” “grovel,” “get that flea,” “cry,” “get your tail,” and “sneeze.”

  “Very impressive,” I said dryly. Sally chuckled and I had to repress my own laugh. In hindsight, I should have been more specific about the obedience training I wanted Robin and Debbie to give Yasha. In elementary school the girls’ usual afterschool routine meant coming to my lab, where they did their homework and played with the rats and pigeons until it was time to go home for supper. They’d both done animal training experiments for science projects. On top of that, Robin had become a psychology major, and she was well versed in operant conditioning, which essentially means finding a behavior the animal already does, naming it, and then reinforcing it, thus bringing it under “stimulus control.” So Robin and Deb had caught Yasha in the middle of sneezing or scratching and then named and reinforced the behavior so that he now did it on command.

  Robin knelt down in front of Yasha. Leaning forward slightly as she spoke, she said, “Yasha, what’s two plus two?”

  Yasha quickly gave four sharp barks. I said, “Nice—so he knows how to bark to four.”

  Robin ignored me and spoke to him again, very slowly and deliberately. Yasha sat in front of her, his ears at attention, as she said, “Yasha, what’s five plus two?” This time, seven sharp barks answered. Robin ran through several other little sums, and Yasha gave the correct number of barks every time.

  I smiled widely and said, “Impressive. How are you doing it?” I knew this was an example of a Clever Hans effect, an issue in all animal learning experiments and something I’ll explore later. Robin teased me for a bit, declaring that she had successfully taught Yasha the rules of addition and was going to teach him subtraction next. Finally she fessed up that she leaned forward a little to cue Yasha that the command to speak—“Yasha, what’s . . .”—was coming. When she wanted him to stop barking, she leaned back and said, “Good dog!” Yasha didn’t really know how to add. He simply read Robin’s body language and barked until she cued him to stop. His skill at arithmetic always entertained the girls’ friends, but it wasn’t on my shortlist to teach my new puppy.

  I grumbled a bit about Robin and Debbie’s not having taught Yasha useful things such as the American Kennel Club (AKC) obedience exercises. I’d started him on the novice exercises before going to Eastern Europe. But the girls’ mischievousness showed that Yasha had a flair for learning new behaviors. That was intriguing.

  Genetically, as a Border collie, Yasha was an incredibly quick learner. By his eighth month of life, he had learned all the novice and open class obedience exercises of the American Kennel Club and was working on the utility exercises.

  As a German shepherd, Yasha was fearless. One day when he was a little over a year old, I went with members of Wofford College’s Adventure Club to canoe a few stretches of rapids on the Green River, only about an hour’s drive from the Wofford campus. I had become a keen paddler since we moved to South Carolina, and introduced many students to white-water canoeing and kayaking through the Adventure Club. Running class three, four, and five rapids on rivers in the Southeast was a passion of mine, and kayaking the Grand Canyon one year was a thrilling high point.

  On this beautiful spring day, Sally and Debbie came along to run shuttle for us, dropping us off at the put-in point upstream and meeting us at the take-out point downstream. Yasha was along as well, full of excitement. He was getting near his full size, but still very much a puppy in temperament. It was not his first trip to the river, but until now he’d mainly only splashed in shallow pools. What swimming he had experienced was in flat, calm water, and although he seemed to love getting wet, he was a weak swimmer at best. So we weren’t expecting him to work on his dog paddle that day.

  Along a stretch of the river called Big Corky, the rapids drop fifteen feet over a distance of about a hundred yards, and are rated class three—“Intermediate.” Sally and Debbie walked Yasha down to the bank to watch us navigate that section. I was three-fourths of the way through the rapids when Yasha leaped excitedly into the water. He had never seen me paddle through white water before and he was eager to join me.

  As soon as the current caught him he knew he was somewhere he didn’t want to be, and he paddled with all his might, flailing furiously, trying to get back toward Sally and Debbie. Still a growing puppy, Yasha didn’t have the strength to get across the current. A whirling eddy sucked him under. He popped back up, struggling to make headway, clawing at the water.

  Coming through the last bit of rapids, I threw my paddle into the center of the canoe, grabbed the gunwales, and vaulted out into the water. I gripped the bow of the canoe with my left hand and with my right hand reached out for Yasha, who was just getting sucked down again. I caught the scruff of his neck, hooked my fingers in his collar, and lifted his head above the water. And then I kicked furiously with all my might, levering down on the bow of the canoe with my left hand to buoy Yasha and me up. A few more kicks and we were in quiet water where I could stand up and Deb waded in to lend a hand.

  Yasha shook himself furiously. He was panting hard, but his breathing soon evened out and his dominant emotion seemed to be intense excitement. A few minutes later he was splashing around in the shallows, diving for rocks. From that time on, whenever Yasha saw me put the canoe or kayak on the roof of the car, he was raring to go. We didn’t want to take chances with him, so Robin sewed a life vest, packed with pieces of flotation foam, that we made him wear whenever he came on the river with me.

  Throughout his life, Yasha exulted in clambering rocky riverbanks, nails scratching on the wet rock, and in going swimming with me. It wasn’t all that long after his misadventure at Big Corky that he was impatiently watching several students and me body surf the Chattooga River at the bottom of a rapid called Bull Sluice, where the waves were harmless and void of any danger. I was just jumping off when a student hollered, “Dr. Pilley! Dr. Pilley!” I hit the water and spun myself around in time to witness Yasha jumping off the six-foot boulder after me. Thus was born his unquenchable thirst for body surfing.

  Only one other activity appealed to him as powerfully—Frisbee play. Bring out a ball and he might simply lie down. Bring out a Frisbee and he erupted into excited barks, jumps, and tornado-fast spins. Whether the Frisbee was thrown directly to him or to his side, Yasha always leaped forward in anticipation of it—the mark of an elite athlete. For the first four or five catches, his return for another throw was rapid. However, after the fifth or sixth throw, mouthing the Frisbee triggered his chewing instinct. No amount of soft or hard recalling could overpower this behavior, an example of what animal scientists call instinctive drift.

  Instinctive drift must not be punished. The best way to inhibit an undesirable instinct is to trigger a competing, more powerful instinct. Fortunately I learned that sailing another Frisbee to Yasha made him drop the first Frisbee in order to catch the second one. I also learned that if I ran toward him, he cleverly nested the two Frisbees together upside down and then ran away with both of them in his mouth. I continued this experiment with more Frisbees and discovered that Yasha could nest as many as six Frisbees together and hold them in his mouth while playing keep-away. Of course, my pace of running was quite slow, to give him time to nest the Frisbees together, but fast enough to motivate his possessive instinct.

  Yasha’s enormous energy, boundless curiosity, and quick learning—not unique to Border collies, of course, but so typical of them—made me think he would be the perfect subject for animal learning experiments with my students. Until then, my research and teaching as a psychology professor at Wofford College had involved rats and pigeons in Skinner boxes, named for B. F. Skinner, the influential behavioral psychologist. A Skinner box is an enclosure in which the animal learns to press a lever or perform some other behavior to get a food reward.

  The experiments produced interesting, statistically significan
t data, but nothing earth shattering. Never what I was always looking for: an aspect or principle of animal learning that could be generalized to all learning. That was my quest after I left the Presbyterian ministry and found my true calling as a research psychologist and a college teacher. Entering graduate school in psychology at the age of thirty-six, with two young daughters, was only possible for me because of Sally’s belief that I should follow my passion to understand more about learning. We were “as poor as Job’s turkey,” to quote Sally, and for a few years her work as a nurse was our main source of income. But she never complained, and those were happy times for all of us.

  In addition to their role in my research, the rats and pigeons in my lab were subjects in countless student experiments. Yasha’s rapid learning, in tandem with the long-evolved social bond between dogs and people, offered me an alternative. I was fascinated by the canine intelligence that made the dog-human bond possible and led to the astonishing variety of roles that dogs take on as working and service animals and pets. Border collies’ capacity for learning, which I observed in herding trials and demonstrations, particularly impressed me, and I hoped that animal learning studies with a Border collie would be more likely to produce data that could be generalized to all learning. Even more important, I figured that my students and I could have a lot more fun with a Border collie than with rats and pigeons.

  Yasha exceeded my wildest expectations. He quickly became not just a subject for student experiments but my full-fledged teaching assistant. If my students and I didn’t discover something new about learning with Yasha, it wasn’t because of any lack of capacity on his part.