Chaser_Unlocking the Genius of the Dog Who Knows a Thousand Words

by John W. Pilley

  Every fall I taught a course on scientific methods in psychology for non–science majors. As someone who came to science late after a first career in the ministry, I treated the course, an introduction to the principles of learning for both humans and animals, as an opportunity to inspire students to consider devoting themselves to scientific discovery. When it came to showing college students that science was an interesting place to be, Yasha was my secret weapon.

  During the first class of each semester, I entered the classroom with Yasha at my heels. As I dropped my briefcase on the desk at the front of the room, Yasha went around and introduced himself, tail wagging. His manner was less solicitous than it was bold and self-possessed, but as always I noticed the extra time and encouragement he gave shyer students, bowing his front legs, angling his body sideways, and tilting his head as he looked up at them in order to emphasize his desire to make friends.

  Having established a positive connection with each and every student, Yasha looked at me. I nodded with approval, and he climbed up and sat in the chair closest to the door. As the last-minute arrivals came in, Yasha climbed down to greet them. No student could pass without a successful let’s-get-acquainted moment, and I marveled as always at Yasha’s confident social intelligence.

  The bell in the tower of Main Building, familiarly known as Old Main, tolled eight a.m. I gave Yasha another nod. He sprang down from his seat, with its half-desk writing surface, to paw and nose the door shut. And then he climbed back up in his place and sat as if he were ready to start taking notes.

  “Hello,” I said. “I am Dr. Pilley, and the dog who greeted you is Yasha. He is half Border collie and half German shepherd. For anyone who doesn’t know about Yasha’s role in the course”—this elicited smiles and chuckles from the students, most if not all of whom had been attracted to the course, despite my relative stinginess with A’s, precisely because of what they’d heard about him—“he serves as my teaching assistant. If you graduate from working with human subjects in the first part of the course, Yasha will also serve as the subject for your individual and group research projects in the principles of learning. Whether he is a cooperative or uncooperative subject will depend on the relationships you build with him. Until then he will have other tasks in the class.”

  I paused, holding the students’ attention, and then turned to Yasha and said, “Yasha, if any students fall asleep in this class, nip them in the ankles.”

  He barked and nodded his head in reply, and the students giggled, a few of them a little nervously. I knew they’d probably heard some wild stories about Yasha and were wondering which ones to believe.

  In the fall semester I taught second-year psychology majors experimental methods employing both animals (rats and pigeons) and humans as subjects for experiments. In the spring I taught my favorite course, devoted to human and animal learning processes such as classical and operant conditioning. After much thought, I decided that I would continue to use rats, pigeons, and humans as the primary research subjects for my upper-level psychology courses—leaving the door open for some of the majors to work with dogs. So it was that Yasha officially became my research assistant.

  One course was set up so that students worked in groups of three or four to try to teach Yasha new behaviors, and then demonstrated the results to the rest of the class. This was so successful that I soon expanded the scope a bit by letting students use their own dogs, if they had them, as a few students who lived off-campus generally did. A couple of years later Sally got a purebred female German shepherd we named Grindle, who also became an experimental subject until arthritis made her infirm.

  To teach Yasha, Grindle, or their own dog a new behavior, the students had to employ classical conditioning and operant conditioning, the basics of learning for all creatures. In a nutshell, classical conditioning involves creating an association between two stimuli in order to elicit an involuntary response from an animal. Ivan Pavlov made the Pavlovian response famous by pairing the sound of a bell with the sight and smell of food, conditioning dogs to salivate in anticipation of a meal whenever they heard the bell. In operant conditioning an animal learns to associate a given voluntary behavior with a given consequence. Operational conditioning is at work when a rat or a pigeon in a Skinner box learns to press a lever to get food.

  Before my students graduated to working with dogs, they first had to do classical and operant conditioning experiments with people. This could mean conditioning a roommate to wear a particular shirt for days on end by saying how good it looked, conditioning another professor to end class before the bell rang by organizing other students to close their books five minutes early, or evoking some other behavior with a cue that the person involved didn’t recognize consciously.

  For example, students working in teams of two used positive reinforcement to motivate each other to give at least five compliments for each of the next five days to people on campus. In their written lab reports the students had to identify the ABCs of each compliment: the antecedent situation preceding the compliment, the behavior that was complimented, and the consequence of the compliment for both the giver and the receiver, as well as the specific reinforcement that each student used to motivate his or her partner to give the compliment. These ABCs are a good tool for analyzing the two ways to influence any behavior: altering the antecedent situation that triggers the behavior or the consequences that follow it.

  The first time I introduced this assignment, I asked the students to compliment the person sitting next to them. I then asked the class to share what they had learned from that. There was silence until a female student said, “I learned that the guys have a lot to learn about giving compliments.” That sparked laughter and several valuable comments, mostly by the women, such as that a compliment should be sincere, embody emotion, be something that you think is important to the other person, and refer to something that the person has done as opposed to an aspect of their personality or appearance. The last idea evoked a heated debate, always a good sign that a class is engaged.

  Students were often initially flummoxed about how to work with Yasha and Grindle. “Gee, Dr. Pilley,” they said, “Yasha and Grindle already know how to sit, lie down, stay, come, and all of that on cue.”

  “So think of a twist,” I said. “Think of getting them to do something they already know on a unique signal. Or think of something entirely new. This is your chance to be creative.”

  If students continued to have trouble starting to train, I steered them to Grindle and coached them in training her in a variation of a basic obedience behavior, such as sitting in response to another word besides “sit.” Grindle was much more patient than Yasha, who adopted a piercing, high-pitched bark when he wanted students to speed things up so he could earn a treat.

  Training a single behavior was just a prelude to the major training assignment, which was to teach one of the dogs to complete a chain of heterogeneous behaviors on a single command. The idea was to string together behaviors that a dog was very unlikely to emit in sequence naturally, such as walking a precise route and stopping to sit or lie down at designated locations, and put them all under stimulus control.

  Grindle and Yasha both learned impressively long behavior chains in this way. I don’t think Yasha ever forgot anything students taught him, but Grindle’s working drive and memory didn’t match his. Without continued repetition, she forgot much of what students had taught her the previous semester, especially over the summer break.

  One thing my students taught Grindle that she unfortunately never forgot was how to open doors with round doorknobs. Brass doorknobs throughout the Psychology Department were soon dented with Grindle’s tooth marks. The Maintenance Department had to replace the knob on my office door numerous times, owing to a big, powerful German shepherd twisting it around. Occasionally Grindle managed to click the catch on a door in such a way that she locked herself inside. A pair of brand-new boots, handmade in Spain, met an untimely end when Grindle locked hers
elf in Debbie’s room and had nothing to occupy her but chewing on some beautiful leather.

  Grindle taught herself to open the unlocked door of our Volkswagen Bug from the outside. No doubt she was inspired to do this by her success with round doorknobs. But it took cleverness for her to figure out how to push the pushbutton outside the handle of one of the Bug’s doors in order to pop it open. This caused us a lot of worry, because Grindle couldn’t open the door from the inside and could easily get trapped inside on a hot South Carolina day.

  There were occasionally other problematic results of the students’ interactions with Yasha and Grindle. For example, Yasha usually wandered around a little at the beginning of a class, unobtrusively soliciting treats from students who were working with him in my lab, and then settled down quietly in the back of the room. However, one day he interrupted my lecture three times with his unignorable high-pitched bark. Three times I corrected him. A few moments after the third “Hush, Yasha,” as I paused in my lecture, everyone heard a male student whisper, “Frisbee, Yasha. Frisbee.” Students will be students, and we all had a good laugh.

  There was also the time that one of my favorite students, Gervais Hollowell, and two of his classmates taught Grindle to answer the telephone in my office. I missed quite a few calls until Gervais and I solved the problem by putting the telephone on a cabinet where Grindle couldn’t reach it. However, Grindle was also picking up a ringing telephone at home. When I was somewhere in the house or out in the yard where I couldn’t get to the phone when it rang, I heard the ringing stop after three or four rings and assumed Sally had answered it. Meanwhile, she was often assuming the same thing. It could be hours before we found the phone off the hook. After we put it back, it inevitably started ringing with calls from friends or family members who had been trying to reach us and getting a permanent busy signal. It took a few weeks of not being rewarded for picking up a ringing telephone before Grindle began to forget about doing it.

  Yasha really had a remarkable memory. One year a student took him to the opposite side of the Wofford campus from my office and lab and put a Frisbee in a tree. A month later the student asked Yasha to find the Frisbee, and he took off like a shot straight for that tree.

  Over the years, Yasha also learned to pretend to jump over an invisible hurdle, balance a book on his back while walking, climb a ladder, and obey commands delivered by walkie-talkie, among numerous other behaviors.

  Yasha was so quick to learn new behaviors and solve new challenges that I wondered if I could teach him to understand words, specifically the names of objects. My procedure was to place two objects, such as a rope and a ball, on the floor about two feet apart. Standing a few feet from the objects, I randomly showed Yasha a rope or a ball identical to the ones on the floor and asked him to fetch the corresponding object. I reasoned that seeing the rope or ball in my hand and hearing me name it would enable Yasha to quickly associate the object and name and retrieve the correct object.

  Boy, was I wrong. After a hundred trials, Yasha failed to show any sign that he was learning to retrieve the objects by name. I modified our procedures over a dozen times, but still failed to produce positive results.

  My efforts with Yasha never got anywhere, but I always suspected that this was because my method was wrong. I believe Chaser’s success in language learning indicates this, because as bright as she is, I don’t think she is a whit smarter than Yasha was.

  In any case, Yasha continued to be a great teaching assistant and experimental subject for students. He had the freedom of the Wofford campus, although this occasionally raised a few eyebrows. One day a senior member of the campus security detail came to my office as I sat grading exams. This man was fondly known as Deputy Dawg for his success in solving campus thefts. He usually gave me a big smile whenever he saw me, but on this day he looked serious.

  “Where’s Yasha, Dr. Pilley?” Deputy Dawg asked.

  “I don’t rightly know at the moment,” I said. “He was here not too long ago, but then he wandered off. Is there a problem?”

  “Don’t you think it could be a problem having him wander everywhere he pleases, looking for mischief?”

  “Well, I . . .”

  A smile broke out on Deputy Dawg’s face. “I’m just funnin’ with you, Dr. Pilley. I remember when you first brought Yasha on campus as a puppy and he palled around with the dean’s old hound, who already had the run of the place. The truth is, I think it’s time we recognized Yasha’s presence officially, and I’ve brought you his faculty ID badge.”

  Deputy Dawg handed me a faculty ID card in a plastic case attached to a lanyard. It read, “Wofford College Faculty/Yasha/Teaching Assistant.”

  Deputy Dawg said, “I don’t expect Yasha to wear that, mind you. But you might want to keep it in a safe place. You never know when there might be a changing of the guard around here, and you’ll need to show some whippersnapper that Yasha’s official status precedes his.”

  We laughed over that, and I thanked him. Just then Yasha trotted in and, tail wagging, went up to Deputy Dawg for a pet.

  Deputy Dawg said, “I knew I’d be seeing you sooner or later, boy. Everybody knows that if Dr. Pilley is around, you’re bound to be close by.”

  It was true. If I drove to the grocery store for a gallon of milk, Yasha was in the front passenger seat. Unless Sally, Robin, Debbie, or another person was also along, in which case Yasha happily sat in the back.

  In hindsight, the match-to-sample method was not the best starting point for teaching Yasha the names of objects. Moreover, I failed to incorporate Yasha’s language training into our playful interactions as I had all of his prior training. I certainly wasn’t taking good advantage of his social intelligence. That had to be a critical mistake, because language is inherently a social activity.

  In 1990, ten-year-old Grindle became seriously infirm from arthritis, and she passed away that year. Sally took it especially hard, but the whole family mourned the loss of Grindle’s big heart and calm, soothing presence.

  A friend of mine says, “If you get a pet, eventually you get a broken heart.” The relatively short life spans of our pets cause us a lot of grief, but they also ground us in a natural cycle of life and death and, if we can accept it, renewal. The spirit of our relationship with one pet lives on in and shapes the spirit of our relationship with another pet, even years later.

  I thought I knew that after our family’s experiences with our first dog, Fluffy, a collie Sally rescued when she was pregnant with Robin, and then with Bimbo and Grindle. But I still had a lot to learn about loss and renewal.

  Border collies often work sheep until they are fourteen or even fifteen years old. Yasha was so vigorous for so long that I found it hard to accept when he began to slow down dramatically. Through the fall semester of 1993 he faithfully and effectively served as teaching assistant and research subject. But at the beginning of the spring semester, I saw that Yasha no longer had the energy to go to Wofford and be at my side day in and day out. I began leaving him home, and our reunions every day were bittersweet.

  One cold day in March I sensed something was wrong as soon as I came in the door. “Yasha,” I called, and then, raising my voice, because at sixteen years of age Yasha was a little deaf, “Yasha! I’m home.”

  The low whimpers that came back cut through me. I followed the sounds and found Yasha lying on the rug in our first-floor bedroom. “I’ve left you alone too long, haven’t I, boy?” I said as I knelt down beside him and stroked his head. Sally was in New York City visiting Debbie, and no one else was in the house.

  Yasha relaxed under my touch. Looking into his trusting brown eyes and seeing his indomitable spirit flashing there, I asked myself if it was time to let him go. I couldn’t let myself think that it was.

  “C’mon, Yasha. Let’s get you some water, and some food, if you want it.” I got to my feet and half turned to the door. Yasha strained to get to his feet, but he couldn’t. When I’d left the house a few hours earlie
r, he’d still been able to get up and walk around.

  When I bent down to pick Yasha up, feeling how thin he was gave me another wrench. I carried him into the kitchen, then knelt down with him cradled in my arms so that he could drink a few sips of water. I carried him to the living room couch and sat down beside him, scratching behind his ears. He lifted his head and looked at me with utter trust, then lowered his head to his paws and fell into a light doze. While he slept, I convinced myself it was not yet time to let him go. When he stirred awake intermittently and I saw him become aware of his discomfort, my heart sank. Around ten o’clock, Yasha woke up and started panting. He was suffering, and I knew I couldn’t let that continue any longer. I called the emergency animal clinic to make sure a vet was on duty, then I wrapped Yasha in a blue blanket against the cold and carried him out to my pickup truck. It was only a ten-minute drive, and every second of the way I wished it was longer.

  The vet examined Yasha and agreed with me that it was time to help him on his way. He gave Yasha a sedative and then an injection to stop his heart. It was almost more than I could stand to see the light go out of Yasha’s eyes. Back home, I carried Yasha, still wrapped in the blue blanket from shoulder to tail, into the bedroom and put him on top of the bed. Fully clothed with my shoes still on, I lay down beside him and turned out the light.

  The next morning I went slowly about the house in a daze, picking up and putting down Yasha’s toys: various Frisbees, all of them chewed around the edges, especially his favorite yellow one, and a stuffed rabbit with one eye and torn ears that Sally had mended over and over again. I was in no hurry for what came next. But it had to be done. I got a shovel and went out behind the house to where Grindle was buried. It was a grassy spot shaded by three oaks and a pine. Turning back to face the house, which I’d built myself in a log cabin style, I remembered how Yasha had followed me up the ladder one day when I was finishing the roof and I’d had to carry him back down.