Chaser_Unlocking the Genius of the Dog Who Knows a Thousand Words

by John W. Pilley

  The devotion of Border collies to a beloved master is so well documented that it cannot be called merely anecdotal evidence. David imported his dog Roy, then three years old, from northern England, where a shepherd had raised and trained him from the time he was weaned from his mother. David told me, “There are so many instances where a shepherd has been out with a dog, and maybe because of extreme weather conditions, an accident, or some illness the shepherd falls unconscious or dies. And when that shepherd is found, he may be covered with three feet of snow, but the dog would be laying right there with him. After I got Roy, he laid back in the kennel for three weeks and would not work at all. He would eat and drink, but he wouldn’t work. He had to finish grieving for his old master before he could accept the idea of working for me.”

  A dog can have trouble adjusting to a new master for practical reasons, as well. In the late 1990s Wayne West imported a dog named Ben from one of the most respected breeder-trainers in Scotland. However, Ben just would not work for Wayne. Despite all his experience, Wayne was flummoxed. The man who sold Ben didn’t know what the problem could be either. Eventually he and Wayne guessed that it might be a question of accent. Several days later, Wayne received a cassette tape on which Ben’s previous owner had recorded the standard Border collie commands in his thick Scottish brogue. Wayne told me, “You know I can’t carry a tune, so I wasn’t sure how I’d do. But I listened to that tape and imitated it for hours. When I took the dog out and worked him after that, he fulfilled every command faster than you can say Jack Robinson.”

  I got a chance to witness Wayne working with Ben. His South Carolina twang imitating the Scottish brogue made everyone but Ben laugh. Wayne didn’t sound remotely like a Scotsman, but he reproduced the inflections well enough so that Ben finally understood him. Ben was as happy about that as Wayne. He had been bored stiff from inactivity. He wanted nothing more than to work sheep and fulfill himself as a Border collie. I was happy about Wayne’s finally being able to bond with Ben at the time, and even happier a few years later when we got Chaser, because Ben was her daddy.

  Along the same lines, David said, “Probably the best female Border collie I ever had was Pat. If I was talking to some people, Pat came and sat down by me. She looked from one person to another as they spoke in turn. She focused so intently on the person who was speaking and listened so attentively to whatever they were saying that it was just like she was part of the conversation.”

  The Border collie’s sensitivity to human speech was one of many traits that I expected Chaser to display. But as I’ve mentioned, I wasn’t prepared for the extent of that sensitivity. Seeing Chaser’s reaction to variations in tone of voice made me much more aware of the tone I adopted, not just in speaking to her, but in all my conversations with Sally and others.

  Border collies’ sensitivity to the human voice complements one of their most remarkable instinctual gifts, the “eye.” Uniquely among dogs, Border collies often control and move livestock simply through the power of eye contact—their “Svengali gaze,” as an August 31, 1953, Time magazine article on Arthur Allen put it. A Border collie’s “eye” on the stock can be loose, overbearing, or a happy medium. The “eye” is genetically constrained, and this trait fades out when Border collies are crossbred with other breeds.

  Wayne West first told me about the Border collie’s ability to give “an eye to the sheep and an ear to the farmer.” The best dogs can win a battle of wills with unruly stock just by “putting that stare on them,” in David Johnson’s words. I saw this when Wayne worked his own dogs or put on exhibitions with David and other Border collie people. Arthur Allen wrote that his dog Nickey “had the strongest glare in his eyes . . . [and] was the most fearless and forceful without grip of any dog I have ever worked.” The same dog who was so tender with a child’s pet chipmunk could even herd a mountain lion with his “Svengali gaze.” Disney’s Arizona Sheepdog features scenes with a mountain lion. Both Wayne and David told me how during filming, the mountain lion’s trainer relied on Nick to herd the big cat into his cage.

  Like her extreme sensitivity to tone of voice, Chaser’s own “eye” was something I had to get used to. Early on I often thought that she wasn’t paying any attention to me at all when I spoke to her about something I wanted her to do. As soon as I started to give her an instruction, she lay down and never looked directly at me. I had to remind myself that Arthur Allen said, “I like a dog that will listen for orders and give me his ear and only the slightest glance of his eye.”

  Today when Chaser and I do exhibitions, people regularly comment that she seems to ignore everything but my voice. In blind experiments, as they’re called, when Chaser can’t see me or another person who might be giving her instructions, she does indeed respond to voice alone. But on other occasions, she sees me and my gestures with a slight glance of her peripheral vision. She aims her strong “eye” on the balls and other toys that have become her surrogate sheep.

  The teaching wisdom and field reports of those who spend their lives working with Border collies are resources that animal science needs to appreciate more fully. Above all, researchers need to pay heed, as John Staddon urged, to the way great Border collie trainers recruit the power of instinct to foster a dog’s creative problem-solving ability. In that spirit let me close this chapter with a saying of Arthur Allen’s that I have found valuable in all my interactions with Chaser: “Try to make it a fifty-fifty proposition of you trying to understand your dog while your dog is trying to understand you.”

  8

  Learning by Playing

  “CHASER! THIS IS BLUE.”

  On my knees, I roll the blue racquetball toward her on the living room floor with no other toys anywhere in sight. As Chaser takes the ball in her mouth I repeat “Blue,” the name of the ball. She begins to chew on it as I crawl toward her. When I’m close enough to reach out and grab the ball, she runs away, then turns and looks at me, wagging her tail and grinning.

  In Chaser’s first two months with Sally and me, she’s demonstrated that she loves racquetballs, which happen to be blue in color, because they are so light and bouncy and feel so good in her mouth. And if I’m chasing her to get a racquetball, it must be very valuable. That makes playing keep-away with it exciting, fun, and, I hope, memorable.

  “Blue,” I whisper as I again reach for the ball. She darts just out of range again. Turning to look at me and wagging her tail in delight, she drops the ball accidentally and chases its bounces across the room.

  Each time she takes the ball in her mouth I repeat its name: “Blue. That’s Blue, girl, Blue.” The ball bounces where I can grab it, and I am determined to teach her the name of the ball as I roll it to her, repeating, “Blue. Blue. Chaser, that’s Blue!”

  There was no road map in the scientific literature for teaching words and their meanings to a dog or any other animal. I began trying to teach Chaser words on the assumption that unless the words had strong positive value in her mind, she would not be motivated to focus on them and remember them. I reasoned that the best way to give words positive value was to associate them with objects used in play. Play would give the objects value, and by extension play would give value to the names of the objects and the verbs and other words that directed play activities.

  Play should have many learning benefits, I knew. As a college professor, I had seen how play frees the mind from tension and anxiety, thereby opening the door to creative thinking.

  I wanted to start language-related play with Chaser as soon as possible. Research has shown that there is a critical early developmental period for children to acquire language when they are toddlers, and I speculated that dogs might have a similar developmental window as puppies.

  My hunch was based on my experience, shortly after I came to Wofford, as a consultant to the Spartanburg public schools. I administered hundreds of tests individually to sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-graders to assess their cognitive development and need for special education. In many cases it
seemed plain that a student’s learning problems stemmed from a lack of stimulation and nurturing in early childhood. It was especially sad to see the number of children with such problems, because there was little anyone could do to ameliorate things at that point. The critical time to help these children is in the earlier years.

  The bottom line was that I didn’t know if there was a communication-related developmental period for dogs as puppies. But if there was one, I wanted to make the most of it.

  In anticipation of getting a puppy, I went to the local thrift store and bought a shopping cart full of secondhand children’s and pet’s toys: balls, stuffed animals, rubber animals and dolls, leather chew toys, pull toys, Frisbees, and so on. I was going to use these toys to teach Chaser proper nouns, words that uniquely name something or someone. Because of their strictly limited meaning and one-to-one association with something or someone, proper nouns, such as Mama, Dada, and their own names, were the first words toddlers learned. So I would begin teaching Chaser words with proper nouns, too.

  I gave each object a proper noun name—Elephant, Lion, Santa Claus, and so on—and wrote the name on it in permanent ink. The only exceptions to my naming of toys were blue racquetballs and green tennis balls. Any racquetball was “Blue,” and any tennis ball was “Tennis.”

  In the first two months after we got Chaser, I played with her with all of these toys. But I introduced each toy by name—“Chaser! This is Blue!”—one at a time, with no other objects on the floor available for play. Chaser responded enthusiastically to each new addition to her flock of playthings. She treated the objects like surrogate sheep and eagerly chased, stalked, fetched, and gathered them. She quickly learned the obedience and herding commands in the course of this play. Almost immediately she also started to show flashes of getting the name of an object into her short-term memory. Those moments really excited me, especially as they began to come more frequently and the memories began to be more long lasting, extending from one play session to another a few hours later, and soon a day or more later.

  I wasn’t yet seriously concentrating on teaching Chaser the proper noun names of the toys. Teaching her obedience behaviors took precedence in order to keep her safe from traffic and reliably direct her movements during training. I also wanted to build up the play value of the toys in her mind. And in that respect I was observing how she most liked to play with the toys and which ones she favored in different circumstances. With that information I could heighten her interest in a toy, and thus in its name, when we began training intensively.

  During this time I also established a foundation for language training games by teaching Chaser verbs such as “fetch” and “find,” in addition to those for the obedience and herding behaviors. I taught Chaser the verbs for actions she produced as part of her natural repertoire by naming the actions when I saw her do them. For example, Chaser often shook a toy after she picked it up in her mouth, and so I repeated “Shake it” several times whenever I saw her doing this. The behavior of shaking a toy eventually came under stimulus control, and Chaser shook a toy whenever she heard “Shake it.” Among other verbs I taught her in this way were “drink,” “run,” and “bark.”

  For behaviors that she spontaneously displayed less frequently, I first created a context that evoked or enhanced the likelihood of the behavior. For example, I wanted to attach “find” to Chaser’s natural tracking behavior. To do this I let Chaser smell an object with a strong scent, and then hid the object out of sight. While Chaser followed the scent trail, I repeated “Find” out loud. In a few instances I used food as a lure to guide Chaser’s behavior to a desired response, such as turning around in response to “Turn around.”

  Later on there were more complex behaviors I wanted Chaser to produce on verbal command, and teaching these required shaping by successive approximations. But we only needed a handful of simple action verbs to get Chaser’s proper noun learning under way.

  Chaser had been with us only three weeks—we were still calling her Puppy—when Alliston Reid e-mailed me: “I just ran across this new article and know you’ll want to see it. Talk to you soon.” Alliston’s e-mail included a link to a paper that was a few weeks younger than Chaser. The June 11, 2004, issue of Science, the most influential scientific journal in the world along with the British journal Nature, included an article called “Word Learning in a Domestic Dog: Evidence for ‘Fast Mapping,’” by Juliane Kaminski, Josep Call, and Julia Fischer of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. The paper reported that a nine-year-old Border collie named Rico knew more than two hundred proper noun names that his owners had given to various toys.

  This was far beyond what previous studies had found. The finding also merited attention because Germany’s Max Planck Institutes are the equivalent of America’s national laboratories and National Institutes of Health. The paper’s lead author, Juliane Kaminski, headed up a research group at the Max Planck Institute on the evolutionary roots of human social interaction. Kaminski and her group searched for clues to the origins of human cognitive capacities and social behaviors in studies of bonobos and other animals, and she had established an international reputation in animal science. As Alliston said to me when we caught up on the phone, “These are heavy hitters.”

  Despite the assertions of trainers and farmers that Border collies, as well as other herding and working dogs, could learn a sizable number of words, prior studies had found that dogs knew only around a dozen words, most of them verbs like “sit and “stay.” In contrast, the article said, “Rico’s ‘vocabulary size’ is comparable to that of language-trained apes, dolphins, sea lions, and parrots.”

  Moreover, the article said that Rico was capable of learning by exclusion, or “fast mapping” as it has been dubbed in studies of young children. This meant Rico could fetch an unfamiliar object from a group of familiar ones after hearing its name for the first time.

  Summing up their findings, the paper’s three authors observed that they could not say if Rico’s abilities were the result of “an exceptional mind” or his training. Noting that “dogs appear to have been evolutionarily selected for attending to the communicative intentions of humans,” they wondered if “some of [Rico’s] talent may be accounted for by the fact that Border collies are working dogs” who follow verbal commands in herding livestock. They asserted, however, “Our results strongly support the view that a seemingly complex linguistic skill previously described only in human children may be mediated by simpler cognitive building blocks that are also present in another species.”

  When an article counters the prevailing scientific consensus or addresses a long-standing debate on a major topic, Science sometimes publishes an accompanying “Perspective” on it written by a leading scholar. That was the case here, with a “Perspective” titled “Can a Dog Learn a Word?” by the childhood language learning expert Paul Bloom of Yale University. Bloom accepted that Rico could correctly identify more than two hundred objects by their proper noun names by fetching them on command. He even said, “For psychologists [studying language learning], dogs may be the new chimpanzees.” But he expressed strong reservations about whether Rico really understood that each name had an independent meaning apart from fetching the object associated with it.

  Rico’s owners said that on command he could also perform other actions with the objects whose names he knew. But the Max Planck Institute researchers had only tested Rico in fetching, and Bloom rightly insisted that that was the only evidence science could evaluate. Among other things, Rico’s owners might sincerely believe their dog knew how to do these things but not realize that they were unconsciously cuing him as to what to do.

  Bloom noted that human toddlers begin to learn words by associating them on a one-to-one basis with specific things, individuals, and actions. But toddlers quickly develop and display the understanding that words can be used in different ways in different contexts. In addition to learning that proper nouns refer to
specific, unique things, toddlers also quickly learn that common nouns refer to whole categories of things. And they can learn words simply by overhearing them, whereas “Rico . . . learn[ed] only through a specific fetching game.” He concluded, “Rico’s abilities are fascinating, but . . . it is too early to give up on the idea that babies learn words and dogs do not.”

  The Rico paper and Paul Bloom’s critique of it provided several goals for my research with Chaser. One striking fact was that the most successful language-trained animals, no matter what their species, all had roughly comparable vocabulary sizes of around one hundred to five hundred words. When the results of a number of experiments cluster, you have to ask if that apparent pattern is the whole story. I wondered if one hundred to five hundred words was the ballpark all animals were in, or if more was possible, and I wanted to test the limit.

  I also wanted to see if Chaser could make the leap that toddlers make and understand a variety of words—proper nouns, common nouns, verbs, and modifiers—according to how they are used in different contexts. Exactly what makes this leap possible in children is unknown. But there is no doubt that it happens as every child acquires language. There is also no doubt that one-to-one associative word learning is a necessary first stage along the way. For Chaser to understand that some words represent categories and to learn concepts, our best chance was building a cycle of positive reinforcement in associative word learning.

  The Rico paper did not explain how Rico’s owners trained him to learn an object’s name. But given Chaser’s fast-developing memory for the names of her toys, the appearance of the article at just this time felt like a sign that we were on the right path.

  As soon as the Jeep incident was behind us, I began to do more intensive training on the names of objects. The procedure began with Chaser sitting in front of me in the living room. So that Chaser could learn without errors and build on a series of small successes, the only toy in sight was a little stuffed Santa Claus doll that we’d played with many times, and whose name—Santa Claus—I had said dozens of times over the previous two months.