Chaser_Unlocking the Genius of the Dog Who Knows a Thousand Words

by John W. Pilley

  Sally and I especially enjoyed one reader’s posting: “Cats can do this, too, they just don’t want to.” Another posting that made us laugh read: “I would like to propose a swap: two teenagers for Chaser. I’ll throw in a chocolate cake and a couple twenties to sweeten the deal.” Chaser has a temperamental moment now and then, but having raised two teenagers, we didn’t want any part of that deal.

  The print and online media coverage between Christmas 2010 and late January 2011, along with the outpouring of interest from the general public in website comments and blog posts, left me feeling profoundly grateful. The response to the paper in Behavioural Processes and to Chaser herself went beyond anything I had ever imagined. I hoped all the hoopla would encourage other researchers to try to duplicate my experiments with their own dogs. I also wanted dog owners to know how smart their dogs really are.

  I had no desire to be famous, and I didn’t want Chaser to remain in the media glare. Now that the first phase of her language learning had received a fair hearing, I wanted to return to our usual routine and see how much more she could achieve in the way of language and other conceptual learning.

  But the Nova scienceNow program with Chaser was soon to air, and I was committed—very willingly—to doing publicity for it in New York. I hoped Chaser and I were both ready for prime time.

  14

  Chaser Takes a Bow

  CHASER STOPPED IN a pool of light from a streetlamp. We were at the entrance to a public schoolyard a block and a half from Debbie and Jay’s house in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, on the other side of the East River from Manhattan. The morning of Monday, February 7, was still dark, but Chaser and I kept to our early rising in New York City as well as Spartanburg.

  The empty schoolyard was a favorite spot for Chaser and me, a fenced-in area where we could safely play with balls and Frisbees. But not this morning.

  “Come on, Chase,” I said. “Your paws have been getting all torn up playing in there, and we’ve got to follow the doctor’s orders.”

  It had snowed every day for the past few days, and the sidewalks and streets—and the asphalt schoolyard—remained scattered with big crystals and clumps of road salt. The road salt was murder on Chaser’s paws, and Dr. George Korin, the vet for Debbie’s family’s cats, had advised us to restrict her outdoor activity in these conditions.

  Chaser didn’t buy it. Her paws had healed up nicely over the past couple of days and she was restless to burn off some Border collie energy. She cocked her head at me and then pointed her nose into the schoolyard and woofed softly. This was the first time Sally and I had brought her to Brooklyn during the winter months, and she wasn’t used to having so little physical activity.

  “No, girl, we’ve got to take care of your paws,” I said. “You don’t want to go on national television in two days with bloody feet, do you?”

  On Wednesday morning Alliston Reid, Chaser, and I were to appear live with Matt Lauer on NBC’s Today Show. On Wednesday afternoon Chaser was going to record a segment with Diane Sawyer for that evening’s ABC World News broadcast. Nova scienceNow’s outside publicist, Eileen Campion, who had worked in concert with Wofford College’s Laura Corbin throughout January, had made the arrangements. The two appearances would publicize PBS’s Wednesday-night broadcast of Nova scienceNow’s “How Smart Are Animals?” program, with Chaser featured in its “How Smart Are Dogs?” segment.

  I gave Chaser a pet and we walked back to Debbie and Jay’s row house a short distance from the Bedford Avenue subway stop. I loved the energy and variety of Williamsburg, and New York City in general, especially the opportunities to strike up conversations with people from all over the world. Although we both missed our usual outdoor activity in Spartanburg, Chaser also enjoyed the social opportunities in the Big Apple. She continued to look on every new acquaintance as a prospective playmate, and in Brooklyn there were many new people to meet every day, many new playmates to recruit for her games, no matter how briefly. It wasn’t yet six a.m. and the streets were quiet. But they’d be bustling with people when we went out later in the day, and that would compensate Chaser a little bit socially for her forced inactivity.

  Chaser enjoyed having new walking companions in the city too—Debbie and Jay often volunteered to walk Chaser when we came to visit. The first times either of them walked her on the street in Brooklyn, however, all heck broke loose. In Debbie’s words the problem was that they didn’t know how to “drive” Chaser: “You didn’t tell us her commands, Dad. It’s like trying to handle a Ferrari when you’re used to a Volkswagen.”

  One afternoon Sally, Debbie, and I were walking home from the subway and saw a commotion on the sidewalk up ahead. When we got closer, we saw that the cause of it all was Jay trying to walk Chaser.

  Tall and lean with chiseled features and shaggy dark brown hair that curls over his shirt collar, Jay ordinarily blended right into the Williamsburg scene. However, Chaser was walking backward in front of him with a cigarette butt in her mouth, spinning left or right every time he reached for it. This was drawing a mixture of smiles for her and glares for Jay from people who had to make room for them on the crowded sidewalk.

  Jay was generously giving Chaser an airing because we were late getting back. His effort was all the more generous because he is highly allergic to dogs. And there Chaser was, giving him fits in return for his good deed.

  Chaser likes to carry something in her mouth on walks and will pick up whatever she can find. In Spartanburg that’s most often a pine cone. In Williamsburg pine cones are in short supply, but there are plenty of cigarette butts, and we often turned to find her with one dangling out of her mouth like a confirmed smoker. Jay was valiantly trying to get the darned cigarette butt out of her mouth because he knew we didn’t like her carrying one around. But Chaser thought they were playing keep-away.

  Throwing up his long arms at our approach, Jay said, “I didn’t know I needed to read the user’s manual!” A moment later, seeing Chaser walking perfectly at my side, he asked, “How did you do that?” I apologized for not having told Deb and Jay all of Chaser’s commands and explained that I first said, “Time out,” to signal that play was over for the moment; then, “Out” to get her to drop the cigarette butt; and finally, “Heel.”

  We were all laughing as we turned off crowded Bedford Avenue onto North Fourth Street, where the sidewalk was wide open. Even though Chaser is quite accomplished in her language training and has a huge repertoire of commands, she has the spirit of a puppy and will passionately pursue her desire to play at every opportunity.

  Back in the house on the cold morning of February 7, Chaser and I walked up the stairs past the ground-floor apartment that Debbie and Jay rented to longtime tenants. The wide stair landing for the second floor had a water bowl for Chaser and several of her toys. When Jay was in the house, Chaser spent a good deal of time on the stair landing, where we frequently played the bouncing-ball-on-the-steps game she invented, or in the bedroom on the third floor that Sally and I shared with her on these visits.

  We went through the door off the second-floor landing into the kitchen. No one else was up yet except the cats, Billy and Molly. We’d have breakfast with the family later, but in the meantime I got a snack for myself from the fridge and a couple of little dog biscuits for Chaser.

  Billy, a gray tabby, swiped at Chaser’s wagging tail when I gave her the biscuits. He likes to do that to show her whose house it is. When they first met, Billy had boldly walked up to Chaser, sniffed her nose, and then bopped it with his paw. That was exactly how Molly had greeted Billy on his joining the household four months earlier.

  When Chaser eats her meals in the kitchen, Billy always sits right behind her and she growls at him now and then so he keeps his distance. Molly, a pastel gray calico, just watches from the sidelines. Her attitude seems to be, “Yeah, what Billy said!”

  When no one else is around and she thinks she’s in charge of the kitchen, Chaser tries to get her revenge by
herding the cats. They foil her by jumping on the table. It’s a stalemate then, as there sometimes is between Border collies and livestock on a farm or ranch, at least until the Border collies figure out how to solve the problem, with or without the shepherd’s help. Chaser hasn’t figured out how to herd the cats yet, however, and I don’t think there’s any way I can help her.

  Chaser certainly has to adapt when we go to Brooklyn, but she seems to prefer it to being left behind, and we hate to leave her. Besides, visits to Brooklyn also mean lots of play time with Aidan. Chaser and Aidan became fast friends when she was a puppy and he was three years old. Aidan hadn’t seen Chaser since the summer before in Spartanburg, so he was eager to get home from school every day to play with her.

  Deb came into the kitchen. While she made coffee we spoke briefly about Wednesday’s appearances on Today and ABC World News. Although we weren’t sure exactly what was going to happen on ABC World News, I had no concerns about that appearance—even though I wouldn’t be on camera with Chaser.

  The general plan for ABC World News was for Chaser to demonstrate her language learning to Diane Sawyer while working with Neil deGrasse Tyson. Although they hadn’t met since their first meeting during the Nova scienceNow shoot, fifteen months before, I knew Chaser would be glad to see Neil and comfortable working with him on camera. We were going to sort out what that involved and give Diane Sawyer and Chaser an opportunity to meet each other on Wednesday afternoon, before they recorded the segment for the evening’s broadcast. I felt confident that Chaser’s acute social intelligence and her language learning would enable her to handle whatever happened.

  We’d been in Brooklyn for two weeks, and throughout that time I’d been trying to get a bead on how Today wanted to handle things. Alliston Reid was flying into New York the next afternoon. I thought Alliston, Chaser, and I should have an advance look at the set and run through the segment with the producer, and I hoped Chaser would have a chance to meet Matt Lauer before we went on the air live in front of millions of viewers. Like that of humans, a dog’s behavior is always context sensitive and often situation specific. Change one detail of a process and you may change the outcome drastically.

  From early on in Chaser’s language learning, I envisioned public demonstrations in which Chaser worked in different settings besides our home or Wofford, and with different people besides myself. But until now Chaser had only solved language tasks in the same familiar surroundings where she was trained. I really wanted everything to go smoothly when Chaser was asked to demonstrate her vocabulary in the unfamiliar environment of the Today studio—and on live television, no less.

  It was dark and the block was relatively deserted the next evening at six-thirty p.m., when a black SUV deposited Sally, Debbie, Chaser, and me, my arms wrapped around a plastic storage tub of toys, on West Forty-Eighth Street, directly in front of the stage door to NBC’s Rockefeller Center studios. We rang the bell and were buzzed in by a security guard, who looked askance at the plastic tub I was carrying and even more so at Chaser.

  “You can’t bring that dog in here,” the guard said gruffly.

  “Oh, no, Charlie, they are with me,” a lovely young woman with blond hair said, appearing as if out of nowhere. She turned to us and said brightly, “We are ready for you!” She looked down at her smartphone, which she held close to her in both hands, thumbs tapping away like mad. Without looking at us again, she turned and led us through a labyrinth of hallways and doorways, all while continuing to tap out messages on her phone and chat with us. A few minutes later we followed our multitasking guide out of the seemingly endless maze and onto Today’s set, where Alliston, Chaser, and I were going to meet the producer and run through the arrangements for our segment.

  The empty set looked as though it was asleep, and my first impression was that it was much smaller than it seemed on television. The set areas that looked like broad, separate spaces on camera were tucked together only a few feet apart. Debbie, whose work in the music industry has included a number of television appearances, explained that this made it easier for the hosts to move from one spot to another in the course of the live broadcast.

  Eileen Campion had told us that tomorrow’s show would feature segments with First Lady Michelle Obama and the English actor-comedian Russell Brand, as well as Chaser. The lack of activity now reminded me of the night before Christmas, with packages beautifully wrapped under a tree gleaming with decorations and lights and everything in readiness for the activity and excitement of the morning.

  I was trying to take in this strange new environment when a tall man in jeans and a flannel shirt, one of the stagehands, came up and silently took the tub of toys. With a smile he placed the tub on a nearby table, and I mentally kicked myself when I noticed it was crusted with dried mud from our backyard in Spartanburg.

  A handsome young man walked onto the set, enthusiastically shook my hand, and identified himself as the producer of Chaser’s segment. Talking as rapidly as he had on the phone the night before, when we’d arranged the run-through, he led me to a large red velvet curtain suspended from the rafters. On the floor below the curtain there was a carpet of bright green artificial grass. The young woman with the smartphone, the producer’s assistant, followed along, still tapping away. A team of techs and stagehands also gathered around, waiting to hear what they needed to do for the segment.

  Where was Chaser? We’d let her off the leash as soon as we entered the set area, and she’d dashed around a corner with Debbie in pursuit. I pulled my thoughts back to the producer, who was still talking at a fast clip. He was explaining how the segment would unfold. When he paused briefly I said the red velvet curtain was going to be a stunning backdrop for Matt Lauer’s interactions with Chaser.

  The producer frowned and said no, the curtain was going to separate Chaser from Matt throughout the segment. Before I could respond, a loud bark reverberated through the set. Was there another dog here? I wondered. Chaser never barked full out like that. The producer continued explaining how the segment was going to go, using his hands now to emphasize his words. His assistant kept clicking away at her smartphone, but she flashed brief looks of concern that I wasn’t following what her boss was saying.

  I closed my eyes for a second and reminded myself to breathe. When I opened my eyes, Chaser skittered around a corner into view, bouncing a beach ball into the air with her nose. She jumped to bounce the ball into the air off her nose and keep it from hitting the floor, and barked between bounces. Debbie, who was trying to get ahold of her, later told me that she’d found the beach ball in the prop room. As Chaser came through the set area, she attracted the attention of all the techs and stagehands, who watched with wide eyes and open mouths. One of them exclaimed, “I’ve never seen a dog do that before! How did you teach her that?”

  I hadn’t taught her that. The women’s volleyball team at Wofford had a few years before, when I was working with them on performance psychology. During breaks the members of the team enjoyed teaching Chaser to play volleyball with a very light ball that they sometimes used in their training. Chaser was now looking for someone to play volleyball with again. It was good that she was enjoying herself and discovering a new full-throated bark. But her somewhat dog-gone-wild behavior made me all the more concerned about her reactions to the intense atmosphere of a live television broadcast.

  The producer’s patience was evaporating. He wanted me to order Chaser to stand quietly on one side of the enormous red curtain so that we could begin rehearsing the segment.

  I knew what he was proposing was not fair to Chaser and might result in a very disappointing segment for everyone, especially viewers. I tried to explain to him how both human and canine behaviors are context sensitive. Just as people behave differently in church and at a party, a dog will behave differently in different situations. Most dogs that know how to find the newspaper on the lawn and bring it into the house will be baffled if you ask them to find a newspaper inside the house and bring it t
o you. The request won’t make any sense to them. “Chaser is very adaptable,” I told the producer, “but this big curtain is too much to throw at her.”

  The producer said, “We’ve seen video of Chaser performing behind a screen, and I have been advised that we are to use this curtain.”

  The screens in the videos were there to ensure that Chaser could be guided only by the words she heard and not any physical cues, and they were more than big enough for that purpose. This huge curtain was going to isolate her in a way she’d never experienced, in a confusing new environment with lights, noise, and strangers she’d never encountered. I couldn’t imagine putting her in that situation on live television in front of millions of people, and told the producer as much.

  The producer said, “I thought we worked this out on the phone. I told you yesterday what we want you to do in the segment.”

  My jaw clenched involuntarily. I heard myself bellow, “I will not allow you to present my dog on live national television in a situation that sets her up to fail!”

  The producer was taken aback. “I will have to check with my superiors about this!” he exclaimed.

  If someone had dropped a pin then, everyone present would have heard it.

  Finally I said, “If we can’t find a compromise, I will take my dog home.”

  Fortunately Julia Cort, the ever-graceful executive producer of Nova scienceNow, appeared at my side and gently clasped my arm. She had arrived at the studio with Alliston and Eileen Campion’s assistant, Vicky, while the segment producer and I were arguing. She said, “I’m sure we can work this out, John. No one wants you to put Chaser into a bad situation.” Deb now stood next to us in silent support. Julia went over to the producer and they walked a few steps away. I heard Julia suggesting that Chaser would shine, and the audience would love it, if Matt Lauer interacted with her as Neil deGrasse Tyson had on Nova scienceNow. Julia beckoned to me and said, “John, could you demonstrate that?”