Chaser_Unlocking the Genius of the Dog Who Knows a Thousand Words

by John W. Pilley

  For more than thirty minutes, Chaser went from one young woman to another with her ball. None of the four ever stopped to interact with her, but she didn’t stop trying.

  Finished with my workout, I called to Chaser, “Come on, girl. Time to go.” But she was focused on one of the young women she wanted to win over. She would come in a flash to “Here!” But I like what Chaser and I do together to be a shared idea whenever possible. So instead I said, “Chaser, let’s go see Nanny.”

  The thought of seeing Sally immediately made the hard-to-get girls in the exercise center uninteresting, and Chaser came to my side with her tail wagging. The day has not begun properly until we get home from Wofford around seven a.m. and Chaser goes into the bedroom to see Sally, who is usually just getting up. As soon as Sally makes the bed and tells Chaser it is okay for her to get on it, they play catch with one of her toys. After that we all have breakfast together, and then Chaser takes a little nap before our next language training and play session.

  The next morning at Wofford I was on a treadmill when a different young woman came in and started using the treadmill three stations away. Chaser went over, and instead of dropping her ball on the floor or on the treadmill, she simply held it up in her mouth, lifting her head as high as she could. I glanced away, and the next thing I knew the ball was flying across the room with Chaser in happy pursuit. She brought the ball back to the young woman on the treadmill and again held it up in her mouth. This time I saw the young woman look down at Chaser, smile, and then take the ball from her mouth and throw it for her again.

  I love seeing Chaser’s determined spirit. She shows it every day in her willingness to keep at the tasks I set for her, as well as in pursuing her own goals. One of our training games at Wofford involves a large exercise ball—Big Ball, we call it. We work with Big Ball in the room between the racquetball courts and in the hallway on the other side of the room from the main exercise area.

  “To Pop-Pop, take Big Ball,” I tell Chaser. She primarily understands “take” to mean “pick it up in your mouth,” but this inflatable exercise ball is twice as big as she is. She can’t hold the ball in her mouth, and the only way she can really move it effectively is by nosing it.

  “To Pop-Pop, take Big Ball” is a lesson in how the meanings of words can be ambiguous and depend on context. It’s also a lesson in persistence.

  For some time Chaser’s response to “To Pop-Pop, take Big Ball” was to nose the ball in almost any direction. As she did this I repeated, “To Pop-Pop, take Big Ball,” until the ball finally wound up near me, often as much by accident as by her efforts.

  But when I said, “To Pop-Pop, take Big Ball,” one day in early 2013, Chaser trotted over to the ball, some thirty feet away down the long hall, and paused. She cocked her head, looked at the ball, looked back at me, and then went behind the ball and nosed it deftly straight to me.

  We celebrated with play. And then I set the ball farther away and said, “To Pop-Pop, take Big Ball.” Again she went behind the ball and nosed it straight to me.

  We celebrated again with play. I set the ball even farther away. And for the third time she responded unerringly.

  The next day she was again perfect. She had not only learned a physical behavior. She had consolidated a concept in her mind, and that made a previously difficult behavior much easier for her.

  There is still a little bit of a delay when I say, “To Pop-Pop, take Big Ball.” She has to work through what I mean by “take” before she starts trying to nose it to me. And there’s another difficulty too. Big Ball can easily get lodged in a corner or behind another object. When this happens I see and hear her frustration. She starts barking impatiently, as if to say, “This is impossible! Help me out here!”

  All I say is, “To Pop-Pop, to Pop-Pop.”

  It’s very frustrating for her, but she keeps nosing and pawing at the ball. Eventually she finds that the task isn’t impossible. She gets the ball rolling again and noses it toward me. But it often gets hung up again, depending on how the exercise mats and other things are situated. Again she barks loud and clear, “Help me out! I can’t do it! This is impossible!”

  Again I say calmly, “To Pop-Pop, to Pop-Pop.”

  She continues to bark that she needs my help, but she never quits on the job. Sooner or later she noses and paws Big Ball out of the last spot where it’s gotten lodged, and she brings it all the way to me. “You did it! Good girl, good dog!” I tell her, and we celebrate her triumph as always with play.

  And so, game by game, day by day, we continue to expand our joyful conversation.

  Epilogue

  Unleashing Chaser’s Genius

  TWO-YEAR-OLD JASON, grandson of our next-door neighbor—and Sally’s fellow Ya-Ya—Theresa, throws a pinecone in our front yard. His throwing motion is not as fluid as it soon will be, but it’s a good heave for a toddler, and the pinecone lands on the grass about four feet away from him.

  Nine-year-old Chaser watches Jason out of the corner of her eye as she begins to creep toward the pinecone, moving as slowly as when we play our mirror-stepping game.

  Jason grins and runs for the pinecone, his chubby arms swinging his torso back and forth, his little legs still getting used to balancing him at that speed.

  Chaser lunges forward at the last second, snatches up the pinecone in her mouth, and races away, with Jason in gleeful pursuit. But he can’t catch up with her and he soon stops running, a hint of frustration coming into his expression. Seeing this, Chaser stops, half turned toward Jason. And then she quick-steps over to him, drops the pinecone at his feet, and retreats a little, waiting for his next move. A grin spreads back across Jason’s face as he bends at the middle—so sharply, that for a fraction of a second I fear he will tumble over—to pick up the pinecone. He can just get one hand around it, and raising it high he runs to the side of the yard, while Chaser follows at a bit of an angle, as if arcing out around some sheep.

  Jason winds up and throws the pinecone as far as he can, a good foot farther than before, and he and Chaser continue their game. They will play like this, never tiring of the repetition of theme and variations, until the proverbial cows come home or Theresa says, “Come on, Jason, it’s time for your nap.”

  Although Chaser loves children, she keeps her distance from the littlest ones, partly as Sally and I taught her when she was a young puppy, so that she never unintentionally disturbed a baby or a protective parent. But the behavior also comes from knowledge, gained by experience, that very young children tend to yank and pull on her and can’t run or throw very well.

  That was how Chaser behaved around Jason when he was always in his stroller outside or just beginning to walk. Now that he is getting his legs under him, the dynamic has changed, and I’ve been watching them learn from each other. Jason has discovered that pulling Chaser’s coat, ears, or tail makes her move far away and not want to come back. Together they have figured out how to adapt games such as catch and keep-away to Jason’s fast-advancing mental and physical skills.

  Jason is in awe of Chaser. He loves to see her leap for the Frisbee and catch it in midair. For her part, she gets more interested in him as a playmate every day, as his increasing coordination and motor skills cue up his cognitive development. There is quite a friendship in the making here, and at eighty-five I am encouraged to think that in the future I might offload some of Chaser’s exercise demands onto my young next-door neighbor.

  For the present they are two of a kind, the human toddler and the dog that will always be a toddler emotionally and cognitively, the eternal puppy. Flexible in body and spirit, they each exemplify and express a 360-degree gradient of curiosity about the world and openness to new experiences.

  In contrast to their wolf ancestors and to wild dogs, genetic selection via domestication has given domestic dogs an enduring juvenile persona. Their always-a-puppy-at-heart nature evokes our human need to nurture, and it also keeps dogs in a state of readiness to learn new things. Harsh expe
rience can bury the puppy self deep inside a dog, but love and play can almost always reawaken the puppy within, as Robin’s love and Chaser’s example of play gradually reawakened the playful puppy inside Spirit.

  I believe that it is my daily play with Chaser that sustains her inner puppy as the source of her creative energy and ability to learn. Likewise, I believe that it is Chaser’s puppyish play with me that sustains my inner child as the source of my creative energy and ability to discover things with her. During the years when Sally and I did not have a dog, I felt my playful side diminish. With Chaser as a member of our family, however, I once again “carry mischief in my pocket,” as Sally, Robin, and Debbie like to say.

  What I am asserting here about play and creative learning potential may not yet be a testable scientific hypothesis, but I am sure that eventually it will be. And I believe with every fiber of my being that testing will confirm and extend the hypothesis that the most profound learning is impossible without play. In chapters 7 and 16, I discussed an essay on creative learning by the great animal scientist John Staddon. During his doctoral studies, Staddon was one of B. F. Skinner’s teaching assistants. But the title of the essay, “Did Skinner Miss the Point About Teaching?,” indicates how Staddon has charted his own path in science. He took the best of Skinner’s paradigm and reinvigorated it based on his own and other scholars’ research into animal learning.

  In his essay, Staddon illuminates Skinner’s great insight that in operant conditioning, which we might better call operant learning, the learner’s voluntary, unconstrained responses are “essentially spontaneous, at least on first occurrence” and that reinforcing these responses makes them richer and more varied. This relationship between reinforcement and freely chosen operant responses is ultimately what makes creative learning creative.

  Skinner’s idea of reinforcement and unpredictable, free-operant responses is akin to Darwin’s idea of selection and variation in the evolution of species. In his own research and teaching, Skinner focused on reinforcement, and so has much animal science ever since. But Staddon calls on animal science to switch focus and “look around for the sources of variation that yield the most exciting kinds of teaching [and learning].” The most powerful such source of variation, the best nurturing for creative learning, is surely play.

  As I also discussed, the most powerful paradigm in animal science has come down to us from Descartes, the seventeenth-century philosopher who decreed, without any experimental evidence, that animals are flesh-and-blood machines that cannot think or feel—and thus obviously cannot play, either. Skinner moved away from this paradigm with his conception of free-operant responses to new situations, and Staddon among others has demonstrated that virtually all animal learning involves conscious or unconscious mental inferences. But Descartes’s animals-are-meat-machines paradigm remains extraordinarily powerful.

  A paradigm in science holds sway so long as the scientific consensus can ignore or dismiss anomalies that contradict it. But the fate of every paradigm in science is sooner or later to be abandoned, or significantly revised, in the light of persistent anomalies. With her language learning, Chaser joins the chimpanzee Washoe, the dolphins Phoenix and Akeakamai, the African gray parrot Alex, the bonobo Kanzi, and her fellow Border collie Rico as anomalies that can no longer be dismissed or ignored. Together they tell us that it is past time to abandon Descartes’s paradigm of animals as machines and to replace it with a new paradigm of animals as truly our fellow creatures—biologically, emotionally, and cognitively.

  Capitalizing on Chaser’s super-social nature and her talent for listening, herding, and creative play has opened up her ability to understand language. Together, she and I have found her light and let it shine.

  I hope that Chaser’s story will inspire play-based training of dogs and other animals by scientists and nonscientists alike. If such training becomes commonplace, it can unleash the genius of all dogs and many other species, and in so doing expand humanity’s horizons to encompass a new understanding of ourselves in the natural world.

  In the near term, Sally and I are looking forward to relaxing on a sunny beach. Of course Chaser will accompany us, so that she can run on the beach, play with her toys, especially the balls and Frisbees, and swim in the ocean. That’s the plan, anyway. But as I’ve found again and again in life, including writing this book, you never know what the next chapter will be.

  Chaser is in her Border collie prime. If she can’t be herding sheep, she needs to be gathering up her toys and solving problems in connection with them. That’s what keeps her mind and body engaged. That’s what keeps her learning without knowing she’s learning. That’s what keeps us both progressing along the road to understanding the mysteries of learning for both humans and animals. Our journey of discovery is nowhere near its end, and we’re counting on lots of fun ahead.

  Here’s Chaser coming up to nudge me as I sit at my desk. She drops a ball at my feet and locks her eyes on mine.

  “One, two, three!” I throw the ball, and the game is on.

  Afterword

  A Future of Many Chasers

  IN THE YEAR since this book was published in hardcover, I’ve been excited to see how Chaser’s learning fits with other recent findings in the field of animal cognition. For example, on November 18, 2013, the New York Times reported on research, first published in the scientific literature a few years earlier, showing the learning abilities of tortoises and lizards. The article’s headline, reflecting a reversal in the prior scientific consensus on these creatures, was “Coldblooded Does Not Mean Stupid.”

  I can’t resist quoting the article’s opening words: “Humans have no exclusive claim on intelligence. Across the animal kingdom, all sorts of creatures have performed impressive intellectual feats. A bonobo named Kanzi uses an array of symbols to communicate with humans. Chaser the border collie knows the English words for more than 1,000 objects.”

  It was fun to see Chaser cited as a super achiever along with Kanzi. It was also fascinating to read that a team at the University of Lincoln in England has documented the ability of tortoises to navigate a maze to find hidden strawberries. As Anna Wilkinson, the leader of the research, told the New York Times, doing this efficiently “requires quite a memory load because you have to remember where you’ve been.”

  The comment struck a chord with me because Chaser has certainly needed to draw on an extensive memory system in her learning.

  The article also reported on a separate finding by Wilkinson and her research associates, that tortoises can learn by imitation a task that they seem unable to learn on their own. When the study’s tortoises needed to navigate around a fence to reach some food, none learned to do it spontaneously on his or her own. But all the tortoises in the study learned to do it by watching a trained tortoise complete the task.

  As I discuss in chapter fifteen, the ability to learn by imitation seems to rest on a theory of mind, the concept that there are other beings in the world with their own points of view. Young children display an implicit theory of mind, without conscious awareness of the concept, when they begin to understand what other people are communicating through words and through gestures such as pointing. The tortoises’ ability to learn by watching a trained tortoise also displays an implicit theory of mind. That’s what Chaser displays, too, when she imitates my actions in response to my verbal and visual cues.

  In February 2014 Scientific American reported on a wealth of recent research on elephants. The traditional folk wisdom that elephants never forget turns out to be well rooted in the facts: the creatures really do have remarkable memories. Also admirable and worthy of further research are their cooperative social behaviors and problem-solving skills, their subtle communication through a wide range of sounds and body language, their adaptive tool use, their apparent self-awareness, and their profound empathy for one another.

  One of Aesop’s fables, “The Crow and the Pitcher,” tells of a thirsty crow who figures out he can reach th
e water in a nearly empty pitcher by dropping pebbles into it to make the water rise. Experiments at the University of Auckland in New Zealand have found that at least some real-life crows are just as smart. Presented with the challenge of getting food floating out of reach in a container of water, New Caledonian crows adopted the same strategy as the one in the ancient fable: they dropped pebbles into the container to raise the floating food high enough for them to pick it up in their beaks. In a March 2014 article in the online scientific journal PLOS One, the researchers reported that New Caledonian crows can solve this problem about as well as five-to-seven-year-old children can. To do this, the crows must draw implicit inferences about cause and effect. Their ability to do so is close kin to Chaser’s ability to draw an implicit inference in learning an unfamiliar toy’s name by exclusion.

  The learning research going on with crows these days is highly varied. A website devoted to it is called cooperativecrows.com, a name that shows animal scientists are finding the social intelligence of crows as remarkable as the social intelligence of dogs.

  I’ll also mention a continuing line of child learning research, which I first discuss in chapter four, showing that there is a huge gap in cognitive development between young children whose parents speak to them frequently in positive ways on a variety of subjects and those whose parents do not. Just as this book was being published in hardcover, the New York Times reported on research at Stanford that found a six-month lag in language skill development between two-year-old children in these two different groups. The thrust of this and similar studies is that talking a lot to young children effectively tunes up and supercharges their cognitive development by recruiting their innate proclivity for social intelligence.