Chaser (2 page)

Now I said, “Those of you who have dogs, when you tell your dog, ‘It's time to go for a walk,' does your dog understand that each of those words has a separate meaning?”

They all said, “No.”

“What word do you think your dog does know?”

The kids gave various answers, but the consensus was that their dogs all knew the word
walk
.

“Well, ‘It's time to go for a walk' is a pretty long sentence. How about something simpler? If you throw a ball and say, ‘Fetch ball,' does your dog understand that those two words have separate meanings?”

This was a tough question, but the kids finally decided that their dogs really only understood the “fetch” part.

“Many scientists think that's all a dog can ever learn. They say that dogs don't really understood that different words have separate meanings; they just learn to associate your words and gestures with certain actions you want them to make, like ‘sit,' ‘stay,' or ‘fetch.' Chaser and I did another experiment to test exactly that.”

I took three of Chaser's toys, Bear, Croc, and Prancer, and put them on the floor.

“Okay, class, we have three toys, and we can use three different commands. We can ask Chaser to nose a toy, paw it, or take it, which means take it in her mouth. And we can mix the three commands up with the three objects any way we like. Let me show you.”

In succession, I asked Chaser to nose, paw, and take different toys, and then I picked a couple of students to do the same.

“What do you think, class?” I asked. “If we can use different commands with different toys, does this show that Chaser understands that a word for an action means one thing and a word for an object means another thing?”

“Yes!”

“I agree with you,” I said. I didn't add that I was waiting to see if any scientists in the fields of animal learning or childhood language learning would find fault with my experiment and cast doubt on its results. As it happened, no one did. In fact, in the three years since the
Behavioural Processes
paper was published, no one has rebutted any of its specific findings, although the controversy about animal learning continues unabated. Meanwhile, Chaser's learning has also continued, reaching remarkable new heights that include adding many common nouns to her vocabulary, understanding sentences with three elements of grammar, and progress in learning by direct imitation of my actions, as I'll explain later.

“I wish Chaser and I could stay longer with you,” I told the class, “but we're running out of time, and there's one more thing we really want to show you. Chaser can learn the name of a new object even though she's never seen the object or heard its name before, and she can do it in one try. All the toys I brought with me are things Chaser knows the name of, so we need a new object. But we don't want Chaser to see it yet. Aidan, why don't you take Chaser behind Mrs. Tapper's desk? That way we can be sure she can't see anything.”

Aidan grinned at his classmates, looked at Mrs. Tapper to make sure
she had no objection, and took Chaser behind the desk and crouched down with her. For good measure he put his hands over Chaser's eyes, and I thanked him for doing that.

Then I asked the class, “Does anyone have an object we can use?”

Lots of kids raised their hands. But a girl in the second row caught my eye by waving a bright red plastic change purse.

“That looks good,” I said, taking the purse from her outstretched hand. “What are we going to call it?”

“Purse!” several kids said.

“We could do that, but Chaser's heard the word
purse
many times, and she probably knows that Aidan's mother and grandmother and other people have purses. So she might already have an association for the word
purse
in her mind. We want a name that will be completely new to Chaser. It could be anything, it could be just a silly sound, like ‘Woosh.' Should we call this ‘Woosh'?”

This sparked smiles and laughs. “Yeah, let's call it ‘Woosh,'” the kids agreed.

I said, “We'll put down some objects that Chaser already knows the names of, and then we'll add this new one. She doesn't know what it looks like, and until just now she's never heard the special name we're giving it.

“Before we see if Chaser can find the new object when we ask for it by its special name, let's ask Chaser to find some familiar objects. She might come over here and take the new object just because it is new and she's curious about it. We all like to get new things to play with, don't we?”

I didn't tell the children that a well-known childhood language learning researcher had criticized a study of word learning by the Border collie Rico precisely because it had not established whether the dog had “a baseline preference for novelty” when it came to learning the name of a new object. This was one of a number of criticisms by prominent researchers of the Rico study, which was published around the same time Sally and I got Chaser as a little puppy. I had carefully designed my own experiments, such as asking Chaser to find some familiar objects first, in the hope of avoiding such criticism.

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

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.