Chaser (3 page)

Robin knelt down in front of Yasha. Leaning forward slightly as she spoke, she said, “Yasha, what's two plus two?”

Yasha quickly gave four sharp barks. I said, “Nice­—so he knows how to bark to four.”

Robin ignored me and spoke to him again, very slowly and deliberately. Yasha sat in front of her, his ears at attention, as she said, “Yasha, what's five plus two?” This time, seven sharp barks answered. Robin ran through several other little sums, and Yasha gave the correct number of barks every time.

I smiled widely and said, “Impressive. How are you doing it?” I knew this was an example of a Clever Hans effect, an issue in all animal learning experiments and something I'll explore later. Robin teased me for a bit, declaring that she had successfully taught Yasha the rules of addition and was going to teach him subtraction next. Finally she fessed up that she leaned forward a little to cue Yasha that the command to speak—“Yasha, what's . . .”—was coming. When she wanted him to stop barking, she leaned back and said, “Good dog!” Yasha didn't really know how to add. He simply read Robin's body language and barked until she cued him to stop. His skill at arithmetic always entertained the girls' friends, but it wasn't on my shortlist to teach my new puppy.

I grumbled a bit about Robin and Debbie's not having taught Yasha useful things such as the American Kennel Club (AKC) obedience exercises. I'd started him on the novice exercises before going to Eastern Europe. But the girls' mischievousness showed that Yasha had a flair for learning new behaviors. That was intriguing.

Genetically, as a Border collie, Yasha was an incredibly quick learner. By his eighth month of life, he had learned all the novice and open class obedience exercises of the American Kennel Club and was working on the utility exercises.

As a German shepherd, Yasha was fearless. One day when he was a little over a year old, I went with members of Wofford College's Adventure Club to canoe a few stretches of rapids on the Green River, only about an hour's drive from the Wofford campus. I had become a keen paddler since we moved to South Carolina, and introduced many students to white-water canoeing and kayaking through the Adventure Club. Running class three, four, and five rapids on rivers in the Southeast was a passion of mine, and kayaking the Grand Canyon one year was a thrilling high point.

On this beautiful spring day, Sally and Debbie came along to run shuttle for us, dropping us off at the put-in point upstream and meeting us at the take-out point downstream. Yasha was along as well, full of excitement. He was getting near his full size, but still very much a puppy in temperament. It was not his first trip to the river, but until now he'd mainly only splashed in shallow pools. What swimming he had experienced was in flat, calm water, and although he seemed to love getting wet, he was a weak swimmer at best. So we weren't expecting him to work on his dog paddle that day.

Along a stretch of the river called Big Corky, the rapids drop fifteen feet over a distance of about a hundred yards, and are rated class three—“Intermediate.” Sally and Debbie walked Yasha down to the bank to watch us navigate that section. I was three-fourths of the way through the rapids when Yasha leaped excitedly into the water. He had never seen me paddle through white water before and he was eager to join me.

As soon as the current caught him he knew he was somewhere he didn't want to be, and he paddled with all his might, flailing furiously, trying to get back toward Sally and Debbie. Still a growing puppy, Yasha didn't have the strength to get across the current. A whirling eddy sucked him under. He popped back up, struggling to make headway, clawing at the water.

Coming through the last bit of rapids, I threw my paddle into the center of the canoe, grabbed the gunwales, and vaulted out into the water. I gripped the bow of the canoe with my left hand and with my right hand reached out for Yasha, who was just getting sucked down again. I caught the scruff of his neck, hooked my fingers in his collar, and lifted his head above the water. And then I kicked furiously with all my might, levering down on the bow of the canoe with my left hand to buoy Yasha and me up. A few more kicks and we were in quiet water where I could stand up and Deb waded in to lend a hand.

Yasha shook himself furiously. He was panting hard, but his breathing soon evened out and his dominant emotion seemed to be intense excitement. A few minutes later he was splashing around in the shallows, diving for rocks. From that time on, whenever Yasha saw me put the canoe or kayak on the roof of the car, he was raring to go. We didn't want to take chances with him, so Robin sewed a life vest, packed with pieces of flotation foam, that we made him wear whenever he came on the river with me.

Throughout his life, Yasha exulted in clambering rocky riverbanks, nails scratching on the wet rock, and in going swimming with me. It wasn't all that long after his misadventure at Big Corky that he was impatiently watching several students and me body surf the Chattooga River at the bottom of a rapid called Bull Sluice, where the waves were harmless and void of any danger. I was just jumping off when a student hollered, “Dr. Pilley! Dr. Pilley!” I hit the water and spun myself around in time to witness Yasha jumping off the six-foot boulder after me. Thus was born his unquenchable thirst for body surfing.

Only one other activity appealed to him as powerfully—Frisbee play. Bring out a ball and he might simply lie down. Bring out a Frisbee and he erupted into excited barks, jumps, and tornado-fast spins. Whether the Frisbee was thrown directly to him or to his side, Yasha always leaped forward in anticipation of it—the mark of an elite athlete. For the first four or five catches, his return for another throw was rapid. However, after the fifth or sixth throw, mouthing the Frisbee triggered his chewing instinct. No amount of soft or hard recalling could overpower this behavior, an example of what animal scientists call instinctive drift.

Instinctive drift must not be punished. The best way to inhibit an undesirable instinct is to trigger a competing, more powerful instinct. Fortunately I learned that sailing another Frisbee to Yasha made him drop the first Frisbee in order to catch the second one. I also learned that if I ran toward him, he cleverly nested the two Frisbees together upside down and then ran away with both of them in his mouth. I continued this experiment with more Frisbees and discovered that Yasha could nest as many as six Frisbees together and hold them in his mouth while playing keep-away. Of course, my pace of running was quite slow, to give him time to nest the Frisbees together, but fast enough to motivate his possessive instinct.

Yasha's enormous energy, boundless curiosity, and quick learning—not unique to Border collies, of course, but so typical of them—made me think he would be the perfect subject for animal learning experiments with my students. Until then, my research and teaching as a psychology professor at Wofford College had involved rats and pigeons in Skinner boxes, named for B. F. Skinner, the influential behavioral psychologist. A Skinner box is an enclosure in which the animal learns to press a lever or perform some other behavior to get a food reward.

The experiments produced interesting, statistically significant data, but nothing earth shattering. Never what I was always looking for: an aspect or principle of animal learning that could be generalized to all learning. That was my quest after I left the Presbyterian ministry and found my true calling as a research psychologist and a college teacher. Entering graduate school in psychology at the age of thirty-six, with two young daughters, was only possible for me because of Sally's belief that I should follow my passion to understand more about learning. We were “as poor as Job's turkey,” to quote Sally, and for a few years her work as a nurse was our main source of income. But she never complained, and those were happy times for all of us.

In addition to their role in my research, the rats and pigeons in my lab were subjects in countless student experiments. Yasha's rapid learning, in tandem with the long-evolved social bond between dogs and people, offered me an alternative. I was fascinated by the canine intelligence that made the dog-human bond possible and led to the astonishing variety of roles that dogs take on as working and service animals and pets. Border collies' capacity for learning, which I observed in herding trials and demonstrations, particularly impressed me, and I hoped that animal learning studies with a Border collie would be more likely to produce data that could be generalized to all learning. Even more important, I figured that my students and I could have a lot more fun with a Border collie than with rats and pigeons.

Yasha exceeded my wildest expectations. He quickly became not just a subject for student experiments but my full-fledged teaching assistant. If my students and I didn't discover something new about learning with Yasha, it wasn't because of any lack of capacity on his part.

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.