Chaser (31 page)

Unfortunately, Alliston had a conflicting commitment and couldn't accept the invitation. It would have been fun to share the moment with him. But I was delighted to accept the APA's invitation on my own, and excited about presenting Chaser's learning to an audience composed mostly of scientists.

It was going to take some work to prepare a talk that was equal to the occasion of a plenary address at the APA, however. Since I'd retired from teaching, scientific presentations had gone from slide projectors to digital “slide decks” assembled with PowerPoint or Keynote. On Debbie's advice I bought a MacBook Pro laptop, and she, Jay, and Robin all became my technical advisors and coaches in preparing a series of Keynote slides and video clips to illustrate my talk, which I eventually titled “Chaser and Her Toys: What a Dog Teaches Us About Cognition.”

As I prepared the presentation, Chaser and I dived into extending her language understanding with regard to syntax (the grammatical structure of a sentence) and semantics (the meaning of the sentence). “Take ball to Frisbee” and “take Frisbee to ball” have the same syntax: a verb, a direct object, and an indirect object. Switching the places of “ball” and “Frisbee” gives them opposite meanings, however, and that's an example of semantics.

Chaser's performance in the take-nose-paw tests showed she could handle two elements of syntax, a verb and a direct object. Our next goal was to add a third element of syntax, an indirect object, as in “take ball to Frisbee.” If Chaser could “take ball to Frisbee” and then “take Frisbee to ball,” she would show an understanding of semantics as well as syntax.

I also wanted to see if Chaser's language and concept learning so far would enable her to match to sample and to learn by direct imitation of me. Matching to sample meant showing Chaser an object without naming it and asking her to find one just like it. The task may appear simple, but success requires drawing a mental inference or formulating an abstract concept, such as “he wants me to find what I now see.”

Learning by direct imitation, performing whatever physical actions someone else performs, is also a much more complicated problem than it may seem. Imitation learning requires the mental awareness that the individual modeling the behavior wants you to copy it. This is an aspect of what is known as theory of mind: the awareness that another individual has a point of view different from your own. Believing that animals do not have a theory of mind, many scientists continue to insist that animals cannot imitate, and that what looks like imitation may only be instinctual behavior being triggered in different ways. Yet evidence is pouring in of imitation among species as diverse as bonobos and crows. I thought that if Chaser could learn new behaviors by imitating my actions, it might greatly accelerate her ability to learn complex new behaviors in the future.

August arrived on the heels of a brutally hot July with sweltering temperatures and no break in the weather in sight. We left for the APA convention very early on the first Thursday in August, and I waited until the last second to load Chaser into the car, after the trunk was packed and the inside was cooled off with the air conditioner on high. The trunk was full, because after spending Thursday night to Saturday in Washington, D.C., where Deb, Jay, and Aidan were meeting us, we were continuing north to spend a couple of weeks with them in Brooklyn.

Sally was already in the front passenger seat with her seat belt on when I brought Chaser out of the house. She stopped several feet away as I held the rear car door open. Experience told her the car was uncomfortably hot.

“Hoop, Chase,” I said, giving her the usual signal to jump up onto something, whether it was a bed, the couch, or the back seat of our car. No matter how I repeated or elaborated that command, however, she refused to budge.

“Come on, girl,” I said. “We're going on a trip.”

She stood her ground, eyes meeting mine with her ears back. The look on her face seemed to plead, “We don't really need to go on a trip, do we? Let's stay home where it's nice and cool.”

I asked her again to get in the car, putting a little more force into my words. She didn't move an inch.

I went over to her and said, “You want me to help you?” With that I awkwardly lifted and shoved her into the back seat, inadvertently twisting her hind legs in the process. She quickly righted herself and plopped down on the opposite side of the seat.

Three hours later we stopped to rest and play with Chaser. “Hoop, Chaser,” I said when it was time to get back in the car. But again she ignored that signal and my repetitions of it.

The last thing I wanted to do was to try to push and lift her into the car again. But finally I walked over to her saying, “You want me to help­—” Before I could finish saying “help” she jumped into the car onto the back seat, where she turned around and looked at me warily.

When we were back on the highway, it slowly dawned on me that my clumsy attempt to get her into the car earlier that morning might have planted the idea in her mind that “You want me to help you?” meant “I'm gonna twist your hind legs now.” When we stopped again, we went through the same rigamarole until I said, “You want me to help—,” at which point she hopped into the car. I poured on the praise and petted her to help build a positive association on top of her aversive memory of being pushed uncomfortably into the car.

After a little more than six hours of driving we arrived at the Westin Washington, D.C., City Center on M Street, about a mile from the Walter E. Washington Convention Center, where the APA was holding its convention. I was eager to get over to the convention center and get a flavor of what was going on. I had never joined the APA during my career as a psychology professor—they made me a member for the year because of my plenary address—and I had never been to the annual convention. I also wanted to make sure that I had everything I needed to plug my computer into the convention center's audio-visual system and show my Keynote presentation.

Sally and I decided we should walk from the hotel, thinking it would be a chance for all of us to stretch our legs after being cooped up in the car for so long. After twenty minutes and several wrong turns, we were melting with sweat and barely halfway there. My laptop felt heavy in my briefcase, which fortunately had a shoulder strap. The temperature was in the upper nineties with oppressive humidity. Spartanburg is in the foothills of the Appalachians, and the hot weather we were now experiencing was even worse than what we'd been having at home.

Forty-five minutes after setting out, we finally reached the immense convention center. We practically seeped into the entrance area, blessing the cool air. A security guard immediately said, “You can't bring that dog in here.”

I was trying to formulate a parched response when we heard a woman say, “That's okay.” It was Candy Won, the APA's meeting director and the person who had conveyed the invitation to Alliston and me. She happened to be walking by when she spotted Chaser, and she was coming over to greet us when the security guard spoke. Candy graciously waited while Sally and I drank deep at the water fountains and filled up a portable bowl for Chaser to lap up every drop of. Then she walked us through the registration process and arranged for a volunteer to guide us around the convention center.

In addition to my plenary address, Candy and I had arranged for Chaser and me to give four thirty-minute demonstrations. Two demonstrations were scheduled for after the address on Friday afternoon, and two for Saturday morning. At my request the volunteer guide took us to see the rooms where I would give the address and the demonstrations. An audio-visual technician was meeting us in the room for the plenary address, so that I could make sure my Keynote presentation was ready to go. As we made our way through the convention throngs, people frequently stopped us to exclaim over Chaser and pet her, to her great delight, and say they were coming to the address and demonstrations.

The lecture hall looked imposing to me from the entrance. A four-foot-high stage ran across the front of the room with steps at either end. A long table on the right side of the stage had room for eight panelists all facing the audience. At the left was a podium, and above the main part of the stage hung a huge screen to display a speaker's slides or video.

I asked our guide how many people the hall seated. “A little over four hundred,” he said. “The halls for the plenary addresses are all the same size. But as you've just seen, people are really buzzing about yours. Everyone's curious about Chaser.”

I focused on the task at hand and forged through a quick rehearsal pretty easily. The tech was a great help, and it reassured me to see my Keynote slides and video clips pop onto the hall's big screen. I was feeling good about my preparation as Sally, Chaser, and I slowly walked back to the hotel in the oppressive heat. It didn't occur to us to try to take a cab with Chaser, but at least we knew the way now.

Our timing was perfect, however. We arrived just as Deb, Jay, and Aidan drove up to the hotel entrance. After they checked into the hotel and got settled in their room, it was time for dinner. I begged off joining everyone and asked them to bring me something back. I wanted to rehearse my presentation a few more times, even though I felt pretty good about it. Deb had shared her and Jay's experience that the technical aspects of an event that are outside their control as musicians, the sound and the lights and so on, easily and commonly go wrong. The key to dealing with technical glitches when, rather than if, they happened was to be on top of your material and confident enough to navigate the inevitable bumps and bobbles. I wanted to heed Deb's words of wisdom.

Fifteen minutes later I felt like one of my students who meant to stay in the dorm and study but kept thinking that all his or her friends were out having fun. I'd had about enough of rehearsing and wished I had gone to dinner with everyone.

Sally called just then and asked what I wanted her to bring me back for dinner. They were only a couple of blocks away, and I hurriedly put on my shoes to go join them. Chaser stood up on the bed, where I'd invited her to get, and looked expectantly at me with her head tilted sideways, hoping that I was taking her with me.

I told her I'd be back. She responded by wagging her tail, jumping down off the bed toward me, and again locking eyes with me and giving me her “can't I go, please?” look. Feeling a twinge of guilt, I said, “No, girl, Pop-Pop will be back.”

Chaser turned around and jumped back on the bed, flopping herself down in an excellent approximation of a teenage girl's pout. She heaved a dramatic diva's sigh as she lowered her head to her paws. Standing at the open door, I repeated, “I'll be back, girl.” She shot me another glance, almost rolling her eyes, and seemed to breathe another deep sigh as she settled down for a comfortable doze.

When we returned about an hour later, Chaser gave soft little “Hurry up” woofs as I fumbled with the electronic key. Once I had the door open I had to find her leash, but I saw that the message light was blinking on the phone. There were two messages requesting an interview from a journalist named Sharon Jayson, who had left two messages earlier in the day and whose number I had already scrawled on a copy of
USA Today
.

As Deb and I searched for Chaser's leash, I mentioned that the same woman had called four times. Chaser wanted to get outside and was following at my heels as I hunted for the missing leash.

“Well, who is she?” Deb asked, looking under the bed.

Fishing through Chaser's toys and growing more irritated about her missing leash, I said, “I don't know, I don't want to be speaking to reporters.”

Deb calmly replied, “Well, give me her number and I'll call her back.” I passed Deb the copy of
USA Today
on which I'd written Sharon Jayson's phone number.

Deb hung up the phone just as I found Chaser's leash in my briefcase. Chaser immediately grabbed a Frisbee and headed for the door as soon as I pulled out her leash. “Did you talk to Sharon Jayson?” I asked Deb.

“Yep,” Deb said. “Her deadline is right after your talk, so she wanted to check some facts first.”

“Well, it's good you called her back. It could have been awkward to run into her tomorrow. Did she say what publication?”

“Yep,” Deb said. “
USA Today
.”

The next day came quickly. At five a.m. Chaser and I left Sally sleeping in our room to go for a walk and some play. The previous evening we'd played with a Frisbee for a while in a small courtyard next to the hotel and in a triangular green space with benches on the other side of M Street. But the weather remained stifling hot.

I closed the hotel room door softly and turned around to walk to the elevators with Chaser. But she had dropped her small cream-colored polyester Frisbee, named Snow, by our room door and trotted down the hall to wait for a throw.

It hit me that this was a precisely analogous situation to our walking outside onto our front porch at home in Spartanburg. Chaser's modus operandi there is to drop her ball or Frisbee on the porch and then proceed out onto the front lawn to await a throw.

I smiled to myself at the cleverness of all dogs, and not least of all Chaser, when it comes to inveigling people into playing and interacting with them. I picked up Snow, intending to carry it with me to the elevator, but when I had the Frisbee in my hand I couldn't resist sailing it down the hall to Chaser. She caught it in the air, brought it within a few feet of me, and then raced back down the hall.

Oh, well
, I thought,
why not have a few throws here before we go out into the heat and humidity?
Chaser seemed to be in no rush to get outside to do her business. And although she'd discovered a full-throated bark at the
Today
Show
and employed it every once in a while out of excitement or frustration, she remained a rather quiet dog who preferred to vocalize with soft woofs. Her woofs only turned to barks if the woofs failed to draw our attention.