Chaser (32 page)

We played in the thickly carpeted hall for about twenty minutes, and then Chaser went to the elevators and woofed, softly, that it was time to go outside. Reentering the hotel ten minutes later, we both were grateful for the air conditioning. Getting out of the elevator on our floor, I turned to head to our room, but Chaser was pointing herself in the other direction.

“It's this way, girl,” I said. “Or did I make a mistake?”

I checked the room number signs on the hotel corridor wall. No, I was right and Chaser was wrong, and that puzzled me.

“Come on, Chase,” I said. But she still looked reluctantly in the other direction. Only then I remembered that Debbie, Jay, and Aidan's room was down that way.

“Do you want to see Aidan?” I asked. Chaser and Aidan had had a great time playing together the night before.

Chaser wagged her tail vigorously on hearing Aidan's name. Mystery solved: Chaser and I were both right. But it was still only six a.m.

“We'll see Aidan later. Come on now,” I told Chaser, but she kept looking down the corridor. So I did what I always did when I wanted to end a play session without disappointing Chaser, and said, “Let's go see Nanny.” At the sound of “Nanny”—it could just as well have been “Sally”—Chaser wheeled around and began trotting briskly toward our room. Following her, I had to laugh at myself, recalling my once telling Wayne West and his fellow Border collie trainers that their dogs didn't understand personal names.

Inside our room Sally was stirring, and she sleepily asked how our walk was. When I described Chaser's discovery that the hallway was excellent for Frisbee play, Sally smiled at first. But then she said, “You can't keep doing that. You're going to wake people up.” Discretion is the better part of valor, and I didn't disagree with her.

We still had all of the morning and early afternoon to wait through until my three p.m. presentation. But I realized I was looking forward to the lecture and even more so to the demonstrations. I was eager to hear what other psychologists had to say when they observed Chaser's learning up close.

Finally it was time to go. We opted for cabs so we didn't have to worry about parking, and much to my relief, the driver of our cab had no problem letting Chaser ride on the back seat between Sally and me. The convention center security guards had apparently all been advised about Chaser, and she and I waltzed right in. I felt myself being swept up in the energy and activity surrounding us. Off we trekked to our presentation, up the escalator, which Chaser handled with aplomb, and through wide lounge areas with charging stations for electronic devices. It reminded me of changing planes in a big airport. We had to stop a few times along the way so Chaser could respond enthusiastically to convention attendees who asked to meet and pet her, and who told us they were looking forward to my talk and demonstrations. At the entrance to the lecture hall there was now a two-by-three-foot sign on an easel with a sign-up sheet for the demonstrations after the talk, and people were waiting to put down their names.

The hall was already half filled with attendees. We still had twenty minutes to go, and heads turned as people realized Chaser had entered the room. A wave of “awww”s followed us as we approached the stage, with Chaser walking steadily beside Aidan. The room started to buzz a bit more as I climbed the stairs and headed toward the podium, while Chaser stood at the front of the auditorium awaiting a command. Two photographers with cameras on tripods were on either side of the room, and a cameraman with a large handheld video camera was in the center aisle. The three of them expertly faded into the background as they focused their cameras on Chaser.

Jay helped me plug my laptop into the hall's projection system. As we were cuing up my presentation, I noticed a smiling woman introducing herself to Deb, Sally, Aidan, and Chaser. I turned my attention back to my laptop and clicked through the first few of my images. They appeared on the big screen in good order, and I clicked back to the first slide, with the title of my talk on it.

Whew! Everything seemed to be set. Jay left the stage to sit beside Deb at the near end of the front row. I glanced around. All the seats looked full, and people were standing along the back and sides of the hall. My nerves ratcheted up a few more notches. I stared down blindly at my notes and checked my watch. Still a few minutes to go.

Sometimes you think you're feeling one thing when you're really feeling another. Excitement and fear can trigger the same physical responses in your body, accelerating your pulse and breathing rate with a surge of adrenaline.
I'm excited
, I told myself.
Just go with it
.

Deb brought the smiling woman to the podium to meet me. She was Dr. Nancy Dess, a professor of psychology at Occidental College in Los Angeles, and she was going to introduce my talk. Deb returned to her seat in the front row, and Dr. Dess and I discussed where we should sit before she went to the microphone and whether Chaser should come on stage.

The audience instinctively quieted down as Dr. Dess approached the podium.
Here we go
, I thought. Dr. Dess gave me a lovely introduction. As she finished the audience applauded, and they seemed to clap louder as I walked to the microphone.

I began speaking, and Deb rushed to the front of the stage to tell me I had to speak directly into the microphone. I squared up to the microphone and asked if they could hear me in the back.

“Louder!” the whole audience seemed to say.

I leaned closer to the microphone, and asked, “Can you hear me now?”

“Yes!” the audience said. I clicked on my Keynote program, glanced up at the big screen, and saw that my first picture of Chaser was upside down.
Well, John Pilley, what do you do now?
I thought. After diligent preparation to avoid this precise predicament, I stood in front of four hundred faces not knowing what magic button to push. I stared at the screen on my laptop while everyone else stared at me.

A man shouted out in the audience. I ignored him and continued staring at the screen on my laptop as if my eyes could twist Chaser right side up. The man in the audience became more insistent. Realizing that he was not heckling me but giving computer directions, I uttered an inner “Hallelujah!” This man was going to be my salvation. I felt my anxiety disappear as I surrendered to the situation. Falling back on my years of experience as a professor as well as a minister, I faced the crowd head on, leaned forward to the microphone, and said, “Help!”

Laughs rippled through the audience, and the helpful fellow shouted, “Press control-alt-R.” I repeated his instructions aloud with a laughing “okay” and pressed control-alt-R. The picture of Chaser popped upright on my laptop and the big screen above my head, and the audience applauded and laughed as I joked about my lack of technical skills.

First I clicked through a brisk slide show of Chaser as a puppy. The audience's reaction showed that psychologists were not immune to the power of puppies to warm our emotions. And then I showed a slide summarizing the four experiments that Alliston and I reported in our
Behavioural Processes
paper, followed by a video clip from
Nova scienceNow
of Neil deGrasse Tyson's testing Chaser in learning by exclusion with the Charles Darwin doll.

When the images onscreen shifted from the
Nova scienceNow
clip to my own clumsy video, I quipped that no one would be calling me to produce their movies anytime soon. More laughter broke out in the audience, and that relaxed me completely. I was able to forget about my notes and speak to the audience conversationally, and they gave me their undivided attention as I described the experiments Alliston and I had reported in
Behavioural Processes
.

In conclusion I said, “Helen Keller awakened to the meaning and power of words as Anne Sullivan drew
w-a-t-e-r
on one of her hands while water from a pump flowed over her other hand. In that moment Helen realized that Anne was tracing the letters of a word—and what that word meant. That simple but crucial insight opened the eyes of Helen Keller's mind to a lifetime of learning.”

I paused for several seconds and then said, “Chaser's moment of awakening came in her first year of life, when she discovered that objects have names and learned the cues that enable her to match a name to an object. That simple but crucial insight opened the eyes of Chaser's mind to the ABCs of language.”

There was absolute silence as I drew a long breath. I opened the floor to questions and hands shot up all over the hall while the rest of the audience applauded loudly.

It fascinated me that, allowing for their professional expertise and comfort with technical vocabulary, this audience of psychologists asked basically the same questions as the media and the general public. They wanted to know if I thought Chaser was unique, how her learning compared to that of one- to three-year-old toddlers, and what advice I had for teaching dogs words and training dogs in general.

As I always did, I said that I thought other Border collies could likely achieve similar results with similar training, but that other dogs might prove just as able to learn, and that linguistics researchers would have to answer the question about toddlers. To teach a dog the names of objects, I advised simple repetition of “This is . . .” associations, using play with the object to give it and its name value in the dog's mind. The key to all training and teaching of dogs, I said, was play based in a relationship of mutual trust and affection.

Hands kept shooting up to ask variations of these questions, often delivered with an anecdote about the questioner's own dog. As the clock ticked toward four p.m., ten minutes past the allotted time for my address and audience questions, Dr. Dess came to the podium and announced that we had to stop. But she urged everyone to sign up for the demonstrations later that afternoon and the next morning.

A standing ovation followed, but Dr. Dess's announcement didn't really end the session. It just brought people surging to the front of the stage to ask questions, offer congratulations, tell me about their own dogs, and most of all get close to Chaser. She was on the auditorium floor in front of the stage, tail wagging with joy as she received affectionate pets, hugs, and even belly rubs from her new fans. Members of the audience were snapping photos of her with their phones like paparazzi pursuing the hottest celebrity of the moment.

The first member of the audience to introduce herself to me was Sharon Jayson of
USA Today
. She told me to look for her story in the evening edition, and then rushed off to make her deadline. A neuroscientist told me about working with her dog on modulating barks in an effort to approximate word sounds, and asked what I thought the chances were that a dog could learn to speak words. I said I wondered if the anatomy of a dog's larynx, vocal chords, and jaw would allow that, but I hoped she'd let me know about her progress.

Chaser's fans would have kept us there longer, but we eventually had to excuse ourselves so that I could have a few minutes' break before the first demonstration at five p.m. Candy Won and I had agreed on a limit of fifty people per demonstration session, and the designated rooms were a good size for that many people and perhaps a few more. When we got to the room where the first two demonstrations were to take place, there were at least sixty people there, and others squeezed in as the demonstration got under way. I recognized quite a few faces from the audience at my talk.

There was a stage at one end with a podium and a long table for panelists at other events in that space, but I thought it would be more fun to do the demonstration in the center of the room. I said hello to everyone and sat down on the floor with Chaser and Aidan, who grinned and blushed self-consciously when I introduced him as my assistant. Aidan's first job was getting some of Chaser's toys out of the tub of toys we'd brought and spreading them around on the floor. Chaser then demonstrated her ability to retrieve a variety of her toys by their proper noun names, and she showed her combinatorial understanding in a take-nose-paw test.

I asked if anyone had objects they'd liked to see Chaser learn the name of by exclusion. While people dug into their pockets, backpacks, and bags, Aidan took Chaser outside so she wouldn't see what the group picked and named for her to find. The group offered up everything from coin purses to small flashlights and umbrellas. A yellow nylon wallet with a Velcro closure caught my eye. Chaser had a purse among her toys, but no wallet. Although none of her toys was named Wallet, she had certainly heard me say that word around the house many times. But “Velcro” was definitely an unfamiliar word for her, so I suggested we use the nylon wallet and call it Velcro.

First I asked the man who owned the wallet if he wanted to empty it. “I trust Chaser,” he said, drawing a big laugh. I put the wallet on the floor with seven of Chaser's toys, and then Deb went out to get Aidan and Chaser.

First Chaser found two of her toys when I asked for them by name, demonstrating that she did not have an overriding preference for picking the novel object. When she heard “Chaser! Find Velcro,” she paused just as she had when Neil deGrasse Tyson had asked her to find the Charles Darwin doll on
Nova scienceNow
. I repeated, “Find Velcro,” and there was a hush in the room as she carefully examined the objects on the floor for several seconds and then picked up the yellow wallet in her mouth. It was always fun to hear the “awww”s when people saw Chaser do exclusion learning with an object they supplied. It was much more impressive than any video for them to see that happen right before their eyes.

I then briefly described Chaser's progress in learning by imitation, matching to sample, and comprehending a three-elements-of-syntax sentence and its semantic reversal. Everyone wanted to see Chaser demonstrate all three, but we were running long. I said that although we were in the early stages of training in all three areas, Chaser was doing best with the imitation learning so far, and that, assuming they didn't mind watching me lose my dignity, they might find that the most interesting. After saying, “Chaser, watch Pop-Pop. Do what I do,” I lay prone on the floor, rolled over, and got up on all fours. And then I said, “Now you do it.” However, I'm afraid the audience was as impressed with my agility at eighty-three as they were with Chaser's execution of the same movements after me.