Until now the world’s cleverest dog was thought to be Border Collie Rico (note the breed), who can recognise 200 words after training at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. Well, move over Rico. New Scientist has now reported on Chaser, another of my distant relatives who can recognise 1022 words and differentiate between nouns and verbs.
While this is all good PR for us collies, poor old Chaser – who is owned by two American psychologists - had to train for five hours every day for three years to achieve this miraculous feat. And she did it all for pats on the head and a chance to play ball. No food treats(!) and to top it all, in an article in the Independent, her owner (personally I prefer the words “human companion”) referred to her as ‘the research animal’!
(As an aside.... recent research from a Hungarian university reckons that pet dogs are often thought to be stupid, when in fact they prefer to wait for owners to do the job for them rather than take action themselves – showing in fact we are very flexible at using social strategies. That’s more like it).
Anyhow, while disturbed by the apparent inequality of the Chaser/researcher relationship, it did set me thinking and I have adapted my training procedure with B and W to investigate Pavlovian conditioning. The early results are fascinating. If I crouch in the corner of the kitchen and look as if I am going to pee, one of them immediately rushes in and gives me the day’s newspaper. If I open the box file marked ‘TAX’ and take out some of the small pieces of paper in it, they run at high speed towards to puppy treat jar!
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