Chaser_Unlocking the Genius of the Dog Who Knows a Thousand Words

by John W. Pilley

  This open-ended training with eager creative learning showed its value one night when seven hundred lambs escaped from their pen and scattered onto the moors. As Hogg went looking for them in the dark, he called and whistled to Sirrah, but he searched until dawn without seeing or hearing either the lambs or the dog.

  Hogg feared that all the lambs were lost. On the way home, however, he discovered that “the indefatigable Sirrah . . . looking all around for some relief, but still standing true to his charge” had gathered every single one of the lambs and herded them into a ravine. Hogg wrote, “How he had got [them] . . . all collected in the dark is beyond my comprehension. . . . If all the shepherds in the Forest had been there to have assisted him, they could not have effected it with greater propriety.”

  If you spend enough time around people who work with Border collies and other herding dogs, you hear about many incidents like this, in which a dog figured out a difficult new problem without human direction. I drink up these stories. They refresh and inspire my belief in the learning and reasoning abilities of dogs, and in what dogs and people can achieve when they form bonds of trust and love as fellow creatures.

  David Johnson believes fervently in the reasoning ability of dogs. He told me, “Dogs and people are so much alike as far as their thinking and even their emotions go. Some people don’t like that idea. I’ve had words with my church’s Sunday school teacher a time or two, because in his teaching sometimes he would say that we are the only creatures that God made that can reason. He’d say, ‘A dog can’t reason.’ And I’d tell him—he doesn’t say it anymore, ’cause I would tell him, ‘I beg to differ with you. I can give you illustration after illustration to let you know that dogs can reason, just like people can reason.’ Matter of fact, as far as working livestock is concerned, I think a lot of dogs that are brought to me for training are more intelligent than the people that bring them.”

  As an example, he mentioned the day he sent two dogs, Maud and Gail, to retrieve some cattle from the woods beyond his pasture. Within the woods there was a fenced lot, once used for holding hogs, with gates at the north and south ends. The gates were now always left open so that cattle could move through the woods to graze in the abandoned hog lot. Here’s how David explained to me what happened after he sent Maud and Gail on their mission:

  I couldn’t see the cattle, but that wasn’t anything unusual. I could cast my dogs at livestock that was out of sight, and they would find them and bring them to me. However, this day they were gone so long that I got concerned. So I walked over to the woods. When I got there I saw Maud and Gail bringing the cows through the old hog lot. The cows went in through the north gate, but when they came out through the south gate they turned back around through the woods.

  I don’t know how many times they had done that, and forced Maud and Gail to round them up again. They did it once when I got in sight. I watched Maud and Gail gather them from among the trees. Their teamwork was something, because of how thick the woods were around the old hog lot. I was still far enough away, and they were so focused on the cattle, that they didn’t see me watching them.

  Once the dogs got the cattle together and headed back down through the north gate, I was going to intervene so the dogs’ efforts didn’t go to waste one more time. But something made me wait. This time, before any cows got down to the gate at the south end, Maud went around them inside the hog lot and cut off, say, eight or ten. When they went through the gate she went through beside them so she could force them to go on straight south toward the pasture.

  Gail understood what Maud was doing and just stopped and waited, didn’t push the other cows on through. Then Maud went back and cut off eight or ten more and brought them through the gate like that and kept them from going back north. I just stood there and watched. And that’s the illustration I told the Sunday school teacher. I said, “If that dog could not have reasoned out the problem and the solution, she would have never done that.”

  Wayne West shared similar experiences of sending dogs to work out of sight and unsupervised. Wayne told me, “If I can’t see where the dog and the stock are at, the dog has got to reason. He’s got to think for himself what he has to do to get the stock from point A to point B.”

  Having dogs work out of sight can lead to unexpected, even unwanted, results, but definitely ones that display independent thought on the part of the dog. David told me how he sent his dog Craig to get some sheep at the far end of a thirty-acre field in driving rain. Because of the rain and the undulations of the field, Craig could not see where the sheep were when he started out. For the same reason, David could not always see Craig as he moved across the field. David said:

  All of a sudden I saw Craig start turning in too quick. I had walked up on a little rise and I could see where the sheep was at, much farther back in the field. And I thought, “What’s wrong with him?” Then I see something lift up, but I can’t make out what it is because of the rain.

  In a few seconds I see it’s a flock of wild geese flying about three or four feet off the ground. And Old Craig is right in behind them, herding them toward me. They fly like that toward me until they get close enough to see me, and then of course they lift up and go on over me.

  In exhibitions I’ve had dogs herd ducks as well as sheep and cattle. Craig saw those geese before he saw the sheep, and he thought that’s what I sent him after. I wish I had that on film, because a lot of people won’t believe that it actually happened.

  Wayne West and David Johnson both learned about Border collies from the grandfather of Border collies in America, Arthur Allen. The son and grandson of sheep farmers who imported top dogs from Scotland, Arthur Allen did more to foster appreciation of Border collies in this country than anyone else. He competed in and won all the important sheepdog trials. Beginning in the 1940s, he put on exhibitions with Roy Rogers’s traveling show. Two of his best dogs starred in the 1955 Walt Disney film Arizona Sheepdog. And he wrote books that became the bibles of breeding and training Border collies in America.

  Wayne told me of standing with Arthur Allen on his farm in southern Illinois and watching two of Allen’s dogs disappear into a distant cornfield where the stalks were as high as a person. Half an hour later the dogs had without supervision gathered a flock of sheep out of the field and moved them several hundred yards farther away to another field through a gate that a farm employee had left open for them. Arthur Allen said to Wayne, “If I could teach the dogs to open the gate, I wouldn’t have to have a hired hand.”

  In his book Border Collies in America, Arthur Allen wrote about his best champion dog, Old Tweed:

  When I asked him to go get anyone in the family, he brought them regardless of what they were doing. Anyone that was on the farm very long knew when Tweed started pushing them with his nose they had no choice but to go wherever he wanted to take them. He had a wonderful ability for finding sick sheep and would come after me and would not give up until I went to see about the sheep or a ewe with a young lamb. He also had a great ability to recognize a sheep that had gotten out of a pasture and become mixed in with sheep from other pastures. He would cut him out and bring him in to be put in the pasture where he belonged. [Tweed] would do this all on his own without any help from me whatsoever. . . . He was a fine trial dog when the going was rough, and . . . when the sheep were impossible for others to handle, Tweed looked his best. But he always seemed to resent exhibition work, as he could not see the purpose behind it.

  In the same book Allen says, “I like a dog that is an individualist; one who thinks for himself and will act without orders.” He adds that the number one mistake that people make in training Border collies is not trusting the dogs’ instincts. The number two mistake is not allowing the dogs to think for themselves. His close observation of Border collies showed how intertwined their instincts and reasoning abilities are, and how their instincts support their ability to solve problems that dogs could never encounter in the wild or could never be specifically trai
ned to deal with in advance.

  Arthur Allen’s dogs Rock and Nickey (called Nick in the movie) provide beautiful examples of this in Arizona Sheepdog, which you can see on YouTube. One comes in a sequence that calls for Nick to herd five stray sheep for more than a day, taking an independent route from the shepherd and Rock, who are taking the main flock to their new pasture. Much of this is scripted and staged to some extent, of course, but the animals’ behavior could not be scripted in every detail. In particular there is a sequence in which the five sheep, supposedly driven by thirst, wind up in a raging river. Two of the sheep separately clamber onto a boulder and strand themselves there, refusing to move. In each instance Nick swims out to the boulder, climbs on it with the frightened sheep, and noses its feet until it falls back into the river, a behavior he could not have been taught in advance. He then herds all five sheep to safety.

  Earlier in the movie Nick displays both world-class athleticism and tenderness in herding a Navajo child’s pet chipmunk back into its little box. Nick’s spontaneous responses to the chipmunk, including gently trapping it with his paw as part of redirecting its path, are a joy to see, an equal expression of his problem-solving skill and his compassion.

  The problem-solving ability of well-trained Border collies goes along with their dedication to their work. And both these things rest on the quality of the relationships the dogs have with people. To illustrate this, David Johnson told me more about the dogs Maud and Gail:

  I was working Maud one day on some cattle, demonstrating for some visitors. She had to nip the cattle on the heels to move them, and I probably worked her for ten minutes. It was only when I called her to me with the “That will do” command that I noticed she had bit through her own top lip. One of her long top teeth was sticking through the lip. As she came out through the gate she was swiping at her face with the front paw on that side, trying to get the tooth free. Until I called her to me she never faltered, she never quit working or anything. She kept right on like it wasn’t a thing wrong. She had to be in pain.

  Another time I was demonstrating for a visitor with Gail. She was working some sheep, and I had her bring the sheep up into the corner of a big pen. Then I gave her the command to “down.” I left her there holding the sheep up in the corner while I took my visitor over to a different lot to see another dog work some cattle.

  We did that for probably twenty minutes, and then I put the dog that had worked the cattle back in the kennel. My visitor said, “Where is your other dog?”

  Understand now, we were completely out of sight of Gail and those sheep. We walked back over there, and sure enough there she’s laying right where I left her, still holding the sheep right in that corner. She was what I call a honest dog.

  Some dogs are so dedicated, they want to please so strong. And then there’s other dogs that aren’t dedicated at all—they’re just obeying you because they think they have to. Once they get an opportunity where they see you’re not looking, they will start chasing the stock for fun or doing things the way they want to.

  Dogs that have had opportunities as puppies to bond with people are the ones that become “honest dogs,” in David’s terms, and put their willpower and cognitive ability to work for their human companions with total dedication.

  David’s explanation of an honest dog’s motivations helped me better understand the dynamics of my relationship with Chaser. Chaser’s sensitive reaction to her errors during training can be extreme, and I hate to see her eyes cloud up with confusion and the hurt of disappointing me when she makes a mistake. She looks so wounded in those moments. I’ve sometimes worried that her strong reaction must be the result of some mistake on my part, inadvertently expressing disappointment over errors in a way that traumatized her.

  David explained that this wasn’t really the case: “Dogs are just like people. Some dogs are very honest, and some dogs are dishonest. I would never send a dog that’s not honest to gather stock out of sight, because you can’t depend on them. They get out of sight and they run the stock ragged. They do what they want to do. Some dogs just will not cheat you at all. My old Roy dog comes to mind. He was one of the most honest dogs I’ve ever had. He just did not want to do anything wrong, he was so dedicated. It looked like it hurt his feelings if he thought he had disappointed me.”

  The more I heard about Roy, Maud, or another one of David’s “honest dogs,” the more I understood how their honesty, as he calls it, flowed from their loving relationships with him and other people. Positive relationships with people are as crucial to a dog’s development as they are to a child’s. Chaser is without question an honest dog in David’s terms.

  Animal scientists have often worked on the assumption that animals cannot reason and are simply machines made out of flesh and blood. That view includes the idea that animals are incapable of empathy and compassion. To have empathy and compassion for another creature requires what science calls a theory of mind, an understanding on some level that other beings have independent thoughts and feelings. In recent years animal scientists have become more open to recognizing signs of empathy and compassion in animals.

  Charles Darwin wrote about the social intelligence of dogs, and animal science today is increasingly recognizing the social intelligence of dogs, bonobos, crows, and dolphins, among other species. We are entering a new period of discovery about what animals’ social intelligence shares with our own social intelligence, with the potential to illuminate the social component of how our own brains mysteriously acquire language. As I mentioned, researchers with backgrounds in behavioral and cognitive psychology, such as Clive Wynne and Alexandra Horowitz, and evolutionary anthropology, such as Brian Hare and Juliane Kaminski, have made great strides in delineating dogs’ perceptual and cognitive capacities. They are pioneering a new understanding of dogs as thinking and feeling creatures.

  The more that science discovers about the unique interspecies social relationship people and dogs share, and the kinds of learning and decision-making this relationship can engender, the more we can appreciate the wisdom and insight that farmers, breeders, and trainers have achieved. Working with dogs on a daily basis has given them a uniquely valuable perspective on dogs’ capacities for problem solving and for empathy and compassion.

  David Johnson said of his dog Roy:

  He was a great dog to move ewes with baby lambs. Roy would move them so cautious, ’cause if he got in a big hurry and went to pushing the ewes too fast they would run over the little lambs and break a leg or whatnot. And ewes will fight to protect their lambs just like cows will fight to protect their calves. If a ewe turned and came back to fight Roy, he would nip her on the nose and turn her. But he let the little lambs wobble and bobble in against his face. He worked with his head low to the ground, and although the lambs might bump into him he would never bite them. He took his nose and just kind of pushed and rooted them along, but he never put his mouth on them. He had enough sense to know that they were fragile. Roy, if the grown ones fought him he’d nip them on the nose and turn them. But he was kind to the little ones.

  David also said:

  I had a customer come here one time, and he told me something that I did not believe. He said he had an old female and a young male dog. The female had gotten too old to jump into the back of his pickup truck. He said the young male dog would jump in the truck, then the female dog would rear up to put her front feet on the tailgate, and the young male dog would reach down and catch her in the scruff of the neck and pull her on up in the truck like a mother dog lifting up a puppy. He said the dogs had figured this out entirely on their own.

  When the customer left, I told my dad, “That’s just a story trying to impress me. The dog won’t do that.”

  A couple of months later the customer came back. And this time he had the two dogs in the back of his pickup. He said, “I want you to watch my dogs.”

  He asked them to jump out, which they did. And then he told them, “Get in the truck.” The young male dog j
umps in. The old female rears up and puts her front feet on the tailgate. And darned if that male dog doesn’t reach down and catch her in the scruff of the neck and pull her up into the truck.

  I apologized to the man for doubting him, and I thanked him for bringing the dogs. What that young male dog figured out to do showed his intelligence, but it also showed his compassion. To me that’s pretty amazing.

  Hearing these stories from David brought to mind an experience I had in Learned, Mississippi, one July day in 1944, when I was sixteen. My sister, her husband, and I were staying with my brother-in-law’s mother, Miss Lillian, on her small, hardscrabble farm. Miss Lillian may not have had much in the way of material wealth, but she was a true matriarch in her sharecropping community, respected by everyone for her wisdom, kindness, and graciousness.

  We had just come back to Miss Lillian’s house for lunch after a morning of Bible study in a hot, sticky classroom, and I was leaning against a maple tree debating whether to go on in the house to eat or take a swim in the nearby lake. My eyes caught something moving in the two-and-a-half-foot crawlspace under the house. Shielding my eyes from the sun with my hand, I made out Miss Lillian’s old black dog, Jeb, walking back and forth in the crawlspace. He stopped for a moment to lie down, only to get back up and walk ten feet away, lie down for another moment, and then get up and move to another spot under the house.

  I looked up and saw through the large picture window that Miss Lillian was preparing lunch plates at the sideboard and then passing them around to my sister, my brother-in-law, and other guests. Peering back down into the crawlspace, I saw that Jeb was following Miss Lillian’s footsteps, which he could clearly distinguish from anyone else’s. Jeb’s devotion moved me, and for the first time in my life I pondered the significance of animal intelligence and behavior.