It was fascinating for all the dog owners to see how David interacted with the various dogs, modeling how best to work with them as individuals. But of course it was especially interesting for each person to see how David worked with his or her dog in particular. David was teaching a master class to two sets of students, dogs and people. I kept wondering how he would work with Chaser and what she and I could learn from that.
Was Chaser ready?
When he’d invited me to the demonstration, Wayne had told me, “Chaser might still be a little young for David to work with, so you should probably plan on her just being an observer alongside of you. She’ll learn a lot from that.” But the more I watched David with the other dogs, the more I wanted him to work with Chaser, too. Chaser’s behavior made me think she was ready: she never took her eyes off the sheep, and each time a dog moved the sheep her ears went up a bit and her tail started wagging. When David brought the sixth dog out of the ring, I managed to ask Wayne and him, “I know you weren’t planning on it, but I sure would love it if Chaser could have a chance with the sheep. Is that possible?”
Wayne looked to David, who nodded his head yes. That excited me, but it also made me a little anxious. Was I still rushing? Was Chaser ready for this? It was hard to sit still as David worked with the seventh and eighth of the other dogs.
Finally, it was Chaser’s turn. David first took her into the corral without putting the harness and long line on her. For a few minutes he just observed her as she sniffed the ground with no apparent interest in the sheep. But as he later told me, David saw that she was interested, albeit uncertain about what to do, from the way she angled her body slightly toward the sheep rather than away from them. He called her by name, put the harness and long line on her, and walked with her toward the sheep. For several minutes David simply stood holding the line slackly in one hand while Chaser sniffed the ground, but with her eye always on the sheep. I was seesawing between hope and disappointment, afraid that David was going to bring Chaser out of the corral and tell me she wasn’t ready.
Then I heard David whispering softly to Chaser, “You can do it. You can do it. You can do it.”
I couldn’t detect any reaction on Chaser’s part. Again I feared that David was going to give up on her. But he kept whispering, “You can do it. You can do it. You can do it.”
I couldn’t tell you how long he did that, whether it was three minutes or ten minutes. It felt like an eternity.
And then Chaser shifted her feet and pointed her nose straight at the sheep. Her ears went up and her tail began to stand out behind her. David was still whispering, “You can do it. You can do it. You can do it.”
The sheep noticed the change in Chaser’s position and body language and they began shifting their own feet. At that, Chaser stepped briskly toward them and they began to move off away from her.
David sang out, “Good girl, Chaser. That’ll do,” and she trotted over to him. Maybe I was projecting my desires, but she looked as pleased as when she’d found a toy I’d hidden. She seemed to be bursting with pride, just like I was. My other feelings were relief that Chaser had made this breakthrough, and admiration for David’s intense communion with her.
David brought Chaser out of the corral, and she basked in my pets and praise. David told me, “She’ll train up fine, if you’ve a mind to do it.”
What a day it had been. I couldn’t wait to tell Sally the good news.
Six months later on a crisp October afternoon I said, “Chaser! Let’s go to the sheep.”
In a flash Chaser was at the door, tail wagging, waiting for me to come open it.
Sally was going through the mail at her desk along the long wall of the living room. She looked up and said, “You said the magic word, hon. Chaser’s raring to go.”
I pulled on my jacket and circled through the living room so that Sally and I could kiss each other goodbye. A few minutes later Chaser and I were in the car heading for Wayne West’s farm, about half an hour away. We were in the regular family car, not our pickup, so Chaser was lying on the back seat. But as always when we were driving somewhere, she was having a snooze, resting up for whenever there would be something interesting to do.
Not that she was in any doubt about where we were heading. Though Rico’s critics said dogs do not learn words by overhearing them, there were quite a few words that Chaser seemed to have learned in exactly that way. I never tried to teach her the word “sheep,” for example. She learned it simply by overhearing it in connection with going to Wayne’s.
After David Johnson guided Chaser through her first successful encounter with sheep, Wayne told me, “Carry Chaser on out here with you whenever you got time, Doc. Don’t bother calling ahead. If I’m not around, you know where the sheep are. You and Chaser’ll do me a favor. Those darned sheep know my dogs so good, and know to heed them so fast, that people don’t always appreciate my dogs when I’m demonstrating with them. If Chaser moves those sheep around, that’ll freshen up their reactions for the next time I demonstrate with my dogs.”
Since then, we’d been going out to Wayne’s once or twice a week. It wasn’t often enough for Chaser to become really accomplished at sheepherding. For one thing, Border collies can’t excel without regularly facing fresh challenges with unfamiliar sheep. Like human athletes competing against more challenging opponents and human students tackling more difficult subject matter, Border collies need to make their way through progressively more difficult situations and problem solving to achieve mastery as working dogs and become champions in herding trials. The same is true of shepherds. People such as Wayne West and David Johnson can guide and partner with dogs so well because of all their experiences with different sheep in varied places and conditions.
But even if Chaser wasn’t going to be ready for sheepherding trials anytime soon, we both loved working the sheep once or twice a week for thirty or forty minutes at a time. Over the past six months we’d improved a lot, individually and as a team, in reading the sheep and moving them from one place to another in the good-size pasture Wayne had close to his house. It was fun to watch Chaser growing more and more comfortable at keeping her eye on the sheep while giving me her ear and the occasional glance. The hesitancy she initially showed around the sheep was long gone, and any resistance from the sheep was a welcome challenge. It seemed to me that her tail never stopped wagging as she darted back and forth around the stock in response to my signals.
The visits to Wayne’s were rewards to both Chaser and me for her language learning progress, but they were also part of that language learning. I always wanted to keep Chaser’s understanding of words grounded in the herding behaviors that are her genetic birthright. Chaser was eighteen months old and so far had learned seven hundred proper noun object names. She easily learned one or two new proper noun toy names a day without forgetting any of the old ones. So I had no doubt that she was going to reach the thousand mark.
About a mile from Flint Hill Farm, Chaser sat up expectantly. It probably took a few drives out to Wayne’s for her brain to map the route exactly. But it seemed that she almost instantly knew every straightaway, turn, bend, undulation, and bump of the drive, and tracked it subliminally while she dozed. Yasha and our other dogs showed the same anticipatory behavior in the car as we neared favored hiking and white-water spots, and most dog owners who regularly take their dogs on certain outings have probably experienced this phenomenon. Dogs’ apparent ability to map a driving route in their minds may not be a match for the marvels of homing pigeons and migratory birds, but it’s impressive in its own right. Chaser always woke up and began to look out the window for Wayne’s farm at the same spot along the road.
“You’re right, Chaser. We’re almost to the sheep,” I said. At the word “sheep” Chaser barked happily.
Nobody was at home but the animals when we pulled into Wayne’s driveway and parked next to his garage. The dogs in the kennel greeted the car with a cacophony of barks. The barking grew frenzied when
I opened the rear door of the car and Chaser jumped out and sped over to the gate to the sheep pasture on the other side of Wayne’s swimming pool. All of the dogs wanted to be in that pasture working the sheep, but the most frenzied barker was a female dog, mostly black with white patches, that I didn’t recall seeing before.
As soon I opened the gate, Chaser shot through it and ran down the sloping pasture to find the sheep. She disappeared over a little knoll as I closed the gate behind us. I walked to the crest of the knoll and saw that Chaser had Wayne’s small flock of five sheep in the far corner of the pasture. She was running back and forth, trying to move them out of the corner.
“There,” I sang out, and Chaser stood still.
“Way to me,” I said. To follow that signal and go behind the sheep in a counterclockwise direction, Chaser had to move along the fence that formed the right side of the corner the sheep were in. As she did so, the sheep spilled out of the corner.
“Come by,” I said, to turn Chaser back behind them clockwise.
“There,” I said, when Chaser was directly opposite me and about ten feet behind the sheep. She stopped instantly. “Drop,” I said. She went to her belly. I watched the sheep for a second or two as they clustered a little closer together.
“Walk up,” I said. Chaser sprang to her feet and began to walk toward the sheep. The sheep moved up the slope to me, and I turned and walked a good seventy yards away to another corner of the pasture, where the road to Wayne’s house intersected with a side road.
I turned around to see the little flock of five sheep, all full-grown adults much bigger than a Border collie, coming toward me. Right in among them was Chaser, as if she were part of the flock. Wayne told me he’d never seen another Border collie do that.
One of the sheep broke ranks and tried to peel back the other way. Without a word from me, Chaser darted out from among the other sheep and turned the stray back into the flock. Then she inserted herself back in the group and trotted along again in the middle of them, ears up, tail wagging, and tongue lolling out of her mouth.
All was well in our world. In her own distinctive way Chaser was doing what she was born to do. And I was a proud and happy daddy watching her.
When the sheep were ten or fifteen feet away from me I said, “Chaser, that’ll do.” She trotted forward out of the little flock and came to my side, and I praised her for her good work. Without Chaser to push and accompany them in my direction, the sheep stopped and milled around where they were. It was a little after two o’clock now, and I thought we’d move the sheep in another direction for a bit before heading home.
A black and white shape streaked by me on the right. It was the unfamiliar dog from the kennel. Somehow she had gotten loose and then jumped the pasture fence.
I called out, “There,” the command to stop, but the dog ignored me. She got behind the sheep and began rushing them toward Chaser and me in the corner. “There,” I called out again in a firm voice, but the loose dog kept moving the sheep toward us in a corner. She too was doing what she was born to do, move the sheep to the farmer, even if she wasn’t going to give her ear to that farmer.
The kennel escapee nipped one of the sheep in the heel, and they all rushed away from her a little faster. That would have been fine with me, except for Chaser’s being by my side. If the sheep crowded in on us, I would be okay. But Chaser might get knocked down and trampled. She could wind up with a broken leg or worse, much worse.
The sheep were almost on top of us. There was no point in giving the other dog more commands she wouldn’t heed. I took off along the fence line for the gate, running as fast as I could. Chaser stayed right with me, although she could have raced ahead or peeled off into the center of the field.
The mostly black dog responded by pushing the sheep even harder behind us. It was a miniature stampede. But its consequences could be full-size.
I kept running, and Chaser kept matching my pace. There was the gate, thirty feet ahead.
I glanced back. The sheep were gaining on us.
I sprinted harder, my lungs beginning to burn. Ten feet from the gate I slipped and almost went down. But I managed to hold my balance and keep going.
The sheep were only a few feet behind us now.
Finally here was the gate. I flung up the latch, opened the gate a few inches, and squeezed through it with Chaser. I shut the gate just as the sheep galloped past.
Perplexed, the mostly black dog stopped running at the gate. She clearly couldn’t understand why I wasn’t holding the gate open for her to drive the sheep through.
I leaned on the gate and caught my breath.
Chaser was fine. She was ready to work the sheep again, in fact. But I figured our close call was enough for one day.
For her part, the other dog was now lying on her belly on the other side of the little flock, holding them by the gate as she assumed the shepherd—me—wanted. I opened the gate and went into the pen, leaving Chaser outside it. The other dog still wasn’t willing to heed my commands, but she let me come up to her, and I took off my belt to use as a leash. With that she walked dutifully beside me out of the pen and back to the kennel.
Up close I could see that she was a young dog, perhaps around Chaser’s age. Although the pattern wasn’t identical, the kennel escapee’s mostly black coat with white patches struck me as a reverse image of Chaser’s mostly white coat with black patches. I thought they would make a great picture if they were posed side by side.
There was nothing wrong that I could see with the fence around the kennel yard. The dog must have jumped it, driven by the frustration of seeing Chaser go into the sheep pasture to do what she was longing to do. When I put her back inside the kennel yard, she seemed willing to stay there. I was about to put her into the kennel proper, where she couldn’t possibly get out, when Wayne drove up in his truck.
Hearing about the dog’s behavior, Wayne shook his head and then apologized. With a wry smile he added, “I reckon we could chalk this up to sibling rivalry.”
To my astonishment he explained that the escapee, Kate, was Chaser’s littermate. One of Wayne’s daughters, Sandy, had taken Kate as an eight-week-old puppy, only to find that she was a nipper. With a young baby in her family, Sandy wasn’t able to work with Kate. Wayne had worked with Kate himself, and he had recently sent her to David Johnson for additional training. Kate promised to be a good herding dog, and Wayne was looking for the right situation for her.
Sally was upset when I told her what had almost happened, concerned for me as well as Chaser. As we talked over the incident she realized that I had never been in any real danger. And we both laughed about Kate’s being Chaser’s sister, recalling some of the more raucous moments between Robin and Debbie when they were young.
The question was what to do about Chaser. Should I stop taking her to Wayne’s? By dinnertime Sally agreed that was too extreme a reaction. Kate’s jumping the kennel fence was just one of those things that can happen now and then in the best of circumstances. But Sally made me promise to make sure all of Wayne’s dogs were secure in their kennel and keep an extra sharp eye out for any escapees. That reminded us both of those great escape artists Blue and Timber, and we shared a few stories of their misadventures over dinner.
Three days later Chaser and I went back out to Wayne’s. Kate stayed in the kennel, and Wayne soon found her a good home on a farm with horses and cattle. Since then Chaser and I have continued our regular visits to work Wayne’s sheep without any mishaps. Thanks to Wayne, I have been able to keep my promise to Chaser when she was an eight-week-old puppy, that I would strive to help her fulfill herself as a Border collie. I love that she can herd sheep the way she was bred and born to do while continuing her progress in herding words.
In Chaser’s second and third years, that meant a greater focus on common nouns, words that stand for categories, and matching another benchmark from the Rico study, learning by exclusion.
11
Advanced Lessons
To teach Chaser what a ball is I started with eight balls of different sizes, colors, and materials on the floor: a tennis ball, a racquetball, a baseball, a lacrosse ball, a golf ball, and big and small balls made of foam and spongelike stuff. The balls had many different characteristics, but they were all round and, to different degrees, bouncy. To enable Chaser to start off with errorless learning, there were no other objects on the floor. So when I said, “Chaser, find a ball,” there was no way she could choose an incorrect object. I used the 8-of-8 test procedure I described earlier, in which I did not replace objects in the group after she picked them correctly. Instead I kept saying, “Chaser, find a ball,” until there were no balls left on the floor.
We did this several times off and on through the day. And then we went through the same procedure with another eight balls of different types, followed by another eight balls, and so on. If this process was successful, Chaser would learn to generalize that balls are round and bouncy. She would acquire an abstract concept of what a ball is, based on the common physical characteristics of all the balls she encountered.
After many repetitions of this over several weeks, I made the task more challenging by putting out eight balls and eight non-balls. She not only had to generalize what characterized a ball, but also had to discriminate a ball from a non-ball. I randomly asked her to retrieve balls and non-balls. If she retrieved a non-ball when she was asked to retrieve a ball, I softly told her, “No, Chaser. That is not a ball.” Informal tests soon demonstrated Chaser’s ability to bring a ball, and only a ball, when I asked her to do so.
I used the same procedure for teaching her what a Frisbee is, using that brand name to apply to any throwable, catchable spinning disk or ring in her flock of objects, no matter what it was made of. First I put eight Frisbees on the floor, with no other objects in sight. After errorless retrieval of all eight, I tested her on other sets of eight Frisbees so that gradually she generalized the characteristics of a Frisbee across all the throwable, catchable disks in her flock. And then I put eight Frisbees on the floor with eight non-Frisbees, so that she would have to discriminate successfully among the Frisbees and non-Frisbees.
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