Chaser_Unlocking the Genius of the Dog Who Knows a Thousand Words

by John W. Pilley

  I said, “That depends on how well you motivate her. At home, there may be twenty toys on the floor. But if I tell Chaser, ‘Clean up and we will play Frisbee,’ she will put the toys in the tub in two minutes and race to the front door. Do you have a Frisbee?”

  “Not yet,” she replied.

  With laughter all around at that, Dave closed the meeting. If you’re curious about the video, you can watch it at www.youtube.com/pilleyjw.

  The demonstration gave me a big energy boost for working on the paper. In March, Alliston invited me to go with him to the Comparative Cognition Society’s annual conference in Melbourne, Florida, where we would have an opportunity to report on Chaser’s learning. The audience would be a tough-minded one, but receptive to the idea that a dog could reason. An increasing number of animal scientists around the world were moving away from Descartes’s animals-are-just-meat-machines paradigm, and the conference attendees reflected that. I was too nervous to make the presentation, however, and I asked Alliston to do it. I was happy to be sitting in the third row listening to Chaser’s story.

  After Alliston’s presentation several of the conference attendees asked tough questions, but in a friendly spirit that put me at ease. That evening at dinner I found myself sitting next to Clive Wynne. Alliston told me later that Clive asked to sit beside me because he was so intrigued by Chaser’s learning. A transplanted Englishman, Clive was a full professor in the Psychology Department at the University of Florida’s flagship campus in Gainesville, where he had his own Canine Cognition and Behavior Lab. He was also research director at Wolf Park, a research and public education facility in Battle Ground, Indiana, and editor in chief of the British journal Behavioural Processes.

  Clive peppered me with questions about Chaser. He was fascinated to hear about the double-blind trial before Wofford’s Psychology Club. And he was especially intrigued when I noted that Chaser performed language tasks for other trainers and questioners besides me.

  “Suppose I were to come up to Spartanburg with a couple of students,” he said. “Would Chaser be able to complete language tasks as you and Alliston describe if the students and I were the ones asking her to do them?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Come on ahead anytime.”

  A few weeks later, Clive drove up to Spartanburg with two of his postdoctoral students and research collaborators, Monique Udell and Nicole Dorey. Sally, Chaser, and I welcomed them, and we spent a little time getting to know one another. Chaser’s way of doing that, of course, was to engage Clive, Monique, and Nicole in playing with her. Each of them was happy to oblige. And then I showed them the Rubbermaid containers with Chaser’s toys so that they could conduct their own trials.

  Clive, Monique, and Nicole randomly picked twenty objects, which we took to Wofford. In the same auditorium where Chaser had demonstrated her learning for the Psychology Kingdom, Clive, Monique, and Nicole arranged the toys in random order behind a large screen. Monique and Nicole took turns asking Chaser to retrieve the objects by name, while Clive evaluated the accuracy of each selection.

  When Chaser quickly brought the first object correctly, Clive, Monique, and Nicole all exchanged a look that said, “Ummm, this could be interesting.” With each retrieval, I could see their excitement growing.

  Chaser brought the last of the objects out from behind the screen. She had not missed a single one. Clive turned to me and said, “If there’s a trick to this, it’s almost more impressive.”

  Sally and I were both bursting with pride. To see a leading canine cognition researcher and two of his best postdocs bowled over after testing Chaser’s learning for themselves—well, I was on cloud nine.

  Back at our house we all sat down together on the porch, and Sally and I answered our visitors’ many questions about Chaser’s training. For our part, we were fascinated to hear about their ongoing research projects. Their main focus was on how wolves and domestic dogs compare in their sensitivity to people’s gazes and gestures. Discovering the differences and similarities between wolves and dogs in this regard would shed light on the evolution of dogs’ social intelligence. Meanwhile Chaser livened things up by luring each of them into her favorite games. And then Sally and I got a shock.

  Just before Clive, Monique, and Nicole left to drive back to Gainesville, Clive asked, “Would you consider letting us take Chaser to our lab to work with her there and then write up our own study?”

  Seeing the negative reaction on Sally’s face and mine, Clive said, “I don’t mean now, of course. But would you consider it for sometime in the future?”

  In order to be polite we said we would, and we thanked him for that extraordinary vote of confidence in Chaser’s learning. Over the next couple of weeks I had several talks with Clive about the possibility of Monique and Nicole’s running a study with Chaser under his direction. The idea was tempting, because it would almost certainly assure that Chaser’s learning would be shared with the scientific community at large through a peer-reviewed paper in a good journal. But there was really no way we could contemplate sending Chaser out of the family for weeks or months at a time.

  Clive, Monique, and Nicole were all dog lovers. Sally and I had no doubt that they would take the best possible care of Chaser. But I finally explained to Clive that, as Sally and I always said, “Chaser is a member of our family.” Clive understood. He had already invited Alliston and me to submit our paper for possible publication in Behavioural Processes. He now took the further step of telling Julia Cort, a producer at PBS’s Nova scienceNow, about Chaser.

  In late September, Clive provisionally accepted Alliston’s and my paper. The peer reviewers for Behavioural Processes wanted to see a number of revisions and elaborations of our procedures, but they were all things I knew we could handle.

  In October, Julia Cort brought a team—her assistant, a cameraman, and a soundman—to Spartanburg to shoot a segment with Chaser for a “How Smart Are Animals?” feature on Nova scienceNow. They arrived the evening before the planned shoot. Tall and slender with shoulder-length dark brown hair, Julia was as congenial in person as she had been on the phone and in her e-mails, and her team were all as nice as they could be.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson, the host of Nova scienceNow, who would be in the planned segment with Chaser, arrived the next morning. Although Chaser’s ability to connect with all sorts of people never ceased to amaze me, I had been a little concerned about how she would react to Julia, Neil, and the crew. If the meeting was in any way bumpy, there would not be much time to put everyone at ease. I needn’t have worried, however. Chaser loved them all, especially Neil, who delighted her with his infectious enthusiasm and sense of fun.

  Neil and Julia were as blown away by Chaser’s language learning as Clive and his students had been a few months earlier. They told us that the feature wouldn’t be ready to show on Nova scienceNow for at least a year, because of the other segments they were planning. They also warned us that they couldn’t promise what would actually wind up in the finished program. But there was no mistaking their excitement over the footage they’d recorded with Chaser.

  Their response energized me. Now I couldn’t wait to finish revising the paper and get final approval of it by Behavioural Processes. The snag was that Alliston’s commitments to SQAB really ramped up over the 2009–10 academic year. But finally in the summer of 2010 we were able to get together on the final changes to the paper. Alliston outdid himself in crunching the data on Chaser’s learning and presenting it in dramatic figures and tables. Allston’s contributions really drove home the stringency of my criteria for whether Chaser had learned a word, and the magnitude of the testing I had done.

  With regard to Chaser’s proper noun learning, for example, we now had 8,000 1-of-8 tests, 1,000 8-of-8 tests, 838 20-of-20 tests, and 145 formal blind 20-of-20 tests to report, as well as the double-blind demonstration at Wofford. Statistics for each kind of test showed that the p-value, or probability-of-chance value, was always equal to or less than .004—wel
l below the point where Chaser’s success could be attributed to chance. And the statistical evidence and blind and double-blind trials we presented on Chaser’s other language learning—her combinatorial understanding of separate meanings for nouns and verbs, her grasp of common noun categories, and her ability to learn by exclusion—were equally significant.

  Clive sent us the peer reviewers’ final comments, with suggestions for a few minor additional revisions, in early September. He also suggested a bold title: “Border Collie Comprehends Object Names as Verbal Referents.” It was not a title to excite the average person. But it was sure to grab the attention of any scientist with an interest in language learning by animals or children.

  In November, Behavioural Processes formally accepted the paper, with e-publication to come the next month and print publication in February. And Nova scienceNow’s “How Smart Are Animals” program, with Chaser as the center of a “How Smart Are Dogs” segment, was scheduled to broadcast in February.

  The stars seemed to be aligning favorably, giving us a chance to reveal to the world that dogs are smarter than we often think.

  13

  Going Viral

  CHASER BECAME WORLD-FAMOUS before we knew it—literally.

  It was early evening on Christmas Eve, 2010, and Sally and I were on the phone with Debbie in Brooklyn. Ten-year-old Aidan had just said good night after telling Sally and me what he was hoping Santa Claus would bring him for Christmas. Debbie said it was getting hard to hide presents from Aidan, but we were all happy that Christmas was still a magical time for him.

  Debbie asked us what was new, and I remembered I had not yet told her that Behavioural Processes put Alliston’s and my paper online on December 8. It had slipped my mind, and at any rate, the print publication wouldn’t happen until February.

  “Dad-d-d-d-d,” Deb said in half humorous, half serious exasperation. “Why didn’t you mention that before? In today’s world the online publication is probably just as important.”

  I told her, “I don’t know, honey. This is science, and the print edition will probably carry most of the weight.”

  Deb sighed and asked, “Can you just give me the exact title of the paper? I’ll Google it.” I did that, and we said good night.

  Five minutes later the phone rang. It was Deb, practically breathless. “You won’t believe what’s happening!” she exclaimed. “When Jay and I Googled the name of the paper, all these links came up referring to Chaser as ‘the world’s smartest dog’ and ‘the dog with a thousand-word vocabulary.’ Jay is scrolling through dozens and dozens of hits and he hasn’t gotten anywhere near the end yet.”

  Deb asked Jay to pick up the other phone to tell us what he was seeing. He came on the line and said, “Chaser’s gone viral, John.”

  Though I used the computer every day for e-mail, I wasn’t Internet savvy and had to ask what that meant. Jay explained that news about Chaser was spreading on the Internet like a flu virus in a crowded room.

  “Wow,” I whispered.

  Deb said, “Oh my god, Dad, this is crazy!” There was silence for a few seconds, and then she repeated, “Oh my god. Tell Mom to pick up the other phone, or put on your speakerphone.”

  As I switched on the speakerphone I asked, “What is it, Deb?”

  She started speaking with an adrenaline rush: “I just had to read this a couple of times to make sure it was referring to Chaser. There is an article from the New Scientist”—she took a deep breath—“and here is how it opens: ‘In the age-old war between cats and dogs, canines might just have struck THE KILLER BLOW! A Border collie called Chaser has been taught the names of one thousand and twenty-two items—more than any other animal’!”

  “Wow!” I shouted. Startled, Chaser padded around the corner from where she’d been lying near the back door. In the winter she likes to feel the little draft of cold air slipping in under the door.

  I quickly explained to Deb that Jessica Griggs of the New Scientist, a highly respected British popular science magazine, had called the morning of December 8. She’d read the Behavioural Processes article online a few hours earlier and had been waiting to call me because of the five-hour time difference between Great Britain and the eastern United States. She asked me a few questions and said she was going to talk to one or two experts to get an independent perspective on the paper. Alliston and I had been hoping she’d do a story in February when the print edition came out. I was so excited about this possibility that I made a deliberate effort to put it out of my mind, and I’d mentioned it only to Sally.

  Jay came back on the phone and reported that the first hit was from two days before, on December 22, when the New Scientist website posted Jessica Griggs’s article under the title “Border Collie Takes Record for Biggest Vocabulary.” The next hit was from the following day, when the BBC’s website ran a story headlined “Chaser the Border Collie ‘Knows More Than 1,000 Words.’”

  Jay said, “I’m jumping from site to site, but it looks like the BBC got its information from the New Scientist. And then after the BBC ran its item, the news exploded. There’s stuff from all over the United States and the rest of the world: newspapers, radio and television stations, cable news networks, news websites, blogs, you name it. Wikipedia already has an entry about Chaser breaking the vocabulary record.”

  “You’re famous, Chaser honey,” Sally said, and Chaser trotted up to her to get a pet.

  “The world’s in awe of you, sweetie,” I said, bending toward Chaser from my seat in the easy chair. Grinning and tail wagging, Chaser trotted over to me, and I rubbed the top of her head and behind her ears.

  Encouraged by this attention and our obvious excitement, Chaser quickly got a blue racquetball and headed to the steps with it. At the foot of the steps, she turned and looked back at me expectantly.

  “Chaser, you know this is not play time,” I said gently.

  Unwilling to take no for an answer, Chaser walked to the top of the stairs and turned around to look at me with the ball in her mouth.

  “No, Chase,” I said a little more firmly.

  She sighed and lay down at the top of the stairs with the ball between her front paws.

  I turned my full attention back to the phone conversation. Debbie was reading the brief but wonderful item on the BBC’s website, ending with, “‘It is thought the training may be the key to Chaser’s apparently massive vocabulary.’”

  “That’s awesome,” I said. Sally and I shared a kiss and beamed at each other, and we could hear the joy in Deb’s and Jay’s voices.

  “You gotta look at these things online yourself, Dad,” Debbie said. “The New Scientist has one of the videos of Chaser’s testing that we put on YouTube for your and Alliston’s paper. And practically all the other stories have embedded the same video or included a link to it. We went to YouTube fifteen minutes ago to see how many hits the video had there, and it only had forty. But we just checked again and there are already over a hundred.”

  “That’s great,” I said. “Maybe tomorrow there’ll be a few hundred more.”

  Deb said she was e-mailing me the links to the New Scientist and BBC webpages, and we all said good night. Sally and I hugged and gave each other another kiss, and I turned to go upstairs to open Debbie’s e-mail and print out the articles.

  Before I put my foot on the bottom step of the stairs, Chaser nosed the blue racquetball over the top step. I chuckled and said, “Okay, Chaser. We’ll play a little while. You should get to celebrate too.”

  For ten minutes or so Chaser and I played the game she had invented, taking turns bouncing the ball down the steps to each other. After I printed out the New Scientist and BBC articles, I took them downstairs to the living room to read and share with Sally.

  Over the previous three years, as I struggled with writing the paper on Chaser’s learning, Robin had repeatedly said, “You’re going to be amazed by the reaction it gets.” Robin has always been the most technologically savvy member of our family, but sh
e had recently begun experimenting with living “off the grid.” I couldn’t wait to tell her how right her prediction was when we saw her on Christmas Day.

  The opening line of the New Scientist article (“In the age-old war between cats and dogs . . .”) was an impossible-to-ignore hook. The brief first paragraph captured the fact that Chaser’s language learning included common noun concepts as well as her record-busting vocabulary of proper noun names. And it provocatively drew the connection with young children’s language learning.

  The rest of the article described the other findings in the Behavioural Processes paper, especially Chaser’s ability to “infer the name of a new object” in learning by exclusion tests. There was a veiled reference to possible Clever Hans effects when Griggs quoted an expert in canine behavior and cognition: “‘The experimenters did a lot of controls to exclude alternative explanations, although from my experience the results are simply too good,’ says Ádám Miklósi, founder of the Family Dog Project at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary.”

  That was significant because Miklósi is perhaps the best-known European animal scientist specializing in research on dogs. His hint of skepticism didn’t faze me. He was asking the same questions about our procedures that Alliston or I would have asked in his place. Miklósi saying that our results looked too good to be true but he couldn’t find a flaw in our procedures was really a testament to Chaser’s unprecedented learning and its potential significance. The article went on to say that Miklósi “thinks Chaser’s intensive training explains the difference” between her results and those of other language-trained dogs.