Chaser_Unlocking the Genius of the Dog Who Knows a Thousand Words

by John W. Pilley

  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.

  They liked it better when I did a figure eight around two chairs, walked to the end of the room and up onto the stage, circled the long table, and came back to the starting point. This was obviously a behavior that Chaser would be extremely unlikely to emit on her own, and everyone was stunned to see her do it. They were even more stunned when Chaser did it all once more when I said, “Again.” I explained that Chaser also understood “faster,” “slower,” and “reverse,” which she demonstrated when I asked her to imitate a figure eight around two different chairs.

  The demonstration was scheduled to last thirty minutes. It ran to forty minutes, right up against the start of the second demonstration, which was just as successful and ran just as long as the first.

  We piled into a couple of cabs to go back to the hotel. Recalling our car seat struggles in New York, I was glad once again that Washington, D.C., cabdrivers didn’t mind Chaser’s riding up on the seat.

  A copy of USA Today with Sharon Jayson’s story was waiting for us at the hotel:

  RESEARCH DOG REVEALS CANINES’

  COGNITIVE POTENTIAL

  WASHINGTON—Don’t underestimate the mind of a mutt—at least when the canine in question is one of the smartest breeds and her trainer has painstakingly taught her to identify more than 1,000 objects.

  The dog of this day is Chaser, a 7-year-old Border collie who can also distinguish between nouns and verbs. She’s a featured player at the American Psychological Association’s annual meeting here, where her owner and trainer—retired psychology professor John Pilley—today let Chaser bask in the attention at the first of several weekend demonstrations planned.

  From the moment this popular pooch entered the room, she was clearly the star, with cameras flashing and people maneuvering for shots of the brainy dog. . . .

  We opened a bottle of wine in our room and toasted Chaser. She grabbed her Frisbee Snow in her mouth and shook it as she jumped on the bed. (Sorry, Westin.) And then we all got our supper and spent the evening unwinding together.

  On Saturday morning Chaser and I played Frisbee again in the hallway, although we moved down from our door a bit in case Sally heard us. I don’t believe we disturbed anyone else either, but I can only swear to the fact that no one opened a door to complain.

  Our demonstrations that morning were again standing-room-only events, and after lunch we were all ready to drive to New York in our two cars. Debbie was going to go with Chaser and me, and Sally was going to ride with Aidan and Jay in their car. When I opened the rear car door for Chaser, she stood stock-still just as she had on Friday morning outside our house in Spartanburg and during our two stops along the road.

  But as soon as I began to say “You want me to help you,” she leaped into the car onto the back seat and turned around to look at me. I was already praising her warmly, and I saw that her wariness was diminishing. In fact, she was looking quite pleased with herself. The expression on her face seemed to say, “You think I’m gonna let you lift me into the car? Ha-ha, fooled you again!” It was like her game of dropping a pine cone in front of Sally or me on a walk, and then racing to grab it before we could pick it up.

  Ever since then, all I have to do to get Chaser in the car is to start saying “You want me to help you?” I wouldn’t say she’s forgotten entirely that my helping her into the car that very hot morning in Spartanburg was a little uncomfortable. But we’ve layered pleasant associations on top of it, so that we can both feel good about how she gets into the car now.

  The journey with
Chaser always has the same number one priority: fun. Sally and I find fun with her every day, a routine that never becomes stale.

  16

  Expanding the Conversation

  IT’S A ROUTINE of surprises. Most mornings around five a.m., Chaser and I are on the ten-minute drive to Wofford. As we have since Chaser was a puppy, we’re going to hold our first training-and-play session of the day in the exercise center. But we don’t know exactly what will happen while we’re there. When we turn in to the campus, Chaser stands up on the car seat, tongue lolling out and tail wagging eagerly.

  The surprises begin as soon as we enter the Richardson Physical Activities Building. Chaser wheels to face me, and I bounce her one of her blue racquetballs.

  Chaser catches Blue and immediately drops it at my feet. I kick the ball down the hall and she darts ahead to snag it on the bounce, carom, or roll, twisting and turning to keep up with its crazy course. She drops it at my feet as I walk down the hall, and I give it another kick.

  A few more paces and the exercise center opens up on our right, with weight machines, treadmills, and other equipment. There’s usually an early bird or two working out, and others come in as the morning advances. If Chaser knows the people, she offers her ball for a kick or throw. With new people, she tries to make friends with the same approach.

  I give her time only for brief hellos and pets at this point, and we go into a large room off the main exercise area. The room is about twenty-five feet by forty feet, with two glass-wall-backed racquetball courts on either side. In addition to being an entry and waiting area for the courts, it has mats and exercise balls for stretching. On the opposite side of the room is a doorway to a hallway that we also use for training. There’s clear glass around the doors at either end of the room, and it’s a wonderful space for us because it’s self-contained but doesn’t feel closed in. Sometimes half a dozen people or more will stand on the other side of the glass and observe us. I always wave to them. If we are near the end of the session I may invite them in, which Chaser loves.