Chaser the Genius Border Collie Understands Grammar

The brainy Border Collie might soon be smart enough to go in the kitchen and make you a sandwich.

A new study shows that Chaser, who gained fame by learning more than 1,000 words a few years ago, is a lot smarter than any of us knew -- he's maybe even smarter than I. You see, he knows grammar.  

In the study, Chaser's owner, Dr. John Pilley, set out to measure the ability of his genius Border Collie to learn the "syntax and semantics" of sentences consisting of three elements of grammar: a prepositional object, verb, and direct object. Chaser had to give consistent responses to commands containing those three elements (like, "to ball take Frisbee") were mixed up ("to Frisbee take ball").

And guess what? Chaser took the Frisbee to the ball, and then he took the ball to the Frisbee. Meaning he gets verbs, prepositions, and direct objects. He knows what fun things to take where, depending on where the words "take" and "to" land in the sentence.  

Imagine the possibilities. In particular, imagine this possibility: "Chaser, to me take sandwich."

"Chaser intuitively discovered how to comprehend sentences based on lots of background learning about different types of words," Chaser's owner, a retired psychology professor at Wofford College in South Carolina, told ScienceNews.

Chaser was tested with familiar and unfamiliar objects, and even took the right object to the right object when he couldn't see them as the command was given. 

Dr. Stanley Coren, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia and an expert on canine intelligence, and who had nothing to do with the study, is not surprised. 

"Roughly speaking, the average dog is equivalent to a human two-year-old in terms of mental abilities," he told The Huffington Post. "And the 'super dogs' are equivalent to maybe a human two-and-a-half-year-old.”

Which are the super dogs? Border Collies, followed by Poodles and German Shepherds, according to Dr. Coren. 

Dr. Coren stresses that when teaching your dog commands, repetition is key. "I always use exactly the same words and I always use the words to precede an action," he said. "I’ll say to my dogs 'upstairs' when I’m going upstairs or 'downstairs' when I’m going downstairs. And so, next time you say 'upstairs,' they'll start looking for stairs to climb."

One day, they'll start looking for a sandwich to make. 

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Border Collie Scores Every Dog’s Dream Job: Chasing Gulls

A border collie chasing gulls (Photo credit: Flickr photostream of BuckarooBob)

A border collie in Elmira N.Y. is probably thanking the big dog in the sky today after landing every dog’s dream job.

She won’t be herding sheep or doing police work or guiding the blind or sniffing out bombs like other working dogs. No, Sammi will be chasing ring-billed gulls on Elmira’s stretch of the Chemung River. Apparently the gulls are there in force, making a mess and causing problems, and the city wants them gone.

City manager John Burin assures that no gulls will be harmed while Sammi is doing her job. The 7-year-old dog was a champion herder, and has worked with ducks and geese in the past.

“The dog basically harasses them to the point where the birds want to go some place else,” he says. “Now, where they’re going go we’re not sure.”

The gulls probably won’t too happy, and some bird advocates’ feathers may get ruffled, but for Sammi, life doesn’t just doesn’t get any better than this.

Sources: WETM-TV, TheGazette.com

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Border Collie Has Vocabulary of More Than 1,000 Words

Two psychologists have taken the notion behind the wonderful children’s book I’ll Teach My Dog 100 Words, and upped it tenfold. They taught their dog 1,022 words, to be precise. That’s a world’s record by a mile.

Chaser, a border collie, not only knows the names of all these objects, but she can categorize them by function and shape if asked.

The psychologists, from Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina, had set out to see if there is a limit to the number of words a border collie can learn, according to New Scientist. They worked with her for hours a day for three years, and the result is apparently that the sky’s the limit when it comes to vocabulary, at least for very well trained border collies.

Jake is wondering when they will try this on Labs. “What’s the big fuss about border collies and their great big brains? It’s always ‘border collies this’ and ‘border collies that’ ” he grouses.

Meanwhile, how many words do you think your dog knows? And how did your dog come by his vocabulary: Did you teach your dog specific items, or did he pick them up on his own?

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