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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After Four Long Years, Cassey the Collie Comes Home

After running off one day, Cassey spent years on her own. Last week, she found her family again.

Expecting their third child, Brandy and Dave Metcalf of Wake Forest, N.C., came up with a plan to calm the household during those often chaotic first months with a newborn: They decided to let Brandy's sister, Chelsee, dog-sit.

It was not a bad plan. They had a small house, two other children, and understood that Cassey, their Border Collie, might get shoved to the sidelines in all the commotion. It would be good for the dog -- a short vacation with a member of the family who knew and loved the dog, who could give her the attention she needed. Even if she lived in another city. 

“We just had our third child and we live in a small three-bedroom, so it was close quarters with baby stuff. We were just trying to give the newborn the attention she needs,” Metcalf told ABC News. “My sister was living alone in Charlotte and she’s not good at being alone and she’s known Cassey, so she got a roommate while we got past the newborn stage.”

Dave dutifully checked up on Cassey by phone for months, and Chelsee reassured him that all was fine. The phone calls got fewer and farther apart. After six months, Dave drove over to visit Chelsee and Cassey. The dog didn't run out to the car. The dog wasn't in the house at all. Cassey had run off. 

As Dave relates what his sister-in-law told him, "There was a lot going on at the house one day. Cassey is very intuitive about big noises and is very sensitive when it comes to sounds. Something startled her.” 

They searched for their dog, but she was nowhere to be found. Time passed, and the Metcalfs got on with their lives. Years passed -- four years passed -- but they never forgot Cassey. 

“We gave up hope a long time ago, but every day she was mentioned in our house,” Brandy told CBS 6 WTVR. “My daughter just said two days prior to [finding the dog] that ‘I wish we had our Cassey back.’”

Then, on September 11, the phone rang. Someone had Cassey. She was without a collar or tags, she was covered in fleas, and she had lost weight, but it was Cassey. A microchip confirmed it. The people who had found her -- Cheryl and Scott Smith of Charlotte -- had some trouble locating the Metcalfs, since the information on the chip was outdated, but they kept at it and within a few days had located Brandy's mother. 

(In fact, the Smiths even had trouble locating the microchip, since it had migrated from under Cassey's neck to under her ribs. The Smiths, who had met the dog three days earlier and were convinced she had come from a good home, had refused to leave the vet until it was found.)

The Metcalfs jumped in the car and drove to Charlotte, ecstatic. 

“It was a beautiful experience. You’re just in shock. You feel like this couldn’t be the miracle that you want it to be, that it’s too good to be true,” Brandy told CBS 6.

“When we got out of the car and called her name, and she came running up to us, it let us know for sure that yes, she remembered us,” she said. “She came right up and jumped in the van. She was ready to go home."  

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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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