Chaser

I noticed John Pilley’s Chaser: Unlocking the Genius of the Dog Who Knows a Thousand Words while researching the subject of training a puppy. Like the author of this delightful book, we brought home a Border collie pup (the fourth in my lifetime — I’ve grown up with Border collies) at 8 weeks of age and are interested in helping her maximize her potential. But unlike John Pilley, we don’t have a professional background in psychology and several hours a day to spend on training.

Just the same, Chaser is an inspiring and interesting read. It tells the story of Dr. Pilley’s effort to see whether, and to what extent, a dog can learn language, and the results launched his winsome family pet into the spotlight a few years ago when a paper he co-authored with fellow scientist Alliston Reid went viral. Chaser appeared on several television programs including Nova Science Now, and accompanied her owner and trainer to countless demonstrations of her ability to manage her flock — 1,022 toys, all of which she knows by name, and with all of which he can perform different tasks. The latter indicates that along with having learned an impressive range of nouns, Chaser understands other elements of syntax as well. She can also reason, demonstrated by her ability to match an unfamiliar name with an unfamiliar object, and she is becoming more and more skilled at learning by imitation.

You can get a glimpse of Chaser’s skills at YouTube, which contains a number of videos. Here is the Nova segment featuring her:

The book contains plenty of readable detail about Dr. Pilley’s methods in training and testing Chaser’s abilities, and it describes the challenges of documenting her skills in print in a way that would be credible to the scientific community. There are stories about Chaser’s experience on live television and plenty of anecdotes testifying to her social skills with a wide range of people.

But Chaser is above all a book for dog lovers, not just because it confirms our sense that our dogs are something special, but because it includes the story of the family dogs that preceded Chaser. Dr. Pilley is a retired professor now in his eighties, but he shows us that making a vital contribution to a field of knowledge is not limited by age or profession. Really, it’s love that kindled his remarkable work with Chaser, and this opened the door for other students of animal learning who may have been skeptical of the centuries-old assertion by Descartes that animals cannot feel or reason, but lacked definitive proof. Most dog owners would agree: Descartes should have known better.