Engleski B - 2022. ljeto, reading 3.

The smartest dog in the world

Many owners struggle to teach their dogs to sit or fetch, but John Pilley, a retired professor, taught his dog Chaser to understand more than 1,000 words. Chaser is an average-sized border collie with round eyes, mostly the colour of cookies-and-cream ice cream, but with a black patch right above her left eye.

Pilley studied dogs working on sheep farms and one night around the fire he told one farmer, “You know science says that your dogs don’t really know their name?” The farmer responded: “Really? Then tell me why, when I call out my dog Jeb or Fuzz out of four dogs and ask them to go get Molly and Tolly, two sheep out of a hundred, they do it every time?” John Pilley realized he was wrong.

Other scientists worked with monkeys showing how fast they learn through play. For Pilley, our connection with dogs was more special. He was sure that working one-on-one rather than with groups of animals must bring even better results. He believed it would be meaningful to work with one dog, and that was Chaser.

Chaser was a two-month-old puppy when he started teaching her words. The first was for a blue ball. He named it Blue, put it in front of Chaser and said, “Catch Blue”. Then he threw it to her. On the third day, when she could bring him the ball from another room, he moved to another object. At the end of the third month of her training, only five-months-old Chaser knew 40 words.

For three years, Mr Pilley trained Chaser for four to five hours every day. He showed her an object, said its name up to 40 times, then hid it and asked her to find it. She learned to recognize the names of 800 stuffed animals, 116 balls, 26 frisbees and a mishmash of plastic toys. Each of the 1,022 objects Chaser knows has an individual name like “Bamboozel” or “Flipflopper.”