Chaser (12 page)

7

T
HERE WAS A
lot to be thankful for as Chaser turned four months old. The danger of the feral cat had passed, she had learned to be safe from cars, and most of all she had bonded strongly with Sally and me.

We positively reinforced Chaser's bond with us in every way we could. But reinforcement is definitely a two-way street, and Chaser was positively reinforcing us as much or more. Just as a smile elicits a smile, Chaser's playfulness stirred the same in Sally and me. Her wagging tail sparked joy in us to match her own.

Sally and I had been looking forward to having a dog in the family again. But we weren't prepared for how strongly Chaser affected us. We didn't realize how big the void in our lives had become.

We went puppy mad. We e-mailed dozens of pictures of Chaser to Debbie—Robin's e-mail connection in the mountains was too slow for that—and our conversations with both Robin and Debbie were full of details about our new family member. Debbie joshed with us on the phone one day, “I get it. She's cute.” But like Robin, Debbie listened patiently as we waxed on and on about Chaser.

Perhaps the impact was even greater on me than on Sally. My mind was buzzing with curiosity about Chaser's potential to learn the meaning of words. Eight years after my retirement from Wofford I was fully a scientist again, entranced by the possibility of discovering something worth sharing with the world. Sally told me more than once during our first month with Chaser, “You've needed this, John.”

It went even deeper than my desire to contribute to scientific understanding. The day we brought Chaser home, science became secondary to her quality of life. Not that there was any conflict between the two. The more Chaser fulfilled herself as a dog, a Border collie, and a member of our family, the more she was likely to be able to learn. But if a conflict between Chaser's needs and science ever came about, Chaser had priority.

Later in the conversation in which she joked that she'd seen more than enough pictures of Chaser, Debbie said, “I think she's given you your heart back, Dad.”

I couldn't say anything. A few seconds later, obviously concerned about how I might be reacting at the other end of the line, Debbie broke the silence and said, “It just feels like ever since Yasha you've been holding something in. And now that part of you is breathing again.”

I still couldn't say much. But I managed to voice my agreement and my thanks for her, Robin's, and Sally's love and understanding. The black box into which I had locked my grief over Yasha had opened without my realizing it. My sorrow over his loss and my lingering sense of guilt for his suffering at the very end were gone. Yet his vital spirit was still with me, stronger than ever, now that Chaser was a member of our family. My friend who told me, “When you get a pet, sooner or later you get a broken heart,” also told me, “Your heart gets whole when you can risk its being broken again.”

I hadn't been able to take the first step onto that path of emotional healing, but Sally had taken it for me. And then Chaser, greeting me every morning with a “What are we going to do today, Pop-Pop?” tail wag, had done the rest. Her arrival in our family was a blessing, for sure.

My scientific hopes for teaching Chaser language grew larger the more she displayed strong Border collie traits and instincts. Dogs of all breeds and mixtures of breeds can be highly intelligent, but no dogs have shown greater skill and creativity at problem solving than Border collies. The stewards of Border collie intelligence over the generations—farmers, breeders, and trainers—have amassed a body of understanding and insight that complements animal science and offers many clues for researchers to follow and test.

Scientists are trained to be skeptical about so-called anecdotal evidence, meaning observations from experience that haven't been confirmed in rigorous experiments. However, the knowledge of Border collies' intelligence that those who live and work with them every day have accumulated goes far beyond anecdotal evidence. One of the greatest animal scientists of recent times, John Staddon, the James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Professor of Biology and Neuroscience Emeritus at Duke University, believes that the knowledge of farmers and shepherds provides compelling evidence of dogs' ability to make inferences and solve complex problems without human direction. In Staddon's view the exploits of Border collies epitomize creative learning as opposed to rote learning.

In a 2006 essay for a special issue of the
International Journal of Psychology
, Staddon wrote, “There are two methods to train a dog”—and by extension a person or any other animal. The method that is “the quickest, least dependent on individual aptitude . . . is called ‘shaping by successive approximations.' It is the method used by circus trainers. . . . It is effective and reliable, especially if what is to be taught is well-defined and predictable.”

For example, a dog act in a circus might involve dogs jumping through hoops. Shaping by successive approximations begins with getting the dogs to walk through hoops that are stood up on edge on the ground or raised up only a few inches. Gradually the trainer brings the dogs to the point where they leap from one tall platform to another through hoops of blazing fire, perfectly on cue with the gestures of the trainer and any music or sound effects.

These are amazing feats of training, athletic skill, bravery, and, it should be said, intelligence. A circus dog must be a good learner and periodically be able to learn new tricks. It takes a strong bond of trust between trainer and dogs, and dedicated effort by all of them, to put on a great show. But the outcome, if all goes well, is predetermined. The dogs will never be asked to solve a problem on the spur of the moment by applying their instincts, life experiences, and reasoning powers to draw inferences. The trainer and the dogs know exactly what to expect during every microsecond of the act. There is no uncertainty or surprise, except for those in the audience who haven't seen the performance before.

Shaping by successive approximations is essentially closed-ended. Applied to humans, Staddon says, this method “is the basis for regarding teaching [children] as training in a ‘skill,' like a trick to be taught to an animal. It treats students like dogs, and pretty dim ones at that—Odie rather than Lassie.” This is what is happening today in schools where teachers are regimented into “teaching to the test,” and where students spend more classroom time taking practice standardized tests than they do interacting with their teachers and classmates on curriculum content.

By contrast, “creative teaching” is required for teaching things that are less well defined and do not have a predetermined outcome. In the case of humans and animals alike, Staddon argues, this involves creating an environment that challenges learners to use all their “natural propensities”—instincts, fundamental drives, emotional energy, perceptual and cognitive abilities—to solve new problems.

It's important to realize that nature is the greatest creative teacher of all. It's equally important for us twenty-first-century humans to realize that we are not nature's only brilliant students and that we are not its only thinking species. Over the past decades, naturalists in the field have discovered attributes, abilities, and behaviors once thought to be “uniquely human”—tool use, “cultural” differences between groups that belong to the same species, complex emotions such as empathy, inferential reasoning, among other characteristics—in animals such as bonobos, chimpanzees, crows, dolphins, and not least of all domestic dogs.

Researchers are confirming and probing these characteristics both in laboratories and in animal sanctuaries that seek to replicate wild animals' natural habitats. For example, Brian Hare and Juliane Kaminski have separately devised and conducted experiments with bonobos, chimpanzees, and dogs strongly indicating that all of these animals have an implicit theory of mind comparable to that of young children when they acquire language. Hare's book
The Genius of Dogs
, written with his wife and co-investigator Vanessa Woods, offers a fascinating guide to their own work and that of many other researchers on the perceptual and cognitive traits humans share with animals. Much of this work draws on techniques first developed in behavioral and cognitive psychology experiments, with behavioral psychologists such as John Staddon pioneering a broader understanding of the role of inference in nearly all animal learning. The ability to acquire language, I am confident, will sooner or later be recognized as one more capacity that is no longer “uniquely human.”

Staddon reaches the same conclusion that I had heard from Border collie breeders and trainers: creative teaching builds on the learner's instincts and innate tendencies. Instead of teaching single, repeatable behaviors in isolation or in a series, this method of teaching and training encourages creative learning
, the ability to solve unexpected problems through spontaneous trial-and-error inference guided by accumulating experience and judgment. Creative learning is essentially open-ended. It is also highly dependent on the relationship between the learner and the teacher or trainer.

Staddon offers two examples. One is of a teacher encouraging a child's interest in scientific discovery. The other is of a shepherd teaching a Border collie to herd sheep. Staddon quotes the early-nineteenth-century Scottish “shepherd poet” James Hogg on training the dog Sirrah by putting him in situations where his herding instincts and propensities enabled him to solve problems of increasing difficulty: “[Sirrah] would try everywhere . . . till he found out what I wanted” and in so doing would display “a great share of reasoning.”

This open-ended training with eager creative learning showed its value one night when seven hundred lambs escaped from their pen and scattered onto the moors. As Hogg went looking for them in the dark, he called and whistled to Sirrah, but he searched until dawn without seeing or hearing either the lambs or the dog.

Hogg feared that all the lambs were lost. On the way home, however, he discovered that “the indefatigable Sirrah . . . looking all around for some relief, but still standing true to his charge” had gathered every single one of the lambs and herded them into a ravine. Hogg wrote, “How he had got [them] . . . all collected in the dark is beyond my comprehension. . . . If all the shepherds in the Forest had been there to have assisted him, they could not have effected it with greater propriety.”

If you spend enough time around people who work with Border collies and other herding dogs, you hear about many incidents like this, in which a dog figured out a difficult new problem without human direction. I drink up these stories. They refresh and inspire my belief in the learning and reasoning abilities of dogs, and in what dogs and people can achieve when they form bonds of trust and love as fellow creatures.

David Johnson believes fervently in the reasoning ability of dogs. He told me, “Dogs and people are so much alike as far as their thinking and even their emotions go. Some people don't like that idea. I've had words with my church's Sunday school teacher a time or two, because in his teaching sometimes he would say that we are the only creatures that God made that can reason. He'd say, ‘A dog can't reason.' And I'd tell him—he doesn't say it anymore, 'cause I would tell him, ‘I beg to differ with you. I can give you illustration after illustration to let you know that dogs can reason, just like people can reason.' Matter of fact, as far as working livestock is concerned, I think a lot of dogs that are brought to me for training are more intelligent than the people that bring them.”

As an example, he mentioned the day he sent two dogs, Maud and Gail, to retrieve some cattle from the woods beyond his pasture. Within the woods there was a fenced lot, once used for holding hogs, with gates at the north and south ends. The gates were now always left open so that cattle could move through the woods to graze in the abandoned hog lot. Here's how David explained to me what happened after he sent Maud and Gail on their mission:

 

I couldn't see the cattle, but that wasn't anything unusual. I could cast my dogs at livestock that was out of sight, and they would find them and bring them to me. However, this day they were gone so long that I got concerned. So I walked over to the woods. When I got there I saw Maud and Gail bringing the cows through the old hog lot. The cows went in through the north gate, but when they came out through the south gate they turned back around through the woods.

I don't know how many times they had done that, and forced Maud and Gail to round them up again. They did it once when I got in sight. I watched Maud and Gail gather them from among the trees. Their teamwork was something, because of how thick the woods were around the old hog lot. I was still far enough away, and they were so focused on the cattle, that they didn't see me watching them.

Once the dogs got the cattle together and headed back down through the north gate, I was going to intervene so the dogs' efforts didn't go to waste one more time. But something made me wait. This time, before any cows got down to the gate at the south end, Maud went around them inside the hog lot and cut off, say, eight or ten. When they went through the gate she went through beside them so she could force them to go on straight south toward the pasture.

Gail understood what Maud was doing and just stopped and waited, didn't push the other cows on through. Then Maud went back and cut off eight or ten more and brought them through the gate like that and kept them from going back north. I just stood there and watched. And that's the illustration I told the Sunday school teacher. I said, “If that dog could not have reasoned out the problem and the solution, she would have never done that.”