Authors: John W. Pilley
As I switched on the speakerphone I asked, “What is it, Deb?”
She started speaking with an adrenaline rush: “I just had to read this a couple of times to make sure it was referring to Chaser. There is an article from the
New Scientist
”âshe took a deep breathâ“and here is how it opens: âIn the age-old war between cats and dogs, canines might just have struck
THE KILLER BLOW
! A Border collie called Chaser has been taught the names of one thousand and twenty-two itemsâmore than any other animal'!”
“Wow!” I shouted. Startled, Chaser padded around the corner from where she'd been lying near the back door. In the winter she likes to feel the little draft of cold air slipping in under the door.
I quickly explained to Deb that Jessica Griggs of the
New Scientist
, a highly respected British popular science magazine, had called the morning of December 8. She'd read the
Behavioural Processes
article online a few hours earlier and had been waiting to call me because of the five-hour time difference between Great Britain and the eastern United States. She asked me a few questions and said she was going to talk to one or two experts to get an independent perspective on the paper. Alliston and I had been hoping she'd do a story in February when the print edition came out. I was so excited about this possibility that I made a deliberate effort to put it out of my mind, and I'd mentioned it only to Sally.
Jay came back on the phone and reported that the first hit was from two days before, on December 22, when the
New Scientist
website posted Jessica Griggs's article under the title “Border Collie Takes Record for Biggest Vocabulary.” The next hit was from the following day, when the BBC's website ran a story headlined “Chaser the Border Collie âKnows More Than 1,000 Words.'”
Jay said, “I'm jumping from site to site, but it looks like the BBC got its information from the
New Scientist
. And then after the BBC ran its item, the news exploded. There's stuff from all over the United States and the rest of the world: newspapers, radio and television stations, cable news networks, news websites, blogs, you name it. Wikipedia already has an entry about Chaser breaking the vocabulary record.”
“You're famous, Chaser honey,” Sally said, and Chaser trotted up to her to get a pet.
“The world's in awe of you, sweetie,” I said, bending toward Chaser from my seat in the easy chair. Grinning and tail wagging, Chaser trotted over to me, and I rubbed the top of her head and behind her ears.
Encouraged by this attention and our obvious excitement, Chaser quickly got a blue racquetball and headed to the steps with it. At the foot of the steps, she turned and looked back at me expectantly.
“Chaser, you know this is not play time,” I said gently.
Unwilling to take no for an answer, Chaser walked to the top of the stairs and turned around to look at me with the ball in her mouth.
“No, Chase,” I said a little more firmly.
She sighed and lay down at the top of the stairs with the ball between her front paws.
I turned my full attention back to the phone conversation. Debbie was reading the brief but wonderful item on the BBC's website, ending with, “âIt is thought the training may be the key to Chaser's apparently massive vocabulary.'”
“That's awesome,” I said. Sally and I shared a kiss and beamed at each other, and we could hear the joy in Deb's and Jay's voices.
“You gotta look at these things online yourself, Dad,” Debbie said. “The
New Scientist
has one of the videos of Chaser's testing that we put on YouTube for your and Alliston's paper. And practically all the other stories have embedded the same video or included a link to it. We went to YouTube fifteen minutes ago to see how many hits the video had there, and it only had forty. But we just checked again and there are already over a hundred.”
“That's great,” I said. “Maybe tomorrow there'll be a few hundred more.”
Deb said she was e-mailing me the links to the
New Scientist
and BBC webpages, and we all said good night. Sally and I hugged and gave each other another kiss, and I turned to go upstairs to open Debbie's e-mail and print out the articles.
Before I put my foot on the bottom step of the stairs, Chaser nosed the blue racquetball over the top step. I chuckled and said, “Okay, Chaser. We'll play a little while. You should get to celebrate too.”
For ten minutes or so Chaser and I played the game she had invented, taking turns bouncing the ball down the steps to each other. After I printed out the
New Scientist
and BBC articles, I took them downstairs to the living room to read and share with Sally.
Over the previous three years, as I struggled with writing the paper on Chaser's learning, Robin had repeatedly said, “You're going to be amazed by the reaction it gets.” Robin has always been the most technologically savvy member of our family, but she had recently begun experimenting with living “off the grid.” I couldn't wait to tell her how right her prediction was when we saw her on Christmas Day.
The opening line of the
New Scientist
article (“In the age-old war between cats and dogs . . .”) was an impossible-to-ignore hook. The brief first paragraph captured the fact that Chaser's language learning included common noun concepts as well as her record-busting vocabulary of proper noun names. And it provocatively drew the connection with young children's language learning.
The rest of the article described the other findings in the
Behavioural Processes
paper, especially Chaser's ability to “infer the name of a new object” in learning by exclusion tests. There was a veiled reference to possible Clever Hans effects when Griggs quoted an expert in canine behavior and cognition: “âThe experimenters did a lot of controls to exclude alternative explanations, although from my experience the results are simply too good,' says Ãdám Miklósi, founder of the Family Dog Project at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary.”
That was significant because Miklósi is perhaps the best-known European animal scientist specializing in research on dogs. His hint of skepticism didn't faze me. He was asking the same questions about our procedures that Alliston or I would have asked in his place. Miklósi saying that our results looked too good to be true but he couldn't find a flaw in our procedures was really a testament to Chaser's unprecedented learning and its potential significance. The article went on to say that Miklósi “thinks Chaser's intensive training explains the difference” between her results and those of other language-trained dogs.
It was all music to my ears. So was the brief article, more or less a capsule version of what was in the
New Scientist
, from the BBC's website.
While Sally and I read the articles, Debbie and Jay called back several times to report the growing number of Google and YouTube hits.
“It's like a pop song going number one with a bullet,” Debbie said, as the hits for the YouTube video climbed from forty to more than a hundred thousand in a few hours' time.
Chaser caught the current of excitement in Sally's and my voices and body language, and she continued to want to play with her ball and other toys. Normally this was a quiet time, with me heading off to bed and Chaser settling down by Sally while she watched a television show or read a book before coming to bed herself. Sally and I happily indulged Chaser that night.
Debbie and Jay read a number of the YouTube viewers' comments to Sally and me on the phone. It was fascinating to hear how people were engaging with each other about Chaser and sharing stories about their own dogs. Quite a few viewers were debating the extent to which dogs could learn elements of human language, but always in a spirit of admiration for dogs' intelligence and problem-solving abilities. As a group the people commenting on Chaser's video repeatedly expressed an abiding love of dogs, gave thanks for the love dogs expressed in return, and stated the belief that their own dogs understood much of what was said to them.
The comments brought the same feelings to the surface in Sally and me. When we finally turned out the lights and wished each other and Chaser good night, we were aglow with gratitude and joy for our good fortune. I went to sleep thinking that Chaser's story could only have spread so far, so fast, because of the loving relationships that people experience with their dogs.
The next month was a whirlwind. The
New Scientist
article triggered interest in our work, and the BBC article sent Chaser's story racing around the globe. My contact information was on the
Behavioural Processes
paper, and every day my e-mail inbox teemed with fresh requests for media interviews and appearances. The phone started ringing on Christmas Day and didn't stop for weeks.
Chaser was the feel-good story of the holidays. When the holidays ended, the phone calls and e-mails didn't let up. Alliston and I were lucky that Wofford College's director of news services, Laura Corbin, took on the main burden of prioritizing media requests and scheduling interviews. Without her expert help, our heads would never have stopped spinning as we tried to sort things out. Or to borrow another analogy from Debbie, trying to keep up with the requests for interviews and information on Chaser was like trying to hit back balls from a hundred tennis machines at once, all of them set on rapid fire. As it was, Alliston and I each fielded hundreds of calls and did dozens of radio interviews. Alliston also did interviews in his fluent Spanish for media in Mexico and Spain. In late January, Laura Corbin tallied coverage for Chaser in more than forty-six languages around the world.
Deb was waiting in line at the supermarket one evening when she spotted the gossip tabloid the
National Examiner
and did a double take. Chaser was on the cover alongside Charlie Sheen and Brad Pitt. The copy next to Chaser's picture said, “DOG-GONE SMART! The world's brainiest pooch.” Deb grabbed a copy to buy, telling the cashier, “I don't normally read this, but that's my dad's dog on the cover.” With an I've-heard-that-one-before tone the cashier said, “Uh huh” and continued ringing up Deb's purchases.
In typical tabloid fashion the
National Examiner
had to knock someone, even in the canine world. The story said Rico only knew “a piddling” two hundred words and that “Chaser makes Rico look like a howling idiot.” I found this upsetting, but Deb quickly put it into perspective for me: “You didn't say it, Dad. It's a tabloid and that's what they doâthey slam people. It's hysterical that Chaser is on the cover with Brad Pitt.”
Among the first journalists to call me for an interview was Annette Witheridge, the British correspondent in New York City for the
Daily Mail
, Britain's second-biggest newspaper. She asked if she could come to Spartanburg to see Chaser demonstrate her learning, and in the middle of the week between Christmas and New Year's, she arrived on our doorstep with the photographer Chris Bott. On January 1, 2011, the
Daily Mail
and the paper's website ran Annette's article, “Who's a VERY Clever Doggy! Prepare to Be Bow-Wowed as We Put Chaser, the World's Brainiest Dog, to the Test.”
In a very down-to-earth way, Annette's article captured much of what I felt was important about Chaser's story, beginning with the fact that Chaser is a beloved member of the Pilley family and not simply a research subject. Annette really caught Chaser's personality, describing “her tail wagging so hard that half her body seems to be joining in” and evoking her social nature: “âOoh, a new playmate; ooh, a new playmate,' she seems to be saying.”
Annette's very personal response to meeting Chaser came to typify for me how people opened their hearts to Chaser and related her learning to memories of their own dogs. After asking me several questions, Annette shared her memories of Trixie, the collie mix her family had when she was a child. She proudly relayed that when anyone spelled W-A-L-K, Trixie knew what they meant. Hearing that made Sally giggle and she walked into the living room to say, “Chaser's exactly the same. When I say I'm off to pick up the M-A-I-L, she shoots out the door.”
Perfectly on cue, Chaser sprang to her feet and went to the door, ready to help fetch the mail from our street-side mailbox. That's one of her important jobs, by the way. She insists on carrying a piece of mail into the house. It's the same when Sally comes home from the grocery store. Chaser insists on carrying something from the car to the kitchen. Once I gave her a banana to carry, which she did without leaving a mark on it. Since then I've been saying that we should try her out with an egg, but Sally says that's not practical and that Chaser's feelings would be hurt if she cracked the egg in her mouth and thought she'd let us down. Either that, or we'd need to buy a lot more eggs.
Alliston came over to participate in the interview, and Annette asked him to relate Chaser's abilities to the way children learn language. Alliston told her, “A child of two understands the phrase âI love you.' I don't think Chaser would know that. By three, a child would say: âMummy, I love you' and know the meaning. Chaser couldn't do that.”
I saw a small smile on Annette's face as Alliston said this, as if she felt sure Chaser knew the meaning of “I love you.” In her story she quoted Alliston's remark, and then added, “As if to prove otherwise, Chaser . . . wags her tail and looks at me as if to say: âYes, I could.' And based on what I've seen today, I wouldn't put it past her.”
The volume of e-mails and phone calls about Chaser increased even more after this piece appeared. One day Sally took a call from someone in Los Angeles who wanted Chaser to appear on a show there. We had decided that we weren't going to fly Chaser anywhere, because we didn't want her to have to travel apart from us in a plane's cargo hold. I heard Sally explain that, and focused my attention on answering some of the e-mail about the paper. Half an hour or so later I came downstairs for a drink of water, thankful that I hadn't heard the phone ringing and hoping things were starting to calm down. The calls had been coming in nonstop.