Human beings have lived with dogs for thousands of years. You’d think that after all the time you spent with dogs, you know all there is about them. However, until recently, scientists didn’t pay much attention to dogs. These innocent beings with whom humans share their lives were never considered worthy of serious study.
However, this was recently changed as Chaser, a Border Collie became famous on the internet “As the Smartest Dog in the World.” This sweet girl lives with her owner, an 86-year-old retired Psychology professor, John Pilley. She has an inseparable relationship with John, who treats her like his child.
John has taught Chaser since she was a toddler by assigning names to the toys. He has been helping her learn words and simple sentences up to 5 hours a day, 5 days a week, for the past 9 years. He treats Chaser as a 2-year-old toddler. As a result, Chaser’s vocabulary is 3 times better than a human toddler’s. The sweet girl has learned the names of more than 1,000 toys. John also invited the interviewer to show him Chaser’s collection on his back porch.
There are around 800 cloth animals, 116 different balls, and more than 100 plastic toys, totaling 1022 toys. Each had a unique name. To prove it, John cataloged all the toys and then gave Chaser 100s of tests for three years.
The sweet girl identified 95% or more of the toys in all the tests. The result was published in a journal, making Chaser an internet sensation. But, it is not just the names of the toys. Chaser also understands that nouns and verbs have different meanings.
Brian Hare, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University, believes Chaser is the most important dog in the history of modern scientific research. Dr. Greg Burns, a neuroscientist at Emory University, has studied the human brain for over 2 decades. Still, he wanted to find the answer to the age-old question: does your dog really love you?
This inspired Burns to look into the canine brain. His findings show that dogs recognize somebody essential to him/her as they smell their owner’s swab. In addition, Hare says that when dogs and humans make eye contact, they release the love hormone oxytocin. This also happens when they play and touch. Finally, if you are wondering how Chaser did on Brian Hare’s intelligence test, she was off the charts in reasoning and memory.
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