Last week I read about a Border Collie dog that has learnt the names of 1022 things and can retrieve them on command. His owner taught him after he read somewhere that a person had taught their dog 200 words. I am not surprised – for years I have observed the easiness with which dogs master human languages and learn their own names. But I am a bit irritated at the 29 dogs in my house who refuse to learn anything. In fact, my ability to communicate my needs and wishes to them is quite limited.
I am sure many dog owners are looking at their dogs and wondering, how many words they know? How much do you teach your dogs? It took John Pilley, a psychology professor four hours a day to teach Chaser the names of 1,022 objects.
Is his dog smarter than mine? I don’t think so. Most of my dogs have been smart enough to attract attention to themselves on the street when they were wounded and unwell and get someone to care for them. Dogs are really smart and sometimes they learn the wrong things.
Someone has written that his dog didn’t like to come inside when they called. So every time he came in they gave him a biscuit. What he learnt instead was to run outside at every opportunity so that he would get a biscuit to come in. I have a sneaky feeling all of them know exactly what I am saying to them when I say, get off the bed, get out of the room , leave the food alone, don’t jump on me, stop fighting, don’t come in, no, go away, be quiet. They just don’t want to listen. Does that make them smart or me stupid? Do we train dogs or do they train us?
My dog Jairam who wants to go outside twice a night has trained me to get up at 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. to let him out. Gudiya whines loudly at shut doors and has trained me to come running from wherever I am. Devi has trained me to shift off my pillow by jumping on it at night and growling when I change directions in my sleep. Bahadur has trained me not to pat any dog in his presence because he starts shouting and running about in anger. Kajal has taught me to only scratch the base of her tail because she offers it to me and shifts away if I touch any other part. Rishi has taught me to come and stand by him while he eats so that other dogs do not steal his food. Bhim is teaching me to play tug of war. He has a toy in his mouth, ears up, head cocked, paws down and a grumbly throat noise. I have to respond by trying to take the toy from him.
Each dog is in the process of teaching me to interpret every bark, whine, ear twitch, needy moan and shift in posture, and to respond accordingly. To learn Dog. I suppose when I learn my tenth word, some Dr Dog will write a paper on me and circulate it to his four legged students.
Pilley’s technique (he is 82 years old) for teaching dogs has been published in the current issue of the journal Behavioural Processes. He shows Chaser an object, says its name up to 40 times, then hides it and asks her to find it, while repeating the name all the time. She is taught one or two new names a day, with monthly revisions and reinforcement for any names she had forgotten. That makes her smarter than most two year olds.
I have an adult nephew whose vocabulary is probably half of that – the only words I ever hear him say is O.K, No and Gimme. Ideally, by the time children leave school, they should know around 60,000 words. Chaser’s job is much harder: Each sound was new and she had nothing to relate it to, whereas children learn words in a context that makes them easier to remember. For example, knives, forks and spoons are found together. Not just 2000 nouns, Dr Pilley has taught the dog verbs. “Throw a ball” is separate from “fetch a ball”. Dog psychologists say that Chaser is not exceptional. Her knowledge is a result of the attention that has been lavished on her.
Parents of new born babies should learn from that. When my husband died my son was 100 days old. I spent all day, every day with him, showed him books, pointed out objects, and sang to him. He was reading at 7 months and at 11 months my mother in law and I put him into a school – before he could walk. His IQ was measured later in Mensa tests at 160 but I like to think that it was the attention he got in his first two years. Some knowledge, as the snake taught Adam, can be dangerous.
In 1941, the Nazi authorities received a tipoff that a businessman named Tor Borg, of Tampere, Finland had a dog, Jackie, which he had taught to raise his paw every time the owner said Heil Hitler. Borg, a pharmaceutical manufacturer, was summoned by the German Embassy in Helsinki where he admitted that on a few occasions his wife called the dog “Hitler” and that on a few occasions it did respond with a raised paw. But, he said, the episodes had taken place in 1933 and the dog had since died and he had no ulterior political motives whatsoever. The case went right up to Hitler and was dismissed for lack of evidence!!
Maneka Gandhi
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