Chaser: Smartest Dog in the World
We all know that Border Collie is the smartest dog among the other breeds. But, have you heard about Chaser?
A 6-year-old border collie named Chaser owned by a retired Wofford College professor John Pilley, broke the world's record for largest human vocabulary understood by a dog. According to Wofford College announcement, Chaser can comprehend the names of 1,022 objects. Chaser leaps ahead of the previous record holder, another border collie named Rico, who knew 200 human words.
Other dogs can sit, stay and sway but that's nothing compared with Chaser, aside from knowing more than thousand words, he can also sort his toys by function and shapes. Not only that, he happily retrieved the toys for her masters, and waited for more. No attitude problem here. Chaser's vocabulary rivals that of an average 3-year-old human.
Chaser essentially graduated from a three-year training program at Wofford College conducted by psychologists Alliston Reid and John Pilley. Alliston and John wanted to test if there was a limit to the amount of words a border collie could learn, so they taught Chaser the names of hundreds of toys, one by one, slowly and patiently, for three years. “In the first experiment where we talk about the learning of proper nouns, the procedure we use is one where she was taught in a way that she couldn't fail," Pilley said. "We would place the object right on the floor, somewhere the dog couldn't miss.” Then after a period of several months, Pilley and Reid would work with a different object, slowly training the dog on each one. Pilley stressed the training technique more than anything resulted in the incredible skills of the dog.
For now, Chaser is becoming known as the world's smartest dog and still has to work to get the Guinness Book of World Record from Puck, a budgerigar who had a 1,728-word vocabulary.
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