Are you as WOWed by that number as we are?

Our understanding of Canine Behavior and Psychology has come a long way in the last decade.  A lot of that advancement is because of Chaser.  Chaser is an amazing Border Collie who can understand over 1,000 words and can identify not just nouns like “blue” is her blue ball, but common nouns such as “ball” can stand for anything round and bouncy and “baby” can stand for any toy that looks like a baby. She also understands verbs, adverbs, and prepositions (on, under, behind). Chaser even has the ability to infer.  For example, if 20 toys were out and 19 of those toys were ones Chaser was familiar with and she was asked to get “Smokey” and “Smokey” was a toy she has never seen or been shown what it is before, Chaser would infer that the one unknown toy mixed in with 19 familiar ones must be “Smokey!”  Amazing right?

Your dog is capable of being just as smart!  He or she just hasn’t had the education yet to get there.  I always say that there’s no such thing as a “stupid” dog, but only smart dogs who play the “stupid” card really well.  I tried playing the “stupid” card with my mother when I was child.  “I don’t know how to clean my room,” I remember whining at my mother when I was around 10 years old.  (I don’t know how my mom refrained from locking me in a dungeon when I was a child.  I was rotten, lol.)  She said she’d teach me.  From that point on, I no longer had an excuse.  Show your dog what you want from him or her and he will never have an excuse not listen either.  I mean if I could pretend I didn’t know how to clean my house and get away with it, I WOULD!  But that’s not how life works!  (And I don’t want my mom to have to come show me again either!)