‘DOGS THINK’

bred hundreds of years ago to work with sheep, Pilley said. If a farmer’s dog didn’t listen to the farmer, the farmer didn’t breed the dog. Through selective breeding, border collies gradually began to pay more attention to the words themselves.

Though they were quick to learn new behaviors, Pilley’s attempts to teach dogs to understand words never got far. All of his research seemed to indicate that dogs didn’t even know their own names.

“I wanted to do something other than teach, so finally, at age 67, I retired, but I couldn’t find anything that I enjoyed more,” he said.

Pilley’s wife, Sally, was the one who decided for him. It had been almost a decade since they lost Yasha, a border collie-German shepherd mix, to old age. The time seemed right to get another dog.

Chaser arrived one June day on West’s farm as the Pilleys sat beneath an old oak tree. For now, Chaser’s training has been put on hold with John Pilley releasing his new book “Chaser: Unlocking the Genius of the Dog Who Knows a Thousand Words.” » But he doesn’t plan to stop their journey of canine discovery. » “One reason some of our findings are so important is that we demonstrated — and we’re not alone; there are other researchers demonstrating the same thing — that these dogs think. They reason. They make inferences,” he said.

Although Chaser went home with them primarily as a member of the family, Pilley says he had it in his head from the beginning to teach her words.

Chaser had been with Pilley only a few weeks when the journal Science published an article about a border collie in Germany that knew more than 200 words.

The Rico study, as it’s called