One day my bullie was getting into some mischief. I called him and he ignored me. I started counting. He bout broke his neck getting to me by the time I got to two.
He still responds to counting. I think he understands it better than my boys.
Posted on 06/10/2004 10:41:32 AM PDT by KentTrappedInLiberalSeattle
WASHINGTON (AP) -- As many a dog owner will attest, our furry friends are listening. Now, for the doubters, there is scientific proof they understand much of what they hear.
German researchers have found a border collie named Rico who understands more than 200 words and can learn new ones as quickly as many children.
Patti Strand, an American Kennel Club board member, called the report "good news for those of us who talk to our dogs."
"Like parents of toddlers, we learned long ago the importance of spelling key words like bath, pill or vet when speaking in front of our dogs," Strand said. "Thanks to the researchers who've proven that people who talk to their dogs are cutting-edge communicators, not just a bunch of eccentrics."
The researchers found that Rico knows the names of dozens of play toys and can find the one called for by his owner. That is a vocabulary size about the same as apes, dolphins and parrots trained to understand words, the researchers say.
Rico can even take the next step, figuring out what a new word means.
The researchers put several known toys in a room along with one that Rico had not seen before. From a different room, Rico's owner asked him to fetch a toy, using a name for the toy the dog had never heard.
The border collie, a breed known primarily for its herding ability, was able to go to the room with the toys and, seven times out of 10, bring back the one he had not seen before. The dog seemingly understood that because he knew the names of all the other toys, the new one must be the one with the unfamiliar name.
"Apparently he was able to link the novel word to the novel item based on exclusion learning, either because he knew that the familiar items already had names or because they were not novel," said the researchers, led by Julia Fischer of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig.
A month later, he still remembered the name of that new toy three out of six times, even without having seen it since that first test. That is a rate the scientists said was equivalent to that of a 3-year-old.
Rico's learning ability may indicate that some parts of speech comprehension developed separately from human speech, the scientists said.
"You don't have to be able to talk to understand a lot," Fischer said. The team noted that dogs have evolved with humans and have been selected for their ability to respond to the communications of people.
Katrina Kelner, Science's deputy editor for life sciences, said "such fast, one-trial learning in dogs is remarkable. This ability suggests that the brain structures that support this kind of learning are not unique to humans and may have formed the evolutionary basis of some of the advanced language abilities of humans."
Perhaps, although Paul Bloom of Yale University urges caution.
"Children can understand words used in a range of contexts. Rico's understanding is manifested in his fetching behavior," Bloom writes in a commentary, also in Science.
Bloom calls for further experiments to answer several questions: Can Rico learn a word for something other than a small object to be fetched? Can he display knowledge of a word in some way other than fetching? Can he follow an instruction not to fetch something?
Fischer and her colleagues are still working with Rico to see if he can understand requests to put toys in boxes or to bring them to certain people. Rico was born in December 1994 and lives with his owners. He was tested at home.
Funding for this research was provided in part by the German Research Foundation.
smartest dogs= Border collies
One of my dogs, a wildly neurotic German shepherd, understands the theory, but lacks the patience to perform it on her own. So I trained her to do a loop around the tree once when I pick up the cable and say, "Come around, idiot."
Being a dog, she waits for me to tell her to "come around" before doing it, even though she obviously knows it's coming up.
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DPA
Rico on the job: Learns speech like a child
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Another picture from the same article.
longjack
Looks like you call him Snaggletooth, huh? Very gentle dogs, aren't they?
Rhodesian Ridgebacks may give them a run for their money.
RR's were bred in Africa to hunt lions, so I suppose intelligence was an important trait to cultivate -- the dumber ones would get themselves killed pretty quickly.
I knew a woman who had two she kept in her backyard, which was surrounded by a seven-foot wood fence.
She tried every gate latch known to man, but the dogs figured out them all and kept letting themselves out. The only thing that worked was a combination lock.
So rather than going out the gate, they went over the wall, passing a test that's often used for primates -- they pushed various things from the backyard up against the fence until they had built a "stairway" high enough to let them hop over the fence...
GOOD! Now I just need someone to define a Republican cat.
It's not really a life-threatening situation.
oh man I was not prespared for that. lol!
My Aussie Shepherd is smarter then your honor student...
My late wife’s dog (above) - now mine by default - understands every word I utter.
He would never lower himself to such an experiment by obeying any “command”. He will occasionally honor a request.
The Boogie would be there in under two seconds, but he's polite enough to set and wait for my permission before he would grab it.
I’m considerably bigger and badder than he is, and he knows it.
Ah.
Shep devoured furniture for some strange demented reason.
My friend never could figure out just what was so fascinating to lunkhead dog about the couch.
Well, dogs are supposed to be loyal and friendly, not abound in intelligence. So, I don't think he really had that much to complain about.
This is great news! Now there is hope for Hillary.
LOL!
A friend had a Pit Bull named "Daz".
Honestly, the level of stupidity that Daz was should have been fatal.
Daz would jump straight up and down in excitement whenever you looked at him.
The fatal stupidity part is that he'd do that no matter where he was at, under a table, in front of you under a heavy cast iron pan, under a chair -he was a 'self punishing' dog.
You could hold a brick in your hand out level with your chest and say, "Daz!" and he'd jump into it.
Repeatedly.
Not sure where Daz is now, he ran out the front door of my friend's place and saw LOTS of people outside and just had to go and lick everyone he saw.
They never did catch up to him, and no-one said they found him.
I wouldn't be surprised if Daz was still running around jumping in front of and licking everyone he saw.
It probably is looking for someone to lick at this very moment.
Dogs, cats, hamsters and the like, are cute and very nice to look at, but I wouldn't envy the person who must take care of them.
Even if my allergies didn't rule out owning one of these animals, the sheer cost of maintaining them would.
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