Chaser, a 9-year-old border collie who knows 1,000 words, has given rise to a book by her owner and trainer,

retired Wofford College professor John Pilley.(Photo: Mykal McEldowney, The Greenville (S.C.)

 

 

Chaser is now world famous as the dog who knows more than 1,000 words, the largest known vocabulary of any animal except humans. Besides proper nouns, she knows verbs, adverbs and prepositions. She's learned that common nouns can identify different things. Ball could mean any round or bouncy object, Frisbee any spinning disk or ring. And she can make inferences. If asked to fetch a new toy with a word she's never heard, she'll pick the toy out from a pile of familiar ones

Border collies are herders, 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.