A border collie recently set a new world record for non-human animals by learning the names of more than 1000 items.
Chaser can also categorize the different items according to function and shape. Human children learn to do this around 3 years of age. Psychologists working at Wofford College in South Carolina exposed Chaser to an intensive training program by teaching her the names of 1022 toys by introducing them to her one by one, getting her to fetch the toy and then repeating the name to reinforce the association.
The team regularly tested Chaser on her entire vocabulary. Groups of 20 toys were chosen at random and put in a separate room from where she had to retrieve them by name. The toys were in another room so the trainer would not unintentionally give Chaser cues about which toy to choose. She completed 838 of these tests over 3 years and never got less than 18 out of 20 right.
Chaser was also taught to categorise the named objects, complete tasks such as touching the toy with her nose or paw, and she could infer the name of a new object from a set of familiar objects.
Others animals have demonstrated impressive feats of learning in which they also vocalise the words they learn, such as Alex, the grey parrot, who could make sentences out of about 100 words.
If you live with a dog you might like to try teaching him or her the names of objects such as toys. This can be a fun way to enrich their life and yours and you may be surprised how quickly they can learn new things.
Teaching human words to other animals can be an interesting way to find out more about their mental capabilities and intelligence. However, we are of course only measuring their intelligence by our understanding of what intelligence is. All animals will have evolved vocabularies of their own sounds and communicate in ways that we don’t understand.
Studies such as those mentioned above can give us an interesting insight into the minds of other animals but at the end of the day just like humans are most intelligent at being humans, dogs are most intelligent at being dogs and parrots are most intelligent at being parrots.