Chaser (26 page)

However, Sally was still chatting with the same person. It was a few more minutes before she hung up the phone and said, “What a nice young man.” She was about to elaborate when the phone rang again.

It was Debbie, and Sally and I both got on the line. Deb had been trying to reach us and asked if the phone had been off the hook. Sally explained that she'd been talking to someone who wanted Chaser and me to appear on his television show in Los Angeles. Sally was getting frustrated with all the phone calls about Chaser, although she was always gracious when she answered the phone.

Sally said, “I explained that it was too much travel and we wouldn't put Chaser in a plane's cargo hold. Most people hang up when I say that, but he kept asking questions about Chaser and talking about his own dog. He really loves dogs. Finally after forty-five minutes I told him I needed to go.”

Deb asked, “Did you get his name?”

Sally said, “It was Jimmy something.”

“Jimmy Kimmel?”

“That's it! How did you know?”

Deb sighed and said, “Just a guess.”

We especially enjoyed the visit to Spartanburg of a reporter and a photographer from the French magazine
Paris Match
. Having spent her junior year of college in Aix-en-Provence and being fluent in French, Robin was able to explain that
Paris Match
is like a combination of
People
and
Time
magazines. The reporter, Olivier O'Mahony, was as struck by Chaser's social nature as Annette Witheridge had been. His story described how Chaser brought him a ball as soon as she saw him and called her “the most sociable dog” he'd ever met: “In five seconds, I have made a new friend. In the world of humans, this takes more time.”

After Chaser brought her ball over to make friends, I told her Olivier's name by pointing to him and saying, “Chaser, this is Olivier.” As usual in such circumstances, just as when I show Chaser a new toy, she was lying on the floor and apparently looking the other way. Although I explained to Olivier that Chaser was giving me her ear and giving him a glance of her eye, he obviously had his doubts. So I asked him to go hide in the other room, and then said, “Chaser, find Olivier.” He was astonished and delighted when she immediately went and nosed him out of his hiding place behind the couch.

Meanwhile, Sebastien Micke, Olivier's photographer colleague, was out in the yard in the snow, creating a display of Chaser's toys. Sebastien's pursuit of the perfect shot knew no bounds, and he lay full length in the snow to get it (see photo insert).

When the story on Chaser ran in the January 20–26, 2011, issue of
Paris Match
, it immediately followed one on John Travolta and his family. That tickled all of us, and Debbie said Chaser was now indisputably an A-list celebrity.

It was a very different situation when Nicholas Wade, the chief science editor for the
New York Times
, contacted Alliston and me. Like Jessica Griggs for the
New Scientist
, Nicholas Wade was all about the science. Many of his questions had to do with whether Chaser's results in various trials really avoided the Clever Hans effect, and he paid particular attention to the video, part of the online backup to the
Behavioural Processes
paper, that showed Chaser in a take-nose-paw test.

We video- and audio-recorded the test at Wofford College. The setup had me kneeling behind a screen that was thirty-nine inches high by four and a half feet wide. On a cloth in front of the screen were three of Chaser's toys: Lips, which is shaped like a pair of human lips; ABC, a cloth cube with those letters on its sides; and Lamb, a stuffed toy resembling a lamb. These were the objects I would ask Chaser to take in her mouth, nose, or paw. Sally sat at the side of the room more than fourteen feet away from the screen and just slightly behind me. Her job was to wave her hand when she saw Chaser take, nose, or paw an object. When Sally waved her hand, I said, “Good dog!” Sally then put the objects back in place in front of the screen while I rewarded Chaser with brief play with a ball, before we conducted another trial.

I had assigned a different number to each of the three objects and three commands, and used a random number table to pair commands and objects for fourteen trials. During each trial I couldn't see what Chaser was doing, and Chaser couldn't see me. Sally could see when Chaser did something with an object, but she was too far away to tell which object Chaser took, nosed, or pawed, or to cue Chaser's choices.

Afterward, three Wofford students independently watched the video with the sound turned off and wrote down Chaser's actions in all fourteen trials. Then they each independently watched the video with the sound turned on and assessed whether Chaser's actions matched my instructions. The raters unanimously agreed that Chaser got everything right.

Nicholas Wade interviewed Alliston and me separately about the video. His questions indicated that he had scrutinized it frame by frame, and that he had also discussed it and everything else in the paper with outside experts.

On the night of Monday, January 17, 2011, Nicholas Wade's article, “Sit. Stay. Parse. Good Girl!: Dog Might Provide Clues on How Language Is Acquired,” appeared on the
New York Times
website. On Tuesday morning it was the lead story in the paper's weekly “Science Times” section.

The article gave a very thorough account of the
Behavioural Processes
paper and Chaser's language learning to that point in time. The opening paragraph put as big a smile on my face as the one in the
New Scientist
. It said:

 

Chaser, a Border collie who lives in Spartanburg, S.C., has the largest vocabulary of any known dog. She knows 1,022 nouns, a record that displays unexpected depths of the canine mind and may help explain how children acquire language.

 

Wade discussed how the high working drive of Border collies helped explain why Chaser “proved to be a diligent student,” and he compared Chaser's learning to Rico's. He drew out the implications of Chaser's abilities for understanding both nonhuman animal intelligence and children's language learning, “because children could be building on the same neural mechanisms.” And he devoted six whole paragraphs to the danger of the Clever Hans effect and the safeguards against it in Chaser's language trials.

“Haunting almost every interaction between people and animals is the ghost of Clever Hans,” Wade wrote. He quoted Alexandra Horowitz, scientist-author of
Inside of a Dog
, on Border collies' sensitivity to people's voices and attention cues as a possible source of Clever Hans effects. But he also noted that she said “the experimental design [in the
Behavioural Processes
paper] looks pretty good.” Wade revealed that Horowitz had been one of the expert reviewers on the paper I submitted to
Science
, and I breathed another sigh of relief that this flawed first attempt to publish my findings with Chaser had been rejected.

Wade emphasized that Chaser's language trials followed the same rigorous procedures as in the Rico study at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany. He quoted Juliane Kaminski, the lead author of that study, as saying, “I think the methodology the authors use here is absolutely sufficient to control for Clever Hans.”

The specter of Clever Hans is one of the biggest thorns in the side of any researcher who wants to demonstrate learning by nonhuman animals. Although Jessica Griggs had referred to Clever Hans obliquely, her article did not mention his name or go into any detail. I was grateful to Wade for highlighting the most critical area that had to be controlled in my experiments with Chaser and my procedures for doing so.

I regularly taught my students about the horse Clever Hans. Owned by a high school math teacher named Wilhelm von Osten in early-twentieth-century Germany, Clever Hans could apparently understand spoken and written German, identify musical pitches, interpret clocks and calendars, and do arithmetic with both whole numbers and fractions. Hans amazed large crowds free of charge by counting off correct answers in sequences of numbers and letters with hoof taps.

In 1904, the German government's so-called Hans Commission decided that no deception was involved. But in 1907, the psychologist Oskar Pfungst showed that Hans was responding to the increase and release of tension in von Osten's posture and body language. When Hans saw von Osten tense up in anticipation of his answer, he started tapping his hoof. When he saw von Osten relax, he stopped tapping.

Von Osten had no idea he was cuing Hans, and Pfungst found that he himself and other questioners also produced involuntary cues in working with Hans. If questioners knew the answer, then Hans read their body language and almost always “answered” correctly. If questioners thought they knew the answers but were supplied with false information, then Hans again read their body language and “correctly” answered according to the questioners' false beliefs. But if the questioners simply did not know the answers, Hans only got an answer right now and then by pure chance.

The Clever Hans effect, as this involuntary cuing became known, is so pervasive and powerful that drug and bomb detection dogs may produce false positives in response to their handlers' body language. With their acute sensitivity to human body language, the dogs see that someone or something has aroused their handlers' suspicions and they react accordingly.

It's not hard to produce a Clever Hans effect intentionally, either. I described earlier how Robin did that in teaching Yasha to “count.” From the start of my research with Chaser, I knew that other scientists would not accept my results unless I controlled absolutely for Clever Hans effects. In their paper in
Science
, the Rico researchers made a major point of their avoiding Clever Hans effects. In his critique of the Rico study, the Yale psychologist Paul Bloom stressed the importance of their doing so successfully. And it was inevitable that peer reviewers would train a laser eye on whether I fell victim to the Clever Hans effect.

The need to avoid Clever Hans effects was not a stumbling block. It was a given of animal learning research that I had taken account of throughout my research in graduate school and at Wofford. I was glad to demonstrate in a crystal-clear manner that Chaser performed language tasks without any visual cues.

At the end of his article Wade came around, like the
New Scientist
and BBC articles, to how intensive training might explain Chaser's unprecedented results. Had I “lucked out in finding an Einstein of the [dog] species,” or was I right in suggesting to him that “most Border collies, with special training, ‘could be pretty close to where Chaser is'”? He gave the final word to Alexandra Horowitz, writing, “Dr. Horowitz agreed: ‘It is not necessarily Chaser or Rico who is exceptional; it is the attention that is lavished on them,' she said.”

Readers were quick to comment on the story on the
New York Times
website. After approximately 360 posts, comments were no longer being accepted. Scrolling through the posts on the site, I saw the same mix as for the YouTube videos of Chaser. There were some skeptics, but the overwhelming tone of the comments was one of celebration. It was wonderful to see people's enthusiasm for understanding their dogs better and enriching their relationships with them.

Sally and I especially enjoyed one reader's posting: “Cats can do this, too, they just don't want to.” Another posting that made us laugh read: “I would like to propose a swap: two teenagers for Chaser. I'll throw in a chocolate cake and a couple twenties to sweeten the deal.” Chaser has a temperamental moment now and then, but having raised two teenagers, we didn't want any part of that deal.

The print and online media coverage between Christmas 2010 and late January 2011, along with the outpouring of interest from the general public in website comments and blog posts, left me feeling profoundly grateful. The response to the paper in
Behavioural Processes
and to Chaser herself went beyond anything I had ever imagined. I hoped all the hoopla would encourage other researchers to try to duplicate my experiments with their own dogs. I also wanted dog owners to know how smart their dogs really are.

I had no desire to be famous, and I didn't want Chaser to remain in the media glare. Now that the first phase of her language learning had received a fair hearing, I wanted to return to our usual routine and see how much more she could achieve in the way of language and other conceptual learning.

But the
Nova scienceNow
program with Chaser was soon to air, and I was committed—very willingly—to doing publicity for it in New York. I hoped Chaser and I were both ready for prime time.

14

C
HASER STOPPED IN
a pool of light from a streetlamp. We were at the entrance to a public schoolyard a block and a half from Debbie and Jay's house in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, on the other side of the East River from Manhattan. The morning of Monday, February 7, was still dark, but Chaser and I kept to our early rising in New York City as well as Spartanburg.

The empty schoolyard was a favorite spot for Chaser and me, a fenced-in area where we could safely play with balls and Frisbees. But not this morning.

“Come on, Chase,” I said. “Your paws have been getting all torn up playing in there, and we've got to follow the doctor's orders.”

It had snowed every day for the past few days, and the sidewalks and streets—and the asphalt schoolyard—remained scattered with big crystals and clumps of road salt. The road salt was murder on Chaser's paws, and Dr. George Korin, the vet for Debbie's family's cats, had advised us to restrict her outdoor activity in these conditions.

Chaser didn't buy it. Her paws had healed up nicely over the past couple of days and she was restless to burn off some Border collie energy. She cocked her head at me and then pointed her nose into the schoolyard and woofed softly. This was the first time Sally and I had brought her to Brooklyn during the winter months, and she wasn't used to having so little physical activity.