I knew borders were smart, but this dog has been documented to not only know many words, but figure out ones it hasn't heard before -- about at the level of a 3yo child!
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5180799/ "...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...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. 'Equivalent to toddler' -- 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... "[But]�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?.." Anecdotaly, a friend who used to show dogs at the national level had a Shetland collie who had a 'vocabulary' of 70+ words, many of them commands such as stay, forward, [go] right, circle, pause (which was not the same as 'paw') and even 'time out!' (the dog would go to his crate and stay until released). He also did some complex behaviors with/for disabled children, but I don't know what those commands were. Debbi Only One Woof Maru __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Friends. Fun. Try the all-new Yahoo! Messenger. http://messenger.yahoo.com/
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