Link #153: Chaser Has The Best Memory Amongst Animals In The World!

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Chaser Border Collie
Image credit: HMH Books

 

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Link #153: Chaser Has The Best Memory Amongst Animals In The World!

Chaser Border Collie
Image credit: HMH Books

If you have a dog as a pet, then you most probably think that it’s the most intelligent animal ever. If you read our last post about German Shepherds being the third smarted dog breed in the world behind Poodles and Border Collies and have any one of these three breeds, then you’re most probably even surer.

However, while it’s true that your pooch may have the capability to be the most intelligent animal ever in the world, there’s one dog that has already claimed this position.

This is a Border collie that goes by the name of Chaser. Why is it seen as the animal with the best memory in the world? Well, it’s because it knows and understands more than 1,000 different words!

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What Is Chaser, The World’s Smartest Dog, Capable Of?

Chaser is a Border collie that is proven to have the largest tested memory in the animal kingdom. She has received extensive training from her owner who is a retired psychologist known as John Pilley.

Chaser knows the names of 1,022 objects which include 26 Frisbees, 116 balls, and 800 separate stuffed toys. In addition to these, there are many other concepts and ideas that Chaser understands such as adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, verbs, common nouns, and proper nouns.

How Did Chaser Become So Intelligent?

Not only does Chaser have a great vocabulary, but she can actually understand what is being said to her, process it, and react to it like a human toddler would. As mentioned above, the only reason Chaser has such intelligence is that she was given exhaustive and professional levels training by her trainer, John Pilley.

Chaser is a border collie, which means that her natural instincts are geared towards herding and protecting. Moreover, her breeding also means that she has naturally high attention spans.

Pilley used these instincts to communicate with Chaser. This meant that Chaser was being taught through play which is something that isn’t all that different from how human toddlers are taught.

Pilley basically used the various items in chasing, fetching, herding, and finding games with his dog. Because these actions made sense to Chaser’s instincts, the world gained even more importance.

Chaser learned to connect names of objects with the objects first when she was five months old. First she learned individual names for objects, then she learned that a single object can have multiple names, and finally she figured out that a single word can be used describe a number of objects such as groups.

What about Parrots That Have Bigger Vocabularies?

African_Grey_Parrot
African Grey Parrot by Keith Allison CC BY-SA 2.0

There are parrots in the world which are known to have a vocabulary of more than 5,000 words. However, these parrots’ vocabularies are not tested. This means that it’s not scientifically proven whether they understand the meaning of the word that they are speaking or whether it is just instinctive repetition.

This is why Chaser is considered to have the largest tested memory of all animals on the planet. In simple words, Chaser, the world’s smartest dog, could actually be the world’s smartest animal!




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What will be the next link in our Chain of Facts? Think you might know? Scroll down to add a comment below with your best guess.

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Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaser_(dog)
http://www.wofford.edu/psychology/chaser/
http://www.wofford.edu/psychology/chaser/FAQ/
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-12067099
http://ideas.time.com/2013/11/05/your-dog-is-a-toddler/
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/world-smartest-dog-nova-special-shows-border-collie/story?id=12875750

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