He had been watching way too much Fox News the night I took this picture.
Posted on 06/10/2004 10:41:32 AM PDT by KentTrappedInLiberalSeattle
WASHINGTON (AP) -- As many a dog owner will attest, our furry friends are listening. Now, for the doubters, there is scientific proof they understand much of what they hear.
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.
Patti Strand, an American Kennel Club board member, called the report "good news for those of us who talk to our dogs."
"Like parents of toddlers, we learned long ago the importance of spelling key words like bath, pill or vet when speaking in front of our dogs," Strand said. "Thanks to the researchers who've proven that people who talk to their dogs are cutting-edge communicators, not just a bunch of eccentrics."
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.
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.
Rico's learning ability may indicate that some parts of speech comprehension developed separately from human speech, the scientists said.
"You don't have to be able to talk to understand a lot," Fischer said. The team noted that dogs have evolved with humans and have been selected for their ability to respond to the communications of people.
Katrina Kelner, Science's deputy editor for life sciences, said "such fast, one-trial learning in dogs is remarkable. This ability suggests that the brain structures that support this kind of learning are not unique to humans and may have formed the evolutionary basis of some of the advanced language abilities of humans."
Perhaps, although Paul Bloom of Yale University urges caution.
"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?
Fischer and her colleagues are still working with Rico to see if he can understand requests to put toys in boxes or to bring them to certain people. Rico was born in December 1994 and lives with his owners. He was tested at home.
Funding for this research was provided in part by the German Research Foundation.
I'll bet. He probably hears that at least twice a day!
LOL!! Too right! We had a golden who somehow couldn't hear us calling her to come in from the yard, but she'd hear a pop-top from a mile away on a hot summer day...she loved to drink a little beer off the patio stones!
I suspect our current two are just as smart, and "willful"...hehe!
Other words one couldn't spell or say in the dog's prescence: out, food, play.
Spelling them backwards provided some slight relief from being trampled upon or drooled on, but that didn't last long.
Dog riding on a moped?
Wish I could've seen that.
(Got to see my uncle drive his 'girlfriend' who was "A real dog" in his orange Nova affectionately called the Orange Peel. He was cleaning the car and the dog hopped in and wouldn't get out until he drove around the block.)
The Molting One is my wife's cat.
He suffers from nervous delusions I think.
He does the nervous shedding thing, and runs from his own tail when he sees it move.
When we had the dog, he seemed to think she was okay, if a bit on the drooly side.
(Even if he did leave his molted fur on her nose thus making the dog sneeze uncontrollably.)
Cat that's that old?
Ouch.
It's the most remarkable thing you'll ever see.
It's kind of like that dog on
Spin City.
I think its name was "Rags", though I'm not positive.
Some of my friends have dogs, including my friend Pepper, who has a little pug.
I'm not sure how his girlfriend feels about that, but I guess she's put up with it to this point in time.
Currently I don't have a dog.
Not sure when and if I'll ever have another one.
I have a 24 pound cat, and that precludes owning anything smaller than a Corgi.
The cat would eat anything smaller or similar to her size/mass.
That leaves me looking for a dog in a husky/hound size class.
It's always good to keep those "replacement" dogs in stock; just in case an unforeseen accident occurs.
Hmmm....Finally!, The Smokin' Gun...Now we know why Buddy, the Dog....was killed ("Arkanacided") by the Klintoons?...What about Socks, the Cat?...be afraid...CAT! :))
According to every episode of Lassy, all the humans in her home town could interpret two barks and a woof as indicating what particular trouble little Timmy had gotten himself into. It was uncanny. Damn dog did it every week.
An idea, but Tiny dog was a really weird husky mix.
She liked cats, seemed to think she was one since she'd try to leap up to where they were sitting, and didn't quite understand that not all cats were friendly with dogs.
Since I was bitten in the face once by a rather large female shepherd, I am somewhat leery near dogs and will hold a truce with them.
Just so long as the dog understands that it's a truce.
(Most of ours have understood such. But they seem to think my presence signals 'playtime'.)
After that little incident he managed to escape through our heating ducts, never to be seen or heard from again.
!!
Ninja snake, escaped and location unknown.
"Queenie" was a friend's hundred some-odd pound female german shepherd, and she grabbed me by my face without warning or provocation.
She nailed me good too, shook her head once while having a hold of me and tossed me over the porch railing.
I was 6 at the time, and that was quite a surprise to turn around and suddenly be looking down a dog's throat.
Big mistake on their part!
How much furniture was eaten first?
A friend of mine had a Shepherd named simply "Shep", and said dog's favorite food item was 'livingroom couch cushion' for some reason.
Please!! Don't call them dogs. You're insulting dogs.
My dog used to do my tax returns.
Jiust about the the time I'm beginning to think that I am the smartest little sob to come down the street he shows me different.
We have our own vocabulary/word set.
'Hook-up" means get on leash, etc.
Duke the dog is a good old boy.
regards,
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