Sit Stay

        I found it remarkably interesting that a border collie could learn up to 1,022 nouns in the article Sit. Stay. Parse. Good Girl! by Nicholas Wade. I remember people talking about how much smarter pets are than people. To an extent I really do believe that. It’s almost like they have another sense that we do not. They can see things in the future that we technically might not know about for a few hours to a day later. My dog, Snowy, can sense a storm about a day in advance. We always know when a storm is coming because she doesn’t want to leave the perimeter of the house and even tries to get inside by budging the screen door with her nose.

            “John W. Pilley bought a border collie in 2004. He would show her an object, say its name up to 40 times, then hide it and ask her to find it, while repeating the name all the time” said Nicholas Wade of The New York Times. I think repetition is the key here. A dog can hear and I believe that once you say something they can recognize the sounds that you are saying. It’s not so much that I think they know each word but they remember if it was a t sound as in treat or a p sound as in pen.

            We did not train my dog, but she knows certain words that probably most dogs know like treat, sit, shake, and pen. It’s funny how if you say “do you want to go to your pen” and she doesn’t want to or knows there is a storm coming, she will go straight to the corner of our garage and lay down and not even look at us. From that, I really do believe dogs can hear us. We have said pen so many times and once we said it we walked up to her pen. From that experience I believe she learned that the sounds she hears out of pen means where she sleeps.

            Dogs are interesting animals and by our actions they link words together with what we participate in. Also in the article Wade related, “The psychologist Oskar Pfungst discovered that Hans would get the answer right only if the questioner also knew the answer. He then showed that the horse could detect minute movements of the questioner’s head and body. Since viewers would tense as Hans approached the right number of taps, and relax when he reached it, the horse knew exactly when to stop.” This seems to be totally true; the closer someone gets to something the more eager they become. Dogs would be able to pick up on this type of movement and relate the movement to sounds that they hear.

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