On Sunday night 60 Minutes aired a segment on dogs featuring “Chaser,” a border collie that correspondent Anderson Cooper says many think is “the smartest dog in the world.” I just got around to watching it last night and found it too fascinating not to share here with our dog-loving UPROXX readers. As Cooper details, Chaser’s owner, John Pilley, has been teaching her like a parent would a child and that “by assigning names to toys, Pilley has been helping Chaser learn words and simple sentences.” Cooper goes on to note that “he’s been teaching her up to five hours a day, five days a week for the past nine years.” Thanks to all that schooling, Chaser now has a vocabulary 900-1000 words deep.
Cooper goes on to talk to Brian Hare, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University, who believes that Chaser is “the most important dog in the history of modern scientific research” because, in Hare’s words, “it’s the closest thing in animals we’ve seen to being like what young children do as they are learning words.”
Side note: brain research on dogs has confirmed that they are indeed expressing love when they lick you and get excited to see you. It’s not just because they’re hoping you’ll give them treats.
“We know that when dogs and humans make eye contact, that actually releases what’s known as the love hormone, oxytocin, in both the dog and the human,” Hare said. “What we know now is that when dogs are actually looking at you, they’re essentially hugging you with their eyes…And so it’s not just that when a dog is making a lot of eye contact with you that they’re just trying to get something from you. It actually probably is just really enjoyable for them because they get an oxytocin or they get an uptick in the love hormone too.”
Side note 2: Hare has a website where you test your dog’s intelligence.
The full report is embedded below. And if it gives you any difficulties — CBS embeds can be spectacularly unreliable — you can watch the whole thing here.
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