I get in the habit of taking it for granted that my dog understands me -- that when I say "sit" he knows to sit; when I say "down" he’ll get down; when I say "let's go for a walk," he leaps in the air in anticipation. I take these acts of canine comprehension entirely for granted, until I hear someone speaking to their dog in a foreign language. Every time I hear commands being given in Japanese, Spanish, Tagalog, or even Sign Language it strikes me just how amazing it is that our dogs can understand us at all. We force entirely different structures of communication on them and expect them to pick it up. What’s more, we sometimes expect them to know when we really mean “drop it”, but in our haste to correct them, we tell them “no!”
Bridging this language barrier is totally doable. We proved that as soon as we taught them to ‘sit’. But when learning any new language, maintenance is all about practice. If you don’t use it, you lose it. Thus, when it comes to training and command recognition, it seems to be all about consistency. But being consistent is more our problem than our dog’s. If we interchange the term “leave it” when we originally taught them to “drop it”, then they tend to lose any association they built up between command and action.
I catch myself doing this on occasion. It can sometimes be hard to remember the exact vocabulary you worked on with your dog, which is arguably why most of us will stop at just a handful of general commands. In the end, we attribute their limited vocabulary to our dog’s linguistic shortcomings, or training frustrations. But I know that my dog does understand more than I give him credit for. When I adopted him, he was already familiar with certain cues, which I’ve discovered along the way. Some of them I can’t for the life of me figure out why he was taught. Not surprisingly, he reacts to the word “Cat”. It sets him immediately on the alert, and he’ll go to the window, looking around for the intruding feline. What’s weird is that he has the same reaction to the word “White Trash”…I can only guess as to why that might be.
Over that past few years, I’ve built on his vocabulary with some of the more practical commands. But I still wouldn’t consider his vocabulary overly extensive. I read in an article that the average dog has the capacity to comprehend around150 words. The more intelligent breeds (i.e. Border Collies, German Shepherds, etc.) are said to be capable of learning about 250. That seemed pretty impressive to me. But then I heard about Chaser. Chaser is a 6 year old Border Collie with a vocabulary nearing a 1,030 word count! ABC News recently did a story on her. If you missed it, it’s definitely worth checking out.
I think the most amazing thing about this video is the fact that it shows Chaser using deductive reasoning, and essentially teaching herself a new vocabulary word by process of elimination. It just goes to show you how much potential is locked away in our dogs. It’s all a matter of having the right key and knowing how to tap into it. Admittedly, I don’t have 4-5 hours a day to work with my dog, so he’ll probably never get anywhere near this kind of vocabulary. But that doesn’t mean he couldn’t, and that in itself is pretty astounding.
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