World’s Smartest Dog, Chaser the Border Collie, dies

The World’s Smartest Dog, Chaser the Border Collie, has died.

The World’s Smartest Dog – a female Border Collie from Spartanburg, South Carolina, named Chaser – has died, according to the New York Times.

Chaser, who belonged to a retired Wofford College psychology professor named Dr John Pilley, had a working vocabulary of over a thousand nouns – 1,022, to be exact.

According to psychologist, author and dog expert Stanley Coren‘s book The Intelligence of Dogs, the average dog had a vocabulary of about 200-300 words, roughly the same amount as the average two- or three-year-old human child. (This could be why some of the Dogs of Twitter use a dialect of Doggo Lingo that reads like toddlerspeak.)

Dr. Pilley died last year at the age of 89, according to the New York Times, but not before conducting the remarkable experiment, which required four or five hours of training per day for three years.

“The big lesson is to recognize that dogs are smarter than we think, and given time, patience and enough enjoyable reinforcement, we can teach them just about anything,” Dr. Pilley told the NYT in 2014.

Border Collies are considered some of the most intelligent breeds across dogdom, a big reason they’re so successful as farm dogs and at sports like agility, flyball, rally and obedience.

Chaser was 15 in human years, which equates to roughly 90 in dog years. She died from natural causes, though she was in gradually declining health the past few months, Dr. Pilley’s daughter and assistant trainer Pilley Bianchi told the NYT. 

Chaser not only could differentiate between general nouns and proper nouns, but also knew verbs, and she could group items from one to many.

She was featured on TV on 60 Minutes, in magazines like Popular Science and websites like The Dodo.

While her vocabulary skills are amazing for students and instructors of dog science, so was her collection of training materials, which included over 800 stuffed animals, many Frisbees, and over a hundred balls of various types and sizes.

(We bet she was excellent at playing fetch, and sit was a snap, too.)

Incidentally, the sports teams of Wofford are known as the Terriers, members of the NCAA Division I’s Southern Conference, and they made waves in this year’s NCAA Tournament as they advanced to the second round before falling to Elite Eight participant Kentucky.