A recent news story about a smarty pants dog with a 200-word vocabulary didn’t raise eyebrows among those of us with farm dog experience.
In case you missed it, a German Border Collie named Rico was recently tested by scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. Through toy-fetching exercises, the dog demonstrated that it could understand a range of words while also learning and remembering new ones. This puts its language skills roughly on a par with three-year-old children.
Toy-fetching? Yawn.
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No canine is quicker at word comprehension than a farm dog caught chasing cattle in the wrong direction. Of course, the uptake is probably quicker because the words are all fairly short. Four letters, on average.
I once knew a dog that understood the rudiments of scatology, genealogy and biological reproduction. He learned it from only a few sentences, uttered when said dog approached its owner while the man was tagging a newborn calf with one hand and fighting off a possessive cow with the other.
Let me tell you, that dog never went near the calving pasture again. Smart, eh?
There’s also evidence to suggest that, although dogs might understand 200 words or more, there are also a fair number they pretend not to grasp. Bath. Vet. Stay out of the garden. Get out of the truck. Do not drag dead animal carcasses onto the lawn.
As a child I used to wonder why our farm dog barked only at unfamiliar vehicles. My fun-loving uncle provided the answer. He said the dog could memorize licence plates.
Yessiree, that dog was smart enough to vote and could probably do a fair job of it, given dogs’ familiarity with polls, er, poles. Not to mention the fact that election promises and platforms are a dog’s breakfast.
Conservatives might get the dog vote, given their performance with election poles and polls of late. On the other hand, the New Democrats seem inclined to throw out a lot of bones, which is attractive even if no one knows where all the bones are supposed to come from or who will pay for them.
Dogs as a species seem liberal by nature and willing to give just about anyone a chance to impress. But smart as they may be, dogs cannot be expected to keep track of where the Liberals throw all their bones, nor determine where all the bones are buried. Neither can the dogs’ owners, it seems.
One thing is certain: health care wouldn’t be an issue for the dog vote. Our canine friends face no waiting lists, no surgery delays, no months-ahead appointments for an MRI. Yet they’ve sneaked past that whole user-pay question and handed it off to others. Pretty smart, eh?
