It seems there are a few dogs in the world capable of learning and remembering a surprising number of words. Here's why that matters, explains mebwriter
Precocious Pupsat Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary, met a dog named Whisky, whose owner claimed she knew the names of her toys. Although skeptical at first, the researchers tested Whisky, and she passed with flying colors, demonstrating an impressive vocabulary of object names.
Looking at these gifted dogs, it is hard to say what makes them different from other dogs. I have met with a lot of other dogs that are also motivated to learn and attentive to their owners. And yet, they don’t seem to learn. We don’t know what makes these dogs different; only that the difference is very, very clear once you try to teach them.For more than two years, Dror and her colleagues searched worldwide for dogs with an existing vocabulary of object names.
The owners could teach their dogs the new object names however they saw fit. This meant play sessions every day in which the owners interacted with their dogs and the new toys. On the seventh day, the new toys were scattered on the floor, along with several old toys randomly chosen from the dog’s collection of named toys. To control for