The Dog Who Knows 1,000 Words
Chaser the Border Collie

https://youtu.be/_6479QAJuz8

Uploaded on Feb 9, 2011

Neil Degrasse Tyson introduces you to one amazing K-9. For more, click here:http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/worl...

• Release date

  • 2/9/11

• Running time

  • 3:54

• Show

  • ABC World News Tonight with David Muir

• Season

  • 2011

• Episode

  • 50

• Category

  • News
  •  
  • Science & Tech

If we humans listen with our eyes and with our ears our dogs will talk to us.  Dogs are much better at understanding our human languages than we humans are at understanding their dog languages .. so who is the smarter and more clever mammal??

Well, exactly, bubba.  Dogs have their own language, AND they're able to learn a good deal of ours--some of them even have to learn several of the varieties of ours, for that matter.  Us, on the other hand, we don't do quite as well learning the languages of other animals...it's especially sad, that, because it often results in one of our species devolving into the use of brute force and abuse to try and communicate what we want of them. 

The guy in the video is a retired professor, doing this stuff in his spare time.  This detail is relevant because it shines some light on why we don't know a LOT more about canine ability to mimick human communication.

There is a lot of underfunded work being done in the field of canine and primate communication, but there is a HUGE funding issue.  There are many forward thinking anthropologists and psychologists that want to study and define the true limits of animal communication.  However, the committees issuing the big grants are mostly filled with biologists that want nothing to do with that sort of research.  So what you have is a swelling body of experts that want to expand research in this area, but none of the organizations with the ability to properly fund them giving money for them to progress their research.  There are many stories about primatologist/anthropologists that had been working in public zoos for a decade, doing sign language research with greater apes, only to be denied access to the facilities once a new CEO or research director took over. 

Basically after the 1970's biologists decided almost unilaterally that animals cannot communicate and only a doing form of advanced gimmickry, so in return they are doing their best today to eliminate anything resembling such reseach, especially when its occurring in the facilities they oversee.

Note, although I have not been able to find any reliable sources, I had read somewhere that the Germans during WWII did extensive studies on the intelligence of German Shepherds.  However, I have not found any document with proper citations, as to the original source of this information.  Same goes for the Soviets post WWII. 

The human mind does not define the limits of intelligence.  Intelligent animals are intelligent not because they can mimmick humans but because they can perform tasks and exhibit the ability to reason and learn.  Humans are such an arrogant species and that is why we compare every other creature with ourselves.  Some scientists are now warning that so called "artificial intelligence" is a threat to mankind because the possibility that machines once aware and intelligent can easily surpass human intelligence and become the dominant form of intelligence on the planet Earth.  Humans are not afraid of intelligent life that they can control and kill at will but the thought of an intelligence far superior that humans cannot control is a terrifying prospect as it might kill the human species or deny the human species the ability to control all other species on planet Earth.  It is not "intelligence" that humans fear it is the loss of control and the ability of humans to do evil to others because we think ourselves superior.  Intelligence is not a human trait and there is no such thing as "artificial" intelligence.