here’s something about a really smart dog that makes it seem as if there might be some hope. The world is in the midst of a frightening viral outbreak, and nobody knows what will happen. The warming of the planet shows no signs of stopping; it reached a record 21C in Antarctica this month. Not to mention international tensions and domestic politics.
But there’s a dog in Norway who knows not only the names of her toys but also the names of different categories of toys, and she learnt all this just by hanging out with her owners and playing her favourite game.
Whisky is a border collie who lives with her owners and almost 100 toys, and Whisky’s toys have names. Most are dog-appropriate, like “the colourful rope” or “the small Frisbee”. However, her owner, Helge Svela, says that since the initial research was done, her toys have grown in number to 91, from 59, and he has had to give some toys “people” names, like Daisy or Wenger. “That’s for the plushy toys that resemble animals like ducks or elephants (because the names Duck and Elephant were already taken),” he says. During the initial research, Whisky proved in tests that she knew the names for at least 54 of her 59 toys.
That’s not just the claim of a proud owner – and Svela is quite proud of Whisky – but the finding of Claudia Fugazza, an animal behaviour researcher from Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest, who tested her.
It makes Whisky part of a very select group, although not a champion. You may recall Chaser, another border collie who knew the names of more than 1,000 objects and also knew words for categories of objects. And there are a few other dogs with shockingly large vocabularies, Fugazza says, including mixed breeds and a yorkie.