Brainiac Dog Names

Depending on who you ask, dogs may not be the smartest animals on earth, but they most certainly come close, routinely registering in the top 10 by both scientific and quasi-scientific measures. It’s certainly not difficult to see why: they tend to be fast learners, have a wide capacity of understanding, and often surpass most others based on their emotional intelligence alone. But there are also studies that have delved deep into each individual breed’s capacity for both learning and understanding, and three seem to reign supreme most frequently: German Shepherds, Poodles, and Border Collies. 

While Chaser may not have a brainiac’s name, she most certainly has a brainiac’s brain, and has the title to prove it — “the smartest dog in the world.” Chaser is — no surprise — a Border Collie owned by retired psychology professor John Pilley, who spent three years intensely training his canine Einstein after noticing her ability to recognize her toy names. While it started with only a few, Chaser was soon able to recognize all of her toys by name and fetch them at that, leading Pilley to buy her over 800 in total over the years, each of which she can identify and pull out from either a massive pile or individual storage bins without a second thought. Her motivation? A fair amount of praise and a toss of her favorite toy, a blue ball, which she can happily fetch and return. 

But Pilley didn’t stop with toy names. Eventually, he moved onto sequences of words, including using both verbs and nouns, each of which he can employ in conjunction with others to achieve a desired result, all of which she seems to have little trouble comprehending. She is able to mimic him in action, take toys to certain places, return them to others, read gestures and even understand combinations of words she hasn’t heard together before, indicating basic reasoning skills. 

Chaser ended up being so intelligent that Pilley officially studied and wrote about her, opening the door for others to follow. Strangely enough, outside of the last ten years, dogs have been almost entirely overlooked. We’ve spent a considerable amount of time studying the likes of horses, monkeys, and even octopi for decades, if not centuries, attempting to figure out the range of their mental capacities, but for what seemed like forever, dogs and their relative intelligence were left by the wayside until recently. Now that we’ve finally begun to dig into the extent of their abilities, we’re finally beginning to see the exceptional intelligence that has been at our sides all along, throughout our history.