Rico the collie borders on brilliant, scientists say

Jun 11, 6:41 AM ET

Rico the Collie
By Dan Vergano,USA TODAY

Man's best friend might be even smarter than we thought - at least judging by one clever border collie, scientists say.

Researchers at Germany's Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology flipped on the TV one day to see Rico, a 9-year-old border collie, competing on a European game show.

Impressed by the dog's apparent understanding of language, the scientists brought him in for tests. They found that Rico has a learning ability thought to be unique to children. Children learn perhaps 10 words a day with just one exposure, a "fast mapping" ability responsible for the breadth of vocabularies in human language.

"The novel thing is that Rico also shows fast mapping, reasoning and memory," biologist Julia Fischer says. Shown a toy once, Rico learns its name and can, on command, retrieve it from a distant room a month later with a reliability "comparable to the performance of 3-year-old toddlers," Fischer's team reports in Friday's edition of the journal Science.

The scientists asked the dog, separated from his owner, to retrieve items both familiar and unfamiliar. "We quickly established he does know what these toys are," Fischer says.

Asked to fetch an item he had never heard of from an assortment of known toys, Rico returned with the item in seven of 10 tests.

Trained to retrieve since the age of 10 months, Rico knows 260 words for his toys, researchers say. They include "panda" and "tiger." Because Rico lives with a German family, he also understands tongue-twisters such as weihnachtsmann (Santa Claus).

"We know dogs are clever, but this is the first time one has been tested with human psychology techniques and delivered interesting results," says canine expert Claudio Sillero of the United Kingdom's Oxford University, who was not on Fischer's team.

Rico's word knowledge is comparable to that of trained apes, dolphins, sea lions and parrots. Such quickness to learn a word eludes chimpanzees, thought to be man's closest relative.

While canine specialists consider wolves more clever than dogs, a 2002 study suggests dogs surpass wolves and chimps in following the human gaze and understanding commands.

Yale psychologist Paul Bloom, in a commentary accompanying the study, expressed doubt about Fischer's suggestion that Rico truly understands the words in his vocabulary.

Bloom notes that compared to children, Rico's knowledge of words is still tiny.

The scientists agree that other dogs must be tested to see whether Rico is a canine Einstein or merely a particularly enthusiastic fetching aficionado.

Working-breed dogs such as Rico can make terrible house pets, Fischer warns. "He is a workaholic who has been bred to retrieve and respond to commands. Families would be better off with a dog who likes to sleep around the house while they are working, instead of tearing it apart."