Chaser, a border collie who lives in Spartanburg, S.C., has the largest vocabulary of any known dog. She knows 1,022 nouns, a record that displays unexpected depths of the canine mind and may help explain how children acquire language.

Chaser belongs to John W. Pilley, a psychologist who taught for 30 years at Wofford College, a liberal arts institution in Spartanburg. In 2004, after he had retired, he read a report in Science about Rico, a border collie whose German owners had taught him to recognize 200 items, mostly toys and balls. Dr. Pilley decided to repeat the experiment using a technique he had developed for teaching dogs, and he describes his findings in the current issue of the journal Behavioural Processes.

– Nicholas Wade, N.Y. Times.

Man, dogs are awesome. First of all, for people who go on and on about how cats are so much smarter than dogs: Find me a cat that knows 1,022 nouns.

Second, you could be like, “Chaser, go scratch the bear,” to this dog and it will go pick out the stuffed bear from hundreds of stuffed animals and scratch it. And then he’ll turn around and crap on the floor, because that’s just how dogs roll.

I don’t really understand why people are so desperate to teach our languages to animals, because I suspect if we ever do crack the communication barrier we’re going to find that animals don’t have anything all that interesting to say. Probably after you say, “Chaser, fetch the ball,” Chaser just thinks, “ball! ball! ball! ball!” And then later he thinks, “food! food! food! food!’ And sometimes, “other dogs’ asses!”

Straight up, I’d guess that the way a dog learns to associate auditory cues with specific objects and actions can tell us very little about how a human child learns to understand language, even if there’s some overlap in certain processes. Dogs are not people.

Also no matter how often we assume it, dogs probably never think they’re people either. That requires a certain level of self-awareness that I’m not willing to attribute to dogs, awesome though they may be.