NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON (Astrophysicist, American Museum of Natural History): Hi, I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your host of NOVA ScienceNOW, where this season we're asking six big questions. On this episode: How Smart Are Animals?
Meet Chaser. She's got a huge vocabulary.
She knows the name of every single one of these?
And it's not just her. Dogs are suddenly acing some tests that our closest relatives can't pass.
Look at that intensity.
And researchers are finally taking notice.
BRIAN HARE (Duke University): A dog is like a soldier of science.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Find Crawdad.
BRIAN HARE: If we can figure out how they think, then we'll understand ourselves.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Excellent, excellent, good job!
And a trip to paradise, where some of the smartest creatures...
TERI BOLTON (Roatan Institute for Marine Sciences): Come on, boy.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: ...who can even read symbols, are also the most talkative.
TERI BOLTON: These are his clicks.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: But what are they saying?
STAN KUCZAJ (University of Southern Mississippi): Is a whistle a word? Is it a sentence?
TERI BOLTON: Yes, French is very vocal.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Can we crack the dolphin code?
Also,...
ALEX (African Grey Parrot): Water.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: ...communicating with animals is a lot easier, if...
IRENE PEPPERBERG (Brandeis University): What's it called?
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: ...they speak English.
ALEX: Shower.
IRENE PEPPERBERG: Right.
He was at the level of about a five- or six-year-old child.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: This researcher spent her career with one remarkable bird,...
IRENE PEPPERBERG: How many?
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: ...Alex.
ALEX: Two.
IRENE PEPPERBERG: Good parrot.
For 30 years, Alex was the center of my life.
What do you want?
ALEX: Nut.
IRENE PEPPERBERG: You want a nut, you can have a nice big nut.
ARLENE LEVIN (Brandeis University): This is a parrot. How amazing is that?
IRENE PEPPERBERG: We were communicating with another species.
Can you tell me what's different?
ALEX: Color.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Are these just parlor tricks?
Find Darwin.
Or are these animals really intelligent?
Chaser's never even heard the name "Darwin."
All that and more on this episode of NOVA scienceNOW.
It's part of our pop culture to give animals human personalities and talents.
Good boy!
Movies and cartoons are filled with talking creatures who basically act like people, but they've got feathers or fur, from Donald Duck to Alvin and the Chipmunks.
And when it comes to our own pets, it's awfully tempting to imagine that they have human thoughts and feelings. But researchers have always been skeptical about animal intelligence. After all, we humans speak, write and build spaceships and solve puzzles, yet animals, well, they're just not that accomplished. Yet, recently, as we test more animals and try to reveal the way they think, we've come up with some surprising results.
And these days, one of our star pupils is the one animal who may know us the best.
ERIN JAMES (Dog Owner): She's a wonderful little dog. She is something special.
JONI FARMER (Dog Owner): He's really smart, and we have this connection.
SARAH JUMPER (Dog Owner): She is extremely intelligent.
GERVAIS HOLLOWELL (Dog Owner): I think that she is very much like a person.
JONI FARMER: I think Tucker understands me more than anyone else.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Plenty of dog owners have always said their dogs were smart, but animal researchers are just starting to catch on.
RESEARCHER: One, two, three, four.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: New discoveries are showing that our "best friend" is smarter than they ever thought,...
RESEARCHER: Good job.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: ...and that behind those big brown eyes, lies a brain that resembles ours in ways that we never imagined.
John Pilley, a chipper 82-year-old, started working with dogs as a psychology professor.
JOHN W. PILLEY (Wofford College): Walk up. Walk up. Walk up.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Now he's got one of the smartest dogs around.
JOHN PILLEY: Come on. Come on.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: And I've come to check out what she can do.
JOHN PILLEY: Good girl.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Chaser is a six-year-old female border collie, a breed famously skilled at herding sheep.
JOHN PILLEY: She was born to live in the Scottish mountains...
Chaser!
...and herd sheep,...
Go, go, go.
...be a shepherd.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: John has taught Chaser to tend an extremely large "herd," but there are no real sheep in it. Chaser's herd is made up of toys, about a thousand of them.
And she knows the name of every single one of these?
JOHN PILLEY: I hope.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Sailor.
John has assigned a name to each one...
Never Forget.
...and taught those names to Chaser.
JOHN PILLEY: She has about 12 elephants.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Apparently, sometimes John ran out of stuffed animals.
JOHN PILLEY: Uh oh, these are a pair of my shorts.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Oh, my...
JOHN PILLEY: No, no, that's one of her toys.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: John claims that Chaser remembers the name of every single object in the pile. Personally, I find that hard to believe. I don't have time to test Chaser's memory on a thousand names, but I will test her on a random sample. John and Chaser go into the house so they can't see.
So, I'm going to get a handful of toys out of this pile and see if Chaser can identify them indoors.
With John and Chaser out of the room, I lay some of the toys out behind the couch...Inky, there's Lover.
Now it's time to see if Chaser really remembers their names.
All ready for Chaser.
JOHN PILLEY: Come, Chaser! Come to Neil.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Okay, come on now.
Chaser, find Inky.
Well, she got one right.
Find Seal.
Whoa, and that one, too!
Now you might be wondering what's going on behind the couch, like, "Is John handing her the toys?"
Find Crawdad.
Let's check our hidden camera.
Find Sugar.
I asked Chaser to find nine toys, and she got every single one right. And remember, I picked the toys randomly from this huge pile. Neither John nor Chaser saw which ones I picked.
On multiple trials with John and others, Chaser consistently aces her test.
There's a thousand toys here. That doesn't, like, spook you?
JOHN PILLEY: It makes me happy.
These dogs have super memories.
On your mark, get set, go. Over.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Chaser and other border collies like her have shown they can remember hundreds of words and what they represent.
JOHN PILLEY: Table, table. Reverse. Over.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: What's more, they can learn these new words very quickly.
JOHN PILLEY: Table, table. Good girl.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: So, how does this ability compare with other species?
Well, besides us, chimps and bonobos are the animal kingdom's top linguists, capable of learning sign language, but very slowly. And there are other tests where dogs perform much, much better than apes.
Consider this very simple task: by the age of 12 to 18 months a human baby knows to look or go where a grownup points.
BRIAN HARE: This is something that little children do right when they start to acquire language.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Brian Hare is a primate researcher who tried this experiment with some of our closest relatives, chimps and bonobos, with surprisingly bad results.
BRIAN HARE: Primates really struggle. If you try to help them, and you try to cooperatively communicate to them about the location of food, they're completely flummoxed. They don't understand.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Chimps and bonobos can solve some very sophisticated problems, but they don't always pay close attention to humans.
Brian suspected that this was one test where dogs could do better than the apes. Sure enough, when dogs were brought into the lab, they got the point.
BRIAN HARE: So, dogs, on the other hand, are really good at this. If you say, "Hey, the treat's over there," the dogs...zoom. They're really good, and they go find the thing. And relative to primates, it ends up dogs have a very special ability.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: For Brian, the experiment highlights a basic difference between the way that dogs and bonobos view humans.
BRIAN HARE: When I see my dog, my dog wants me to be around. He wants me to be his social partner. He actually needs me. Whereas a bonobo and chimpanzee, they don't need me. They're basically like, "Hey, you got any food? Can I get any food off of you? Is there something I can do to trick you to t...? No, okay. Well, I'm going to go stay with my fellow bonobos and chimpanzees." They're not interested in making me happy.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Compared with primates, dogs are ideal research subjects, because they love to cooperate with humans.
RESEARCHER: Good girl.
BRIAN HARE: A dog is like a soldier. They're like a soldier of science. They show up and they''re like, "Yes, sir. I'm here to play. Let's do this game. Let's find out how my mind works. You know, is that a biscuit? Okay, I'm, I'm...it...whatever you need."
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: So even though primates like chimps and bonobos have bigger brains than dogs and are genetically much closer to us, Brian suspects that, in some ways, dogs' social intelligence might be more like our own.
RESEARCHER: Yes, you're a good boy.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: That's one of the reasons why he and other primate researchers have recently started up new dog cognition labs.
BRIAN HARE: If we can figure out how they think and why they were shaped the way that they were, then we'll understand ourselves.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Look at that intensity. Look at that focus.
JOHN PILLEY: They're truly amazing.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: So how were dogs' minds shaped?
JOHN PILLEY: Good girl, good girl.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Dogs evolved from wolves. Brian believes that something crucial happened to the dog's brain during that evolution from wild animal to pet that allowed it to pay closer attention to another species: people.
BRIAN HARE: It's an excit