Teaching the Dog to Read

A couple months ago, on my return from a trip I learned that in my absence Tom had been trying to teach the dog to read.  He said that the dog wasn't making much progress.  On further investigation, I learned that he actually was trying to teach Bullwinkle the alphabet.  I told him that that no doubt was the problem, that the whole language method would probably be more effective than phonics.

Since then, there was an article in the New York Times about Chaser, a border collie that knows the names of more than a thousand objects, along with some additional verbs.  This border collie is owned by a retired psychology professor from Wofford College, who - from the time the dog was a puppy - spent 4 or 5 hours a day teaching the dog words.  Border collies are energetic, smart, obdient, and hard-working, and according to Dr. Pilley, Chaser's owner and teacher, she still demands 4 to 5 hours a day.  "I'm 82," Dr. Pilley told the New York Times, "and I have to go to bed to get away from her."

Now we knew about border collies and their vocabularies before this report; we thought that border collies could learn 400 words, and if border collies could do it, surely Bullwinkle could too. 

Bullwinkle is mature - he's 9 years old in human years - with a graying muzzle and a very sweet disposition.  He is not particularly obdient (see, for example, this and this) and not exactly energetic either, but since he was a puppy he has been in a household where we talk about current events over dinner and we read newspapers and magazines and books, so surely that counts for something.  (Caroline was in a study, the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, and every year or so I would be interviewed by phone.  Whenever they would ask how many children's books were in the house and I said "hundreds," I'm not sure they believed me.)

We do think Bullwinkle knows quite a few words; most of them have to do with food.  He is obsessed with food, and I think if he were given the chance he would eat until he was sick, or worse.

Given his food obsession and his mellow disposition and not-so-active lifestyle ("Caroline, there's a dog on your bed." "There's always a dog on my bed."), it is not surprising that he has a weight problem.  Tom buys the diet dog food, and at least when I feed him I definitely control portions, but he is insufferable when he thinks it's time to be fed. 

This is the thing that I don't understand.  This is a dog that will jump on the dining room table and snatch a loaf of bread or a stick of butter, if given the chance.  But the 40 pound bag of dog food is sitting out in the foyer, next to his bowl - the bowl he will toss across the room if not filled with food when he thinks it should be - and he has never knocked the bag over or tore it open to get into it on his own.  It's not that he doesn't know that's where his food is, and it's not that he couldn't get into it - he just hasn't.

We used to have a cat named Rocky, who decided he didn't like sharing his house with the dog and moved next door to live with Kathy and Steve; he died of cancer a few years ago.  When Rocky was still in our house at least some of the time, we had dry cat food sitting out for him so he could eat when he wanted to.  Bullwinkle started eating Rocky's food, and Rocky - I know this was deliberately done out of spite - did knock over Bullwinkle's close-to-empty bag of food and helped himself to dog food.  At the time, I told Tom this proved that cats are smarter than dogs, but that may not be true; they simply may be more devious.

Bullwinkle may not know more than a dozen words, but one morning when I returned from a before dawn trip to the grocery store, he broke out in frenzied barking that stopped as soon as he saw it was me.  He doesn't have much opportunity to be a watch dog but I am pretty sure if anyone did try to get into the house at night he would be as loud as our alarm system.  He also knows the sound of a half of a dog treat tapped against the back window, and even when he is barking at possums on the other side of the fence, he usually will come running.  Not bad for an middle-aged, overweight Laborador Retriever, even if he can't read.