Scree - January 08, 2011
Smart Dog
Chaser, the border collie, is a smart dog. He has a vocabulary of over 1,000 words and understands basic sentence structures. For example, he can "paw" a certain toy on command, or "nose" another toy. The pup is pretty remarkable.
Chaser might be smart, but when compared to our dog Jake, how does he stack up...
We have always considered Jake to be a smart dog. We play games with his toys all the times and he is able to find certain toys; but we never actually tested him to see if he could pick a certain toy out from a collection of all his toys.
When asked to get "bear", Jake happily brought us "duck". He was confused by the new game so we tried again. We asked him to get "duck" and he brought us "bear". Then, he brought us "Santa" instead of "gecko" and "toy" instead of "duck". The experiment was a disaster. He didn't understand what we wanted him to do.
However, Jake still is a smart dog. He has figured out how to manipulate us. He gets what he wants, in fact so much so, that his sister, our real daughter, is often jealous of his tactics and results.
Chaser does not have to worry about Jake taking over his smartest dog crown; but as soon as Jake curls up next to us with his head in one of our laps, how smart he is really is no longer much of an issue.
(Time - even though, if you Google: "chaser border collie" - you will find many other articles)
Skiing No-No's
Times are changing on the slopes. There are now certain things you should not do. Like, did you know that you should not ride a chair lift with the safety bar up? The thing that amazed me the most was that riding a chair lift with the bar up must have been a problem or it would not have made the "no" list!
The "no's" are good advice.
