Chaser has a way with words. She knows over a thousand of them – more than any other animal of any species except humans. In addition to common nouns like house, ball and tree, she has memorized the names of more than one thousand toys and can retrieve any of them on command. Based on that learning, she and her owner and trainer, retired psychologist John Pilley, have moved on to further impressive feats, demonstrating her ability to understand sentences with multiple elements of grammar and to learn new behaviours by imitation. Yet astonishingly, Chaser isn’t unique. John’s training methods can be adopted by any dog lover.

I know my mum will like this and I know she has a friend to pass it on to.

I've heard about this dog so I will enjoy reading the book.

What an amzing family. The time John spends working and playing with Chaser is wonderful to read about. I did find the book got a bit repetitious but overall a very enjoyable read.

I am passing this on to a friend, either for her to read or for her doggy to release.

Definitely one for HonoraryBCDog to release in due course, but it looks rather interesting so I will have a look at it first and then pass it on to her.

Many thanks, IceMaiden and Dolph1n!

I hadn't realised I had forgotten to journal this. What an amazing dog! I thought my late lamented Comma (commonly known as Chompy) had a pretty good vocabulary, but I have to admit it wasn't as good as Chasers. I'm handing this over to HonoraryBCDog now so that she and her sister can Wild Release it this afternoon.

My sister and I released this together on a bench, but my sister had to have some help from our friend Dolph1n because she's only a puppy really and is not very good at doing things on her own yet.