Tiffany Kaiser For DailyTech.com

Border collie “Chaser” can understand the names of 1,022 toys

Cats rule, dogs drool, right? Not this time. It looks like the dogs have won this round thanks to a border collie named Chaser, who has the largest vocabulary seen in any animal.

Alliston Reid and John Pilley, psychologists at Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina, have been working with Chaser to see if there is a limit to the number of words a border collie can learn. So far, Chaser knows 1,022 words.

While Chaser has the broadest vocabulary in animal history, she isn’t the first to border collie to be trained to learn the English language. Rico, a border collie who was trained at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, knew a total of 200 words. In addition, Rico was capable of using the process of elimination to distinguish new objects within a group of familiar objects.

But Chaser has surpassed Rico by leaps and bounds. Not only does Chaser know 822 more words than Rico, but she can also categorize words of items according to shape and function. According to the study, this is something human children learn around the age of three.

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