Smart? Not half



Border collies surprise constantly. They're all smart, but some are smarter than others.
Take Rosie.
She, sadly, is gone. She will never be forgotten.
Rosie displayed all the usual high-brow collie traits: she'd learn a new behaviour in minutes.
Dog trainers rate dog intelligence by the number of times a dog has to be told/shown something before picking it up.
Most collies can learn something new - a new command, a new trick - after being told or shown just two or three times.
That's smart - and they never forget.
But they learn, too, by watching.
Consider this.
In our old house, for no particular reason, I mowed our lawn from left to right, in strips.
No big deal.
Rosie, one day, put a ball at my feet as I walked behind the mower.
I kicked it, and the game was on.
But here's the amazing part.
After fetching the ball, she took it away and placed it on the piece of lawn I was about to mow, on the other side of the lawn.
She had watched my pattern of mowing.
More surprising was that she placed the ball just to the edge of the strip to be mown, just where I could kick it without veering off my path. She knew enough not to put it on the actual strip to be mown, but just to the left.
Oh, of course she'd worked out I preferred to kick with my left foot.
I kicked it again.
She then took it to the other side of the lawn, right in the ''kick'' zone but not in the path of the mower.
I obliged, of course, giving the ball a gentle kick each time.
After the first mow, the game was locked in.
If I went near the mower she brought the ball.
If I started the mower, she was waiting with the ball, ready to play.
Collies love to play, and Rosie loved the mower-ball-lawn game, playing it to the end.
And because she was collie, I even took the game to the roadside grass verge.
I could do that safely because I knew she would never run off the grass on to the road.
She ''knew'' not to. I didn't teach her that.
We could stop anywhere on a car trip where there was grass. She'd run and play without us having to worry about her ''playing with the cars''.
Rosie learnt many, many tricks, and we reckoned she knew up to 60 commands.
Was she exceptional?
To us, yes.
But any owner of a border collie will have similar stories.
Here she is. Smart, sassy, and achingly loyal.

Rosie in action