100 Dogs Who Changed Civilization (4 page)

The threat of midair collisions with birds is an ever-present danger at airports around the world. In the United States alone, roughly 2,500 such bird strikes take place annually. These close encounters are almost universally deadly to the foul, and they're no picnic for human pilots, either. A midair run-in can shatter a jetliner's cockpit windows or cause a catastrophic loss of thrust if the avian victim is sucked into an engine.

That's why airports spend a great deal of time and money trying to keep crows, geese, and other potential flight hazards from nesting around their runways. Over the years, airports have used everything from firecrackers to smoke bombs to trained falcons. All of these remedies proved expensive, complicated, and not very effective. But in 1999, Southwest Florida International Airport became the first major airport to deploy what has become the most technically advanced, highly effective answer to the problem—a dog named Jet.

The two-year-old border collie turned out to be an excellent solution. After extensive training he was sent out with airport personnel to patrol the grounds. Whenever flocks picked roosting spots that were too close to air traffic corridors, Jet
would “encourage” them to leave by charging in unannounced, putting them to flight. His herding-dog background was a key advantage. Jet could be counted on to drive off the birds without harming them. And because his movements are so similar to those of stalking foxes or coyotes, the birds never became blasé about his presence, the way they so often did with other deterrents such as firecrackers and smoke bombs.

In 1998, the year before Jet arrived, there were sixteen bird strikes at the airport. During his first year on the job, the number dropped to four, and it remained in the single digits thereafter. The program proved so effective that a new border collie named Radar was recruited to replace Jet when he retired in 2001. Other airports have taken note and purchased their own bird-chasing canines. They're currently on duty at Dover Air Force Base and at municipal airports in Augusta, Georgia, and Vancouver, British Columbia, to name a few.

Dog breeders spend a great deal of time and energy attempting to “improve” our canine friends through selective breeding. But in the late 1990s the engineers at Sony took matters to the next level. Rather than trying to make traditional dogs better, they built a new one from the ground up—a dog that doesn't need walks, won't wet the carpet, or chew on the furniture. All this new breed required was a hard drive and quiet place to recharge its battery.

Their brainchild was named AIBO (short, sort of, for Artificial Intelligence Robot). The four-legged, chrome-plated contraption was the first commercially produced, autonomous robotic dog. It could do pretty much everything real canines can do, plus plenty of things they can't. Thanks to their sophisticated programming, early versions could putter around the house on their own initiative, recognize human faces, and understand and respond to dozens of voice commands. They could even be programmed to start their existence in “puppy mode,” then slowly develop into adult dogs equipped with unique personalities constructed from their “life” experiences.

Later versions of the robot could do considerably more. Among its many other talents, the
model ERS-743 can speak more than 1,000 English words; understand a smattering of Spanish; dance along with music; and connect to the Internet and recite news and sports feeds for its owner—all for about $2,100.

The little machines were undeniably fun, but they were a bit too pricey for the average dog and/or technology lover. To the dismay of robot canine fans worldwide, Sony announced in 2006 that it planned to pull the plug on AIBO. But the discontinuation of the little dogs may have major repercussions on the development of robotics technology. Building a machine that can walk, see, and communicate is difficult and expensive, so engineers and artificial intelligence experts routinely used the comparatively cheap AIBO as a test bed. The ersatz canine even became a centerpiece at the annual RoboCup autonomous robot soccer competition. AIBOs have their own division in the tournament, in which squads with names such as FU-Fighters and the RoboLog Project face off against other teams of robots from around the world. Given their undeniable utility, hackers may be teaching these old dogs new tricks for years to come.

Plenty of people think their dogs can understand what they say. Based on groundbreaking studies of a singularly intelligent border collie named Rico, those people may be more correct than they ever imagined.

All border collies are smart, but Rico is, apparently, a doggie rocket scientist. He seems to possess a vocabulary of approximately two hundred words, is able to identify specific toys from his vast collection by their names alone, and has even displayed deductive reasoning.

In 2004, scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, conducted a study of Rico's behavior and later published their results in the journal
Science
. Rico found himself in the lab after his owners claimed that the nine-year-old canine knew the specific names of every one of his dozens and dozens of toys. The scientists decided to test those claims in a series of carefully constructed experiments. First they placed Rico and his owner in one room, with a selection of his toys in another. Rico was then given the name of the specific object to retrieve, and he made the right choice thirty-seven out of forty times. But then came the
really
big news. A selection of the dog's possessions was
placed in the room, along with a brand new object Rico had never before seen. His owner then called out the new name and told Rico to go get it. Amazingly, the brilliant border collie deduced that the unfamiliar word applied to the unfamiliar object, and he retrieved it. Child-development experts call this singular skill “fast mapping”—the ability to quickly assign a meaning to a new word. Most had thought the technique, which toddlers use to learn language, was strictly a human trait.

The idea that dogs can possess the ability to fast-map is a scientific bombshell. Assuming the study data hold up to scrutiny, it could mean a couple of things: either that Rico is perhaps the smartest dog in the world, or that (more likely) all dogs possess similar abilities to a greater or lesser degree. The work led some scientists to speculate on matters that many dog owners have long suspected but couldn't voice for fear of ridicule. “If Rico had a human vocal tract, one would presume that he should be able to say the names of the items as well, or at least try to do so,” Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, who studies animal communication and intelligence at Georgia State University, told the
Washington Post
. “It also raises the issue of whether Rico and/or other dogs or other mammals might already be trying to say words, but have great difficulty being understood.”

Such musings are music to dog owners' ears. Of course, Rico can't use language with as much dexterity
as, say, the average human first-grader. So far his talents seem to be limited to matters concerning his toy collection and the fetching of specific objects from it. Presumably, if one asked him whether the moon was a ball, or if a specific stuffed toy made him glad or sad, he'd have nothing to offer.

But perhaps, just perhaps, he might. Work is already under way to see if Rico is as good at grasping abstractions as he is at grabbing toys. Given the surprises this singular pooch has already sprung, there's no telling what might happen.

Like most people, John Sperling had a soft spot for his dog, a border collie–Siberian husky mix named Missy. And like most people, he dreaded the day when his companion would pass away. But
unlike
most people, Sperling was in a position to do something about it—something that would bring about a novel advance in cloning technology.

Sperling is not just a dog lover, but a
billionaire
dog lover. He built much of his fortune through the University of Phoenix, a for-profit teaching institution he founded in 1976. He also made a name for himself as a biotechnology entrepreneur. In 1991 he bankrolled, to the tune of roughly $4 million, an effort to clone his best friend, Missy. Called the Missyplicity Project, it was a joint venture between Texas A&M University and Bio-Arts and Research Corporation (BARC), an umbrella company for Sperling and another San Francisco–area businessman. The scientists at Texas A&M labored through the late 1990s and early 2000s, implanting embryos infused with Missy's DNA into various “host” females, but none of the pregnancies proved viable.

After years of fruitless labor, the team reached two conclusions. The first was that dogs are very,
very hard to clone. The second, which came almost as an afterthought, was that cats are much easier.

Thus the Missyplicity Project refocused itself. If it couldn't replicate man's best friend, it would settle for his second-best friend. In 2001, after eighty-seven failed attempts, the research group produced CC (short for Copy Cat), the world's first cloned feline. The kitten seemed to point the way to a unique new business—resurrecting dead pets for fun and profit.

To capitalize on the technological breakthrough, a company with the deliciously
Twilight Zone
-ish name of Genetic Savings & Clone was founded to offer bereaved cat owners carbon copies of their dearly departed friends. Those with an eye toward the future could store their cat's DNA in the company's PetBank. Then, when the original feline passed away, they could use the Nine Lives Extravaganza cloning program to create Fluffy 2.0. All it took to see this new version of your cat alive and well again were the services of Genetic Savings & Clone's state-of-the-art Madison, Wisconsin, laboratory—and, of course, a payment of roughly $32,000.

Not surprisingly, animal rights advocates were horrified by the thought of spending a fortune to resurrect dead felines while thousands of perfectly good live ones languished in animal shelters. That, and the steep price for its services, doomed Genetic Savings & Clone to an early demise. After
creating a handful of custom cats, the firm closed its doors in 2006.

As it turned out, the high cost wasn't the only problem with cat cloning. Nature, it seems, hates to repeat herself. Though a clone and its donor undeniably carry the same set of genetic instructions, subtle environmental factors can sometimes cause slight—and not-so-slight—variations in physical appearance. This difficulty was first noted in CC, the “original” feline clone. Tests showed that she was indeed an exact genetic copy of her donor, a calico named Rainbow. And yet, as if nature were playing a joke, her fur was a different color.

Canine cloning, which was finally accomplished in a South Korean lab, has so far proved too complicated, expensive, and failure-prone for commercial application. As for Missy, she passed away quietly on July 6, 2002. For better or worse, there will never be another dog like her.