Abby is the family dog. but she spends more time with me than anyone else in the house.. yesterday I asked my daughter about the chickens In the back yard. Abby was setting close by and she got up and went to the door and looked at the chickens in the back yard. then she looked at me for a second then came back and sit beside me.. she knew exactly what I was talking about... she is a Border collie and is extremely smart. but she knows more English than any dog I have ever had.. just so you know. HAHA

Border Collie’s are some of the smartest dogs I’ve ever seen.

Labs and Healers are smart too. Just damn hardheaded.

I’ve seen some German Shepherd’s that are pretty damn smart too.

We have some English Sheppards on the place now that are smarter than hell.

I had an Australian Shepard that understood conversations at about the level of a 2 year old kid. She understood a lot of different words and used to amaze me.

One day I told a friend I would meet him at the hardware store in 30 minutes. As I hung up the phone Blue ran to the door knowing I was going to get in the truck and I was in the upstairs room when I told my friend I'd meet him there. How she could learn such things is amazing.

That was not the only time either. She used to interact with me all the time understanding what I was talking about.

Blue was not a hunting dog at all. But one time I shot a deer and dropped in in a field from a fairly long ways off. I drove over there and walked around looking for it for about 20 minutes. It dropped at the shot, but I could not seem to find it. I then drove back up to my home and got Blue. I took her down there but was unsure if she's understand what I was trying to do. She followed me around for about 5 minutes and then looked at a place about 30 yards away and trotted over there and sat down. When I'd call her over she's run to me, but then run back and sit. So I walked to her and she was sitting next to the dead buck.

And she was never trained to do that.

She just seemed to know what to do all the time.

Great stories.

They spend a fair amount of time observing. Smart little creatures

I wouldn't be able to list my Lab's vocabulary. He's with me all day and I just talk to him like a person. He knows the names of a few people that come around and he loves having company.

I told him today that my son was coming to visit and he went to the window to watch for him.

He started picking up on certain words when he was just a few months old.

In my younger days I had a blue heeler that was extremely intelligent. He was my constant companion and as mentioned above use to talk to him all the time. You could show him a trick and as you were showing him how to do it you would tell him what you called the trick. When you told him to do the trick he would do it from the second time on. The really cool trick he did was I lived way out in the country and we would be watching tv and he would be sitting beside me and if he jumped off the couch and sat in the middle of the floor you knew somebody he knew was coming down the road. If he barked and ran to the door you knew somebody was coming that he did not know. And he was right about 90% of the time. And he loved when the witnesses would come knock on the front door, because nobody knocked on the front door that knew me.

I had a very smart English pointer gal once who did just about anything I wanted her to. Taught her to get only in the passenger door of the car. I was in 9 th grade. Aunt didn't believe me. I open drivers door and said get in. She circled car a few times. I said get in. She jumped up on the hood and sat down looking at me twisting her head like I was crazy. She couldnt get in a closed door.

I could go down the street to visit a pal. Tell her to go kennel up. I'd come home a few hours later and she would be in her open kennel waiting on me. If I spent the night at his place and told her to "stay there" with her on his front porch, she would be there waiting for me in the AM.

She was a great hunter to the point if she saw a flock of ducks or geese when we were on the hwy, she would point them while standing in the front seat.

I loved Sue. And then there was Boots. Both, unreal. Then there was Jules, another pointer jewel, but a GSP, and now my baby is Babe.

I have a puggle that understands pretty well to the point he thinks he can talk. His biological clock is pretty good too when it comes to knowing when it is time for meals and walks. When it is his bedtime if we haven't encouraged him to get in his crate he will put himself to bed. When he wants his back scratched he'll find a couple of his toys and lay down on them and proceed to scratch his own back. Pretty smart dog, one of the most intelligent I've had.

Taught 1 of my labs Spanish. responded very well to both. It was fun to screw with people. Great dog, won a few field trial trophies and the best duck dog I ever saw. My shooting pard has a Border Collie fantastic animal.

I've had some smart ones, but the dumbest was a lab. He was also the most expensive purebred, high dollar blood lines, champion field trial parents and all. He'd retrieve singles, and even doubles at his own pace, and it was never fast. Turd eating extraordinaire no matter how expensive the dog food, how many vitamins, or what I sprinkled on it. Our bird dog became a better retrieve just by being out in the field with him.

We've got two purbred German shepherds now, one is our sons who's deployed, and a shepherd / McNabb mix. The mutt is every bit as good a dog to have around as the others, and she kills rodents frequently.

My wieners aren't real smart, but they understand quite a bit. If I say "who wants to go to bed", or "who wants to go for a ride", they come running. "Who schidt in the floor", and the guilty one will run hide.

I had a Mountain Feist years ago that understood many words. Have a Shepherd now that does too.She amazes me.

I vaguely remember hearing on TV a few years that there was Border collie that understood 90 words. I may be wrong on the number but it was a high number.

I knew a guy who had a small population of buffalo he used to ranch. He had a border collie that he used to cut singles out so that he could kill them for market. He had a big picture of the dog doing its job in his workshop, and I asked him what happened to the dog. The dog had died about a year prior. I asked him he was going to get another one. He said, “no. He can’t be replaced. He could read my mind.”

Raising a 4 month old Aussiedoodle right now that knows close to that many words already. We had a Weim for 15 years that could understand literally 100s of words and phrases. The new pup is proving to be way smarter though.

I would say, "Dont chitt on the floor".

We used to have a lab/setter mix that had a great vocabulary. She would lay on the floor while the wife and I would sit talking at the kitchen table. One day I noticed that every time one of us said a word that she knew, her ears would perk up. She would lay there looking half asleep but was actually listening to us the whole time.

My lab was so smart, she literally amazed me all the time. That dog would have me standing there scratching my head, wondering how in the heck did she know that??!


She could read my mind too. It was uncanny.

Thing that's sometimes humbling is when your dog starts laffin' at you.

We used to spell certain words in front of border collies so they wouldn't understand what we were talking about.

I grew up around two separate border collies, not in my home, but my grandparents. They were rescue dogs, and my grandparents had an attachment to the breed. They were house pets, but my great uncle had a dairy farm and had working border collies. I was too young to remember much about the farm, but I heard a lot of stories about those working dogs.

Apparently the cows didn't need much herding, as they'd come back to the barn in the evening on their own, but the dogs would be sent out to round up any stragglers. If my uncle saw a cow the dog missed, he'd say, "You forgot one." The dog would turn around, visually scan the pastures, and then run off to get the cow.

I remember "hunting" with one of my grandparents' border collies. I'd say, "Let's look for squirrels" and the dog would scan the trees looking for squirrels. If I said, "There's a rabbit", the dog would shift her attention to the ground.

After years of spelling in front of the dogs, we didn't think too much of it. The one thing we could never figure out was their impeccable timing. At the dinner table, they were never allowed to beg, whimper, or whine. However, they would get a few scraps after the family was done eating. Typically the dogs would be with us while we ate, but if they were in another room, they would always show up at the exact moment it was time to get their scraps.

Same with a small desert. For example, if you were eating a treat in a wrapper, the dog would show up at the very moment that there was a tiny morsel that was saved for her. We figured that they must have heard something different about how we handled the wrapper, but never could explain their perfect timing. On very rare occasions would you need to actually call the dog for its small treat.

I miss those dogs, and for being a working breed they really adapted well to being with an older couple and no livestock.

When Waylon[Lab] see's me dress a certain way he heads downstairs and sniffs the chainsaws, looks up at me as if to say "which one are we taking today", once outside he stands midway between the truck & Rhino and gives the same look. Should I pull the weedeater off the wall his whole demeanor suddenly changes to a depressed look.

Every dog I’ve ever had had a certain command of English. Always a list of words they know the meaning of via repeated pairing.

I once had a cat who was curled up in my lap. I said his name and his head came up. I said "Hop down, go the the garage and I'll get you some dinner" and he jumped off my lap and trotted over to the garage. Now, "hop down", "garage" and "dinner" were words he heard regularly.

Even better was another cat who we adopted as a stray. Since I didn't know her medical history, I decided to take her to the vet for a complete set of shots. I told her "Tomorrow we're going to the vet and getting your shots.". She immediately hopped off my lap and wanted to be let outside. She skipped breakfast the next day and didn't show up again until it was too late to go to the vet.