Talk:Rico (dog)

Video format?

The NPR news site has a link labeled "see rico learn a new word" but the file type is a .smil, which I don't understand and neither do Quicktime nor Windows MediaPlayer. Anyone else know?

Hi. Sorry to revert a good-faith edit. The open question was a direct quote from the original Science article. It still seems open to me: what do you think the answer is?

best wishes, Robinh 20:41, 20 May 2006 (UTC)

Thanks Robin, no probs. It wasn't clear that it was a quote from a mag. However I checked the kaminski article (11 JUNE 2004 VOL 304 SCIENCE www.sciencemag.org) and the word "voice" doesn't occur. In any case since the words spoken are spoken by the human voice, I can' see the distinction. Perhaps the quote came from another article. I'll await your input before editing. Mccready 04:48, 21 May 2006 (UTC)

Hello again Mccready. Well I can't see the quote in Science, or anywhere else for that matter. It was me who put it there when I created the page and I was sure that it was quoted from somewhere. I don't think I made it up (although stranger things have happened), but my best guess it was taken from some evanescent news page somewhere. Anyway, I'm getting very confused about what it means anyways. Oh, and I've found a nice new quote from Bloom, which I'll add in a minute. Best wishes, Robinh 12:28, 23 May 2006 (UTC)

I can attest to the accuracy of this story, my border collie, "Jimmy", recognizes about 200-300 English words, I have never used hand signals or any "keywords" or "commands", I have always spoken in plain English and he has always understood. We do everything throughout our day with yes / no questions "Need to go outside", "Do you have to go pottie", "Are you hungry", "Chicken or Beef" - which elicits his picking out the type of dog food he wants today, and all of which are answered with yes/no in the fashion of yes - Jumping up & down - or no, sitting or laying down and acting quiet. No inflections are used, as he responds the same to any person speaking to him - familiar or stranger. Occasionally I have worked with him to form words himself, and he does try, and seems stressed that he cannot do what I am trying. "Walk" has been the word he really wants to say, and he rolls a growl in the effort.

Quote

I think that the final quote by a famous violinist is out of order. The article is very scientific and says clearly that the experiments can not tell us if the dog "thinks"... the quote seems to depend solely on the violinist definition of "thinking" as including in this case only sound recognition and elimination process.--Damifb 11:32, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

copyvio

Large sections of this article are copied from the article Word Learning in a Domestic Dog: Evidence for "Fast Mapping" (second Science link). If anyone can rewrite it, please do. Tesseran 02:05, 11 July 2007 (UTC)

That is not true. I wrote much of the article, based on the Science link, rewording it for a wikipedia. This is acceptable use. Read the link, then read the wiki article again, then see if you can point to more than very short segments of text that appear identically in both. Robinh 08:24, 11 July 2007 (UTC)

Still alive?

That dog would recently have turned 15. While this is not impossible, it is not very probable that it is still alive. Are there any references concerning this question? --Cú Faoil (talk) 21:04, 29 January 2010 (UTC)

The German version now has a source showing that the dog died in 2008. --Cú Faoil (talk) 19:33, 8 March 2011 (UTC)

"the anti-Clever Hansing protocols"

This is an unbearably clumsy and awkward descriptor for those "protocols." Surely we can do better, and must. Toddcs (talk) 23:07, 18 November 2023 (UTC)