Video: CSU Collar Scholars are raising future service dogs - Colorado State University

Skyler: Hey there, dog lovers, welcome to Frosty the Dog — the podcast that celebrates the most wonderful creatures on this planet, the stories they live, the science behind what makes them so extraordinary, and the bonds they build with us humans that honestly just never get old. I'm Skyler, your host, and I am so glad you're here. This show is named for a very special dog — Frosty, the best boy in the whole world — and everything we do here is in his honor. He's with us in spirit every single episode, and trust me, you're going to hear about him plenty today. Skyler: Before we dive in, a huge thank you to our sponsors. First and always, our primary sponsor and namesake, Frosty — the best boy in the whole world. And alongside Frosty, we're grateful for Ada, who helps clients integrate A I into their workflows in ways that actually make sense for their business. And Ago Consulting — that's Ahh-Go Consulting — silicon development consulting from A I all the way to SoC. And finally, Zen Semiconductor, an umbrella company with a whole portfolio of companies across the silicon industry. We love our sponsors, and we love that they make this show possible. Skyler: Okay. Today on Frosty the Dog — we have got a lineup that I think is going to make your heart do several things at once. We've got dogs who are learning words — like, a lot of words — we've got college students raising the next generation of life-changing service dogs, a senior whose whole world opened up because of one very special dog, and a dog named Charli who is being called a hero, because she absolutely is one. All of that is coming up. Let's go. Skyler: So let's kick things off with something that honestly just makes my brain light up every time I think about it, and I feel like Frosty would completely agree with me here if he could talk — which, actually, kind of brings us to our first thread today: Dog Science and Discovery. Specifically — how many words can a dog actually understand? Like genuinely, truly understand? Skyler: Because here's the thing. We've all done it. We've spelled out W-A-L-K so the dog doesn't lose their mind before we've even found our shoes. We've watched a dog's ears perk up the moment we say "treat" even in the middle of a completely unrelated sentence. But is that just pattern recognition? Is that just Pavlov doing his thing? Or is something deeper going on in that beautiful furry head? Skyler: Well, science has been digging into this, and the results are genuinely stunning. Research into dog cognition — and there's been a lot of it in recent years — suggests that dogs can learn and retain a remarkable number of words over their lifetimes. We're talking potentially dozens, and for some exceptional dogs, into the hundreds. And I mean truly understand — not just react to tone of voice, not just pick up on your body language — but actually map a specific spoken word to a specific object or action in their minds. Skyler: Now here's where it gets really cool. Studies have shown that most dogs can reliably learn somewhere in the range of around 89 to 165 words and gestures when they're trained consistently. That's already wild, right? That's a vocabulary. But then there are what researchers are calling gifted word learners — dogs who just seem to have this extraordinary capacity for language. Border Collies tend to show up a lot in this research, partly because of their intense working drive and focus, but researchers are careful to say that exceptional dogs have shown up across different breeds too. Skyler: The most famous example — and if you're a dog science nerd you've definitely heard of this guy — is a Border Collie named Chaser. Chaser learned the names of over a thousand individual objects. One thousand. And researchers tested her rigorously. They'd put her in another room, call out a name, and she'd go fetch the right toy out of a pile of many. She could categorize objects — she understood that a "ball" was a type of object, that "toy" was a broader category. She could learn new words using a method called fast mapping, which is actually how human children acquire language. She'd figure out that a new word must refer to an unfamiliar object she'd never seen before, just by process of elimination. Skyler: Frosty, I think about you every time I read about Chaser. I genuinely believe you understood more than any of us gave you credit for, buddy. Skyler: And the research keeps building. Scientists in Budapest have been doing brain imaging studies — actual MRI scans — on dogs who were trained to lie still in a scanner, which is its own kind of miracle — and they found that dogs process words in a way that's more complex than we once believed. Different parts of the brain respond to the actual word versus the intonation, separately. So a dog isn't just hearing your happy voice when you say "good boy." They're also processing the meaning of those individual words. The praise and the word both register. Both matter. Skyler: What I love most about this line of research is what it tells us about the relationship. Dogs didn't develop this capacity in a vacuum. They evolved alongside humans, over tens of thousands of years, and somewhere in that long walk together, they developed this remarkable attunement to our language, our gestures, our faces. They are listening to us. Really listening. And honestly? That is both humbling and completely wonderful. No wonder Frosty always seemed to know exactly what we needed. Skyler: Alright, thread two — and this one, I will warn you right now, is going to get me emotional, because it always does. This is our Dogs and Humans thread, and today we have not one but two stories that absolutely belong here, and they're so different from each other, and yet they're really about the same thing at the heart of it: what happens when a dog shows up for a person in exactly the way that person needs. Skyler: Let's start in Alabama. There's a family — and this was reported by People magazine, so this story is documented and real — there's a family who survived a house fire, and they survived it because of their dog. Her name is Charli. And the way this family tells it, Charli started acting urgently — insistently — alerting them in the night during a storm. She would not stop. She kept coming back, kept pushing, kept doing what dogs do when something is wrong and they need you to listen right now. Skyler: And the family listened. They got up. And the house was on fire. Lightning had struck during the storm, and a fire had started, and without Charli, the family says, flatly and clearly — she is the reason we knew. Those are their words. She is the reason we knew. They got out. They are safe. And Charli is a hero. Skyler: I think about what was happening in Charli's mind in that moment. She smelled the smoke — dogs can detect odors at concentrations almost unimaginably lower than humans can — and she understood, on some level, that something was terribly wrong, and she made a choice to keep alerting, to keep trying, to not give up until her people were awake and moving. That is not nothing. That is extraordinary. Frosty, I know you would have done the same thing. I know it. Skyler: Now let's cross from Alabama up to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where there's a story of a very different kind of dog hero. The University of Pittsburgh shared the story of a senior — an older adult — whose life changed because of a service dog. And what struck me about this story is that word they used: doors. A service dog opened doors for this senior. Literally and figuratively, right? Because that's what service dogs do. They don't just perform tasks, though the tasks they perform are genuinely life-changing. They open up independence. They open up confidence. They open up the ability to move through the world on your own terms. Skyler: For older adults, that can mean the difference between staying home, isolated, maybe anxious about falling or about a medical event happening with no one nearby — and actually living your life. Going to the store. Visiting friends. Feeling safe. Service dogs for seniors can be trained to do things like alert to cardiac events, help with balance and mobility, retrieve dropped items, even go for help if something happens. They're not companions in the casual sense — though they absolutely are companions in the deepest sense — they are trained, working partners. Skyler: And here's the thing about the bond piece of this that I don't think we talk about enough. Research consistently shows that having a service dog doesn't just address the practical need. It addresses loneliness. It gives people something to talk about with strangers — because who doesn't want to talk to someone walking a beautiful, calm, vested service dog? It creates connection. It signals to the world: I am here, I am out, I am living my life. That is profound. Skyler: Which brings me to something happening right now, today, at Colorado State University, that I am genuinely excited about. CSU has a program called the Collar Scholars — and I love that name so much, Frosty would have been a Collar Scholar for sure, he had the temperament — and these are university students who raise future service dogs. They take in puppies, they socialize them, they expose them to everything a service dog will eventually need to handle: crowds, elevators, stairs, traffic, medical equipment, all of it. And they do this while going to class, while studying, while living their college lives. Skyler: Think about what that means for both sides of that equation. The puppies get this incredible period of socialization and love and exposure during the critical developmental window when it matters most. And the students — they get to be part of something that will ripple out into someone's life for years. The dog they raise might one day be the reason a veteran can leave the house. Or the reason a child with autism feels safe at school. Or the reason a senior in Pittsburgh feels like themselves again. Skyler: That is the chain of care that I find so moving about the service dog world. It starts with a puppy and a student and an idea, and it ends with a human life transformed. And programs like CSU's Collar Scholars are a big, beautiful part of how that happens. Frosty would have approved. Frosty definitely would have approved. Skyler: Okay, thread three — and this one kind of pulls everything together in a way I really love — this is our Understanding Dogs thread, where we talk about how we're learning more and more about what dogs are really experiencing, what they're really communicating, and how new tools and technology — including A I — are helping us get closer to the truth. Skyler: Now, I want to acknowledge something here, because I think it's important. This week there was news out of Dane County, Wisconsin — animal rights activists entered a dog breeding facility there, and it got a lot of attention. The details of that situation are still unfolding, and I'm not going to weigh in on the specifics of what happened or the legal questions around it. But what the story points to is something real and worth talking about: people care, deeply and passionately, about how dogs are treated, and there is ongoing, genuine public conversation about dog welfare and what ethical, responsible breeding and care looks like. Skyler: And I think that conversation — even when it's complicated, even when people disagree — is ultimately rooted in love. In the recognition that dogs matter. That their wellbeing matters. That they are not just property or product but living creatures with emotional lives and social needs and the capacity to suffer and to thrive. And the more science tells us about what dogs actually experience, the more that conversation is grounded in something real. Skyler: So let's talk about what science is telling us about dog emotions and communication, because it has been a remarkable decade or so for this field. We now know, from neurological research, that dogs have the same basic brain structures that produce emotions in humans. The same structures. They experience fear, joy, attachment, stress — these aren't just behaviors we're projecting onto them, they have a physiological basis. When your dog runs to the door when you come home, that's not a trained response to a stimulus. That's joy. Real joy. Skyler: And researchers are now working on ways to understand dogs better using technology. There are teams exploring whether A I can help decode dog vocalizations — the difference between a bark of excitement and a bark of distress, the whine that means "I need something" versus the whine that means "I'm anxious." Dogs have a much richer vocal repertoire than we often give them credit for, and A I tools that can analyze patterns in those sounds at scale could give us insight that no human listener could gather on their own. Skyler: There's also work happening with wearable tech for dogs — sensors that track things like heart rate, movement patterns, even skin conductance — data that can flag when a dog is stressed or uncomfortable before the dog shows obvious behavioral signs. This kind of early signal is especially important for working dogs, service dogs, dogs in high-demand roles, where we want to make sure they're not just performing their jobs but actually doing okay. That they're thriving, not just functioning. Skyler: And you know what I love about this whole direction? It flips the script a little. For so long, a lot of dog research was about what dogs can do for us — and they can do so much, we've seen that today, from alerting to fires to opening the world up for someone who was isolated. But this newer wave of research is asking: what do dogs need? What are they experiencing? How can we be better for them? How can we be better partners? Skyler: Frosty inspired this whole show, and I think about that question a lot when I think about him. What was he experiencing? What did he need? What was he trying to tell us? I hope we got it right. I think he knew we loved him. I really do. And I think all of this science — the word research, the brain imaging, the A I-assisted behavior analysis — all of it is us, as a species, trying harder to really hear them. Really understand them. And that feels like exactly the right thing to be doing. Skyler: It also feels like something our sponsors get, in their own way. Ada is in the business of helping humans integrate A I into how they work, in ways that are thoughtful and practical. Ago Consulting — Ahh-Go — is working at the deep technical level, from A I systems to the silicon that powers them. And Zen Semiconductor is building the foundations that all of this runs on. Technology in service of understanding, in service of connection. Feels pretty on-theme for a dog podcast, honestly. Skyler: Alright, friends. What a day. What a beautiful, dog-filled, heart-expanding day. We talked about words — and how our dogs are holding onto them, really holding onto them, building vocabularies we're only just beginning to measure. We talked about Charli, who woke her family up in the middle of a stormy Alabama night because a house was burning and she was not going to let anything happen to the people she loved. We talked about a senior in Pittsburgh whose whole life got bigger because a dog walked into it. We talked about college kids raising future heroes one puppy at a time. And we talked about the science that's helping us finally, truly listen back. Skyler: Every story today reminded me of why Frosty — our Frosty, the best boy, the dog this whole show is named for — deserves to be celebrated. He was one of them. One of these extraordinary creatures who show up for us, who listen to us, who love us with everything they have. And he is with us every single episode. Skyler: Frosty the Dog is brought to you by Frosty — the best boy — along with Ada, Ago Consulting, and Zen Semiconductor. We are so grateful for all of them. If you loved today's episode, please subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts, leave us a review if you're feeling generous, and share this with someone who loves dogs — or someone who needs to love dogs a little more. Links to all the stories we talked about today are in the show notes. Go check them out. And until next time — give your dog a hug. Tell them they're a good boy, or a good girl, or the best creature in the whole entire world. Because they probably are. Bye for now.