The moment Chuck never forgot
Chuck returned again and again to a story from his first year with London. He remembered speaking to him about the light and seeing London operate the switch without having been taught that particular action. Chuck came to regard that moment as the beginning of a different way of thinking about dogs: not simply training them to repeat actions, but trying to find out what they might understand.
We cannot independently reconstruct exactly what happened that day, but there is no doubt about what the memory meant to Chuck. London had made him curious, and that curiosity shaped much of the rest of his life.
Useful things became performances
Long before television, London was already doing practical things around Chuck. At ballparks he carried equipment and retrieved objects. In 1955 his familiar job of carrying a pitcher’s jacket led to the extraordinary Kearney game that made national news. The following summer, a contemporary report from Bismarck described London fetching objects and running the bases before a crowd.
What began as things London did around Chuck’s everyday life gradually became part of the way the two of them entertained an audience together.
Listening to more than a command
As the years went on, Chuck increasingly described London as responding not just to short commands but to words, objects and spoken requests. Later accounts credited dogs in the group with very large vocabularies and with selecting objects, printed material and colours. Those claims were never tested in the controlled way we would expect from a scientific study, and the repeated use of the name London sometimes makes it difficult to know which dog a later story concerns.
Whatever the explanation, contemporary audiences really did watch Chuck’s dogs perform remarkably complicated routines. What we still cannot know is exactly how the dogs understood what they were being asked to do.
For Chuck, the question had begun with one dog. London carried jackets, fetched objects, worked before crowds and cameras and, in Chuck’s memory, sometimes did things that seemed to go beyond what he had been explicitly taught. Chuck spent the rest of his life trying to understand what that meant.