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put the canoe or kayak on the roof of the car, he was raring to go. We didn’t want to take chances with him, so Robin sewed a life vest, packed with pieces of flotation foam, that we made him wear whenever he came on the river with me.
    Throughout his life, Yasha exulted in clambering rocky riverbanks, nails scratching on the wet rock, and in going swimming with me. It wasn’t all that long after his misadventure at Big Corky that he was impatiently watching several students and me body surf the Chattooga River at the bottom of a rapid called Bull Sluice, where the waves were harmless and void of any danger. I was just jumping off when a student hollered, “Dr. Pilley! Dr. Pilley!” I hit the water and spun myself around in time to witness Yasha jumping off the six-foot boulder after me. Thus was born his unquenchable thirst for body surfing.
    Only one other activity appealed to him as powerfully—Frisbee play. Bring out a ball and he might simply lie down. Bring out a Frisbee and he erupted into excited barks, jumps, and tornado-fast spins. Whether the Frisbee was thrown directly to him or to his side, Yasha always leaped forward in anticipation of it—the mark of an elite athlete. For the first four or five catches, his return for another throw was rapid. However, after the fifth or sixth throw, mouthing the Frisbee triggered his chewing instinct. No amount of soft or hard recalling could overpower this behavior, an example of what animal scientists call instinctive drift.
    Instinctive drift must not be punished. The best way to inhibit an undesirable instinct is to trigger a competing, more powerful instinct. Fortunately I learned that sailing another Frisbee to Yasha made him drop the first Frisbee in order to catch the second one. I also learned that if I ran toward him, he cleverly nested the two Frisbees together upside down and then ran away with both of them in his mouth. I continued this experiment with more Frisbees and discovered that Yasha could nest as many as six Frisbees together and hold them in his mouth while playing keep-away. Of course, my pace of running was quite slow, to give him time to nest the Frisbees together, but fast enough to motivate his possessive instinct.
    Yasha’s enormous energy, boundless curiosity, and quick learning—not unique to Border collies, of course, but so typical of them—made me think he would be the perfect subject for animal learning experiments with my students. Until then, my research and teaching as a psychology professor at Wofford College had involved rats and pigeons in Skinner boxes, named for B. F. Skinner, the influential behavioral psychologist. A Skinner box is an enclosure in which the animal learns to press a lever or perform some other behavior to get a food reward.
    The experiments produced interesting, statistically significant data, but nothing earth shattering. Never what I was always looking for: an aspect or principle of animal learning that could be generalized to all learning. That was my quest after I left the Presbyterian ministry and found my true calling as a research psychologist and a college teacher. Entering graduate school in psychology at the age of thirty-six, with two young daughters, was only possible for me because of Sally’s belief that I should follow my passion to understand more about learning. We were “as poor as Job’s turkey,” to quote Sally, and for a few years her work as a nurse was our main source of income. But she never complained, and those were happy times for all of us.
    In addition to their role in my research, the rats and pigeons in my lab were subjects in countless student experiments. Yasha’s rapid learning, in tandem with the long-evolved social bond between dogs and people, offered me an alternative. I was fascinated by the canine intelligence that made the dog-human bond possible and led to the astonishing variety of roles that dogs take on as working