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and service animals and pets. Border collies’ capacity for learning, which I observed in herding trials and demonstrations, particularly impressed me, and I hoped that animal learning studies with a Border collie would be more likely to produce data that could be generalized to all learning. Even more important, I figured that my students and I could have a lot more fun with a Border collie than with rats and pigeons.
    Yasha exceeded my wildest expectations. He quickly became not just a subject for student experiments but my full-fledged teaching assistant. If my students and I didn’t discover something new about learning with Yasha, it wasn’t because of any lack of capacity on his part.
    Every fall I taught a course on scientific methods in psychology for non–science majors. As someone who came to science late after a first career in the ministry, I treated the course, an introduction to the principles of learning for both humans and animals, as an opportunity to inspire students to consider devoting themselves to scientific discovery. When it came to showing college students that science was an interesting place to be, Yasha was my secret weapon.
    During the first class of each semester, I entered the classroom with Yasha at my heels. As I dropped my briefcase on the desk at the front of the room, Yasha went around and introduced himself, tail wagging. His manner was less solicitous than it was bold and self-possessed, but as always I noticed the extra time and encouragement he gave shyer students, bowing his front legs, angling his body sideways, and tilting his head as he looked up at them in order to emphasize his desire to make friends.
    Having established a positive connection with each and every student, Yasha looked at me. I nodded with approval, and he climbed up and sat in the chair closest to the door. As the last-minute arrivals came in, Yasha climbed down to greet them. No student could pass without a successful let’s-get-acquainted moment, and I marveled as always at Yasha’s confident social intelligence.
    The bell in the tower of Main Building, familiarly known as Old Main, tolled eight a.m. I gave Yasha another nod. He sprang down from his seat, with its half-desk writing surface, to paw and nose the door shut. And then he climbed back up in his place and sat as if he were ready to start taking notes.
    â€œHello,” I said. “I am Dr. Pilley, and the dog who greeted you is Yasha. He is half Border collie and half German shepherd. For anyone who doesn’t know about Yasha’s role in the course”—this elicited smiles and chuckles from the students, most if not all of whom had been attracted to the course, despite my relative stinginess with A’s, precisely because of what they’d heard about him—“he serves as my teaching assistant. If you graduate from working with human subjects in the first part of the course, Yasha will also serve as the subject for your individual and group research projects in the principles of learning. Whether he is a cooperative or uncooperative subject will depend on the relationships you build with him. Until then he will have other tasks in the class.”
    I paused, holding the students’ attention, and then turned to Yasha and said, “Yasha, if any students fall asleep in this class, nip them in the ankles.”
    He barked and nodded his head in reply, and the students giggled, a few of them a little nervously. I knew they’d probably heard some wild stories about Yasha and were wondering which ones to believe.
    In the fall semester I taught second-year psychology majors experimental methods employing both animals (rats and pigeons) and humans as subjects for experiments. In the spring I taught my favorite course, devoted to human and animal learning processes such as classical and operant conditioning. After much thought, I decided that I would continue to use rats, pigeons, and humans as the