A few nights ago I was at my friend’s house, where he showed me something hilarious that his dogs had learned. He threw a packet of potato chips out for the pair of them, one of the dogs puts his front paws on one half of the packet, while the other does a big belly flop on the other half, popping it open and sending the chips flying everywhere!!
Neat!
Goat (my dog) has eaten an actual tin can. That’s where he got his name. Although maybe that falls under “Really stupid things my pets have done.”
And Poochie (the cat, we have really weird names for our animals) once knocked over a glass of milk by sitting on it. I also taught this cat to sneeze on command. Pooch snot is good luck.
Teaching a cat to sneeze on command! How cool is that?? The possibilities… Eeexcellent…
Oh yeah, I forgot a couple. If my dog was looking at me when i yawned, he would yawn too.
I SWEAR one day he said “hello” to me… Well, it was more like Scooby Doo says it (“Rello”) but it was definitely a greeting
The late great Miss Emily Kimberly was exceedingly smart. Two of her self-taught tricks:
(1) When she was young and spent a lot of time in her dog pen, she used to play with the old ice-cream buckets we used to take food/water out. She’d grab the bucket in her teeth, flip it up into the air, and catch it. Mr. S used to watch her from his bedroom window. But one day she saw him watching her, and after that she never did it again.
(2) In her later years, Miss Emily was on meds that made her process a lot of water: she drank a lot and peed a lot. So her water dish was often empty before we realized it, and of course she would go drink out of the toilet. We’d hear the seat flip as she drank, and we’d go fill her dish. Well, she made the connection. After that, when her water dish was dry she’d go into the bathroom, make the seat go flip, and then stick her head out the bathroom door to see if we were coming to fill her dish. She had learned how to call us!
God I miss that sweet, smart dog.
Now we have her successor, Miss Phyllis. Phyllis (also a springer) is very long, lean, and agile. She has excellent balance and can walk along on her hind legs for several steps. In the kitchen she’ll walk along with her nose at counter level to see if there’s anything interesting up there. And if we’re having something particularly savory for dinner, we’ll see her head pop up above the table and glide along the length of it as she scopes out the table. She’s hilarious and nearly up to Emily’s level personality-wise.
Tried to save my life:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=101490
Zen’s predecessor, Bear Dog, would smile or sneeze on command. Then again he would also “fish” (I have photographic proof). At age ten, he was swimming at a reservoir and suddenly started putting his head underwater, blowing bubbles out of his nose and bringing up neutral bouyancy pieces of driftwood. He would shake them vigorously to “kill” them and bring them up on the bank for a good gnawing. Then again, in his prime, Bear Dog was trained to sixty different commands, including silent hand signals for hunting.
Probably, Bear Dog’s greatest stunt was when I was white water rafting down the South Fork of the American river. On the last leg of the trip we rafted past our campground where some of the mothers and kids were hanging out at the beach with their kids. Bear Dog was playing with all of them and upon seeing him I whistled. The crew in our raft obliged with a little back paddling while Bear Dog swam out to us. I hauled him into our raft and he shot the last few rapids with us.
This is one of my very fondest memories of Bear Dog.
At three years old, Zen is coming along just fine. He already sneezes on command, smiling is next.
Just remembered another of Emily’s exploits.
One day I went to Subway to get lunch for me and Mr. S. I got a footlong and had them cut it into four pieces. When I got home, I unwrapped the sandwich, put it on the kitchen table, took a piece, and went to find Mr. S. When we returned, only two pieces were left. I should say at this point that Miss Emily never ate lettuce, and that we found lettuce shreds on the carpet where she liked to take treats to eat them. It wasn’t worth scolding her because the deed was long done. But she watched us very closely as we ate the remainder: “Gee, that looks good! Wonder what it tastes like? Can I have some?” No, Miss Emily, you already had yours.
The funny thing was that you would expect a dog to just scarf the whole thing. Not Emily – she took one piece, only her fair share!
My cat loves to sleep on my lap, and when I’m sitting on the couch watching TV, he’ll snooze. The second I hit the remote to turn off the TV, he bolts awake, makes a short noise, and jumps off my lap and heads to the bedroom. Sometimes I do that just to get him off my lap so I can get another drink from the fridge! Makes me feel just this {-} much bad.
Mystic, our male cat, loves helium balloons. When the kids come home from a birthday party with one, they know they’ll have to give it up to the cat.
Mystic will spend hours just walking around the house with the balloon string in his mouth, occasionally letting it go so he can jump up and catch it.
He never pops balloons, just walks around with them until they no longer float in the air.
Sheri
He sleeps on my tummy at nap time,
and sometimes does the push-paw thing
on my tummy before laying his soft
little kittyhead under my chin.
He purrs in my ear to wake me up,
if that does not work, he then
softpaws my closed eyes until I
make a noise and he stops and
I open my eyes to this huge
kittyface, nose to nose with him.
My dog Buck, a Brittany inspects my face when he thinks it doesn’t smell right.
I have allergies that act up at different times and will use a variety of nose sprays and inhalers. He doesn’t mind the flovent, serevent or proventil(metered dose inhalers or puffers) but when use Flonase (nose spray) he’ll come up to me and plant his nose firmly against mine and take a long slow sniff, then he’ll look at me with puzzled expression and cock his head to the side and make a little huh? sound.
Once he did this same thing to an aquaintance who came in and I jokingly asked what he had been putting up his nose cause Buck didn’t think it smelled right. He admitted that he had snorted a little cocaine right before he stopped by.
He can also find people behind closed doors by smelling under the door. He takes loooooooooooong slow inhales then a quick snort followed by another long slow inhale.
Boone the beagle is becoming a better rabbit-hunting dog every time I take her into the woods, but she’s supposed to do that, so it’s not that amazing. Makes me very happy, though.
My wife has trained the dog to do The Twist. Boone will stand on her hind legs and sort of wiggle her front legs back and forth.
My favorite thing I’ve trained the dog to do is to go crazy and bark when I (or anyone) says “Commies!”. Douglas Adams mentioned a fictional dog that did this in the original “Hitchiker” book.
My kitten plays fetch. I throw her the life-sized fur-covered squeaky rat and she runs to grab it between her sharp little teeth and then she leaps back up onto the bed, all the while making little chomping motions, and drops it in front of me. I throw it again and she brings it back again. Over and over and over.
Also, you know how one end of the hangers stick out in your closet – the part where the shoulders of the garment are? Well, in case you were wondering, that shoulder area makes a lovely area for a kitty nap. (My closet is quite full so all the shoulders make kind of a slanted shelf.) I’m not so fond of that practice as I am of Kitty Fetch.
Our cat, Ozzie, has this toy that he obsesses about. It’s two feathers attached to the end of a string, which is itself attached to a stick. If you wave it around, the feathers spin and Ozzie pretends it’s a bird has a blast pouncing on it and chasing it. If we don’t keep it locked up, he chews on the feathers until they’re useless.
One day I was in our spare bedroom (where we keep the computer) surfing the 'net and not paying attention to Ozzie. He somehow managed to get into the bedroom closet, drag his toy all the way across the house in his mouth, and then walked up to me and started pawing at my ankles, with the toy in his mouth. :eek:
Smart cat, he is :D.
This is an appropriate time of year for this story:
Back in the mid-90s I had one of the dogs I still have today, JC, and another older dog named Roman, who was the absolute best dog I’ve ever had. Both of them had excellent house manners and we never worried about them doing anything they shouldn’t, so at Christmas time we decided to put the presents people had sent them under the tree along with our own. We never have a large tree, just a small tabletop model, and we put it up on a corner table with the gifts around it.
My relatives and friends are usually pretty generous with the dogs and we joke that sometimes they get more stuff than us! There were easily 5 pounds worth of doggie treats under that tree, but they were both good and didn’t touch a thing, and they had plenty of opportunity to, seeing as how we both work all day and they were there by themselves.
We decided that we would go out for a fancy dinner on Christmas Eve, got all dressed up and were gone for about two hours.
When we get home, there are the dogs, happy to see us as always. I then I notice wrapping paper on the floor. Lots of it. Not shredded or anything, just laying there on the floor. So I go to inspect what’s happened, only to find out that the dogs have meticulously picked all of their presents out from under the tree, leaving ours completely alone, and painstakingly opened each one without shredding a thing. Even the boxes and plastic wrap on the gifts themselves had not been shredded. There were no crumbs on the floor at all. They had neatly and efficiently eaten every single scrap of everything they’d been given. There were also no tummy upsets either, much to my relief. I’m sure if I’d been able to ask them what happened, they’d have said elves did it :), but personally I think they were just po’d that they didn’t get to go out to dinner with us and decided to have their own Christmas Eve celebration in our absence.
I’d give anything to have a videotape of how they did this.
I once had a small male poodle. You know how males usually raise one leg when they pee–Inky raised both and did a handstand while walking all around the yard. It was the funniest thing I ever saw. He would take that opportunity to sniff the ground and pee at the same time.
It must be a recessive trait or something, because we bred him once, and got a phone call from a man who bought one of the male pups–apparently his new puppy did handstands too!
(She also did the handstand thing while peeing too, if only for the first two years of her life.)
I forget exactly what she did but she earned a smack for some bad behavior, so she jumped onto the bed and sulked, giving me several baleful glances out of the corner of her eye. I felt bad almost immediately and went to kiss her on the head - at which point she leapt up, bit me on the nose, and took off running. I swear if dogs could laugh she’d have been heard halfway down the block.
Gromit just did something really funny last night. I bought a bag of Jolly Ranchers - small hard candies wrapped in cellophane, for those of you who don’t now - and had put them in a candy dish on one of the end tables in the living room. About an hour later, I found a wrapper on the floor. I puzzled over it, since I hadn’t eaten one and I didn’t think Mr. Athena had, either.
About a half hour later, I notice Gromit’s got something in his mouth. Sure enough, it’s a Jolly Rancher. Nice solution for puppy breath! The candy dish is above his head, so he must have delicately stood up on his back legs, and nicely taken one piece of candy from the dish. None of the others were disturbed.
Weirdo dog!
My cat Fluffy (hey, I named her when I was a kid) was drawn to a nature program I was watching one night featuring big cats. She watched carefully and then appeared bewildered as the cat ran off the side of the screen…she then checked around the back & side of the TV to figure out where it had gone!
My current cat, Max, reciprocates when I give him kisses by gently nipping the end of my nose. He’s also very responsive to emotions–a surefire way to get him to come to me is to pretend I’m crying. He’ll come up and paw my face when I do this.
SpoonerDog also knows when the TV goes off, we’re leaving the room, but has also learned that we like snooze alarms -so she usually doesn’t get off the bed until we start moving.
She also has learned that “Excuse me” means to get up & move - usually it’s cause she’s laying at our feet in the computer room & we don’t want to roll over a paw or tail.