We do. Our dog understands way too much. Sometimes I’ll want to use the word “walk” or “hungry” for example, and end up spelling the word or using some other coded message. “Well, I’m going for a “W” now.”
And please don’t ever say the word “treat” in a sentence. :smack:
I have siamese attack cats. My wife and I ***need * ** to use code especially when talking about T.R.E.A.T.S.
Otherwise, both the boy and the girl S.A.C’s will not leave us alone.
The boy has figured out however, that with any use of the letters “eet” means food. So sometimes we even nead to talk in code when talking about what we are going to E.A.T for dinner. 
Sometimes when I have said some thing to my wife like, "wow honey those cookies are sweet!"
I hear THUD [cat jumps off bed in master bedroom] then clipclipclipclipclip as he skids across the wooden floor upstairs. Then thomp, thomp, thomp as he bolts down the stairs to see me. Standing there just talking. Looking at me as if I have a T.R.E.A.T. for him… all of that simply because I said ‘Sweet.’
Yeah, G-O, G-O-I-N-G, L-E-A-S-H and M-I-L-K-B-O-N-E.
And do NOT, under ANY circumstances, rattle your car keys unless you are prepared to leaves the house immediately. Otherwise, the spinning Tasmanian Devil is unleashed, and all hell breaks loose.
We can’t even spell WALK - they’ve figured that out. We have to say stuff like “should we take these guys (can’t say doggies) on a promenade?”
O-U-T, because even if it’s only been five minutes since Boomer went O-U-T, it’s gonna be dance time.
My youngest son has the job of feeding the dog in the evenings, but often needs to be reminded. So if we call out my son’s name anytime after about 3:00 in the afternoon, the dog goes crazy.
Our dogs pick up on a scary amount of words.
Dog park, walk, river, biscuit, bath, kitchen, mommy, daddy, sit, stay, leave it, crossing, wait, are all recognized.
The most recent is “barbeque”, upon hearing it one of our dogs will stare longingly at “that place on the patio where delicious smells and treats come from” and go sit by it and wait for us to turn it on.
My dog knows a lot of words too, and a lot get spelled. Otherwise, she goes bananas. What’s funny is that sometimes my mom just can’t spit out the right spelling so we go for “WLK” or get a “TRET” 
She’s also learned that I tend to spritz my hair with water before I go out, because it helps the curls. So if she hears me using a spray bottle she goes mental (she always leaves the house with me). If I spritz and am NOT going out, I have to calm her down and reassure her I am not just trying to leave without her.
My old dog Bear (bless his soul) had a friggin’ thesaurus full of synonmyms for “walk”. By the time he died, at about age 16, he knew “walk”, “stroll”, “hike”, “trek”, “perambulation”, “promenade”, “constitutional”, “excursion”, and probably a few others I’m not remembering, and had figured out that any word we spelled out in his presence was probably one of those in disguise. Nor was it just reacting to other cues: He’d also go crazy if you ever happened to use any of those on a phone call, even if the subject of the conversation had nothing to do with canines or exercise. Towards the end, we resorted to using no word at all, and just leaving a blank spot in sentences-- I don’t think he ever managed to catch on to that one.
He understood some other words, too, but “walk” and its synonyms were the only ones that were dangerous. He knew that “ball” was that round thing you threw for him to chase, for instance, and he might go get it if you mentioned it, but he wouldn’t go crazy like he did for the W-word.
My cat Rex responds when I spell his name, R-E-X. Of course, he just recognizes the distinctive X sound at the end, but it’s a fun parlor trick to play on the gullible. “Look, my cat can spell!”
The daily wet cat food meal is “yum yums,” but you can only say that if they’re about to get some, because they freak out when they hear it. All other times it’s “you know whats.”
If my dog does something clumsy like trip off the sidewalk (oh yes, it’s true) and I say, “You all right?” his ears perk up because he thinks I’ve said some form of “Wanna go for A RIDE?” and I have to tell him “nope- sorry- not what I meant!” which he understands, and then he carries on with his bad self.
My ex-to-be and I tried once to spell our first dog’s favorite treat only to realize that in spelling ice, you say it.
eye-s[perky puppy]ee-eee.
Our three dogs are obsessed with jelly beans. Just saying the words “jelly bean” will cause a frenzy of excited barking and jumping. So, on the occasions when jelly beans must be discussed, my husband and I started calling the candy in question “J-B.” The dogs soon learned that “J-B” mean “jelly bean.” Now we call a jelly bean “That Which Must Not Be Named.” So far, the doggies haven’t caught on.
Our dog has figured out what we mean when we spell C-O-O-K-I-E.
Our family had a border collie named Barnaby when I was a child. He knew W-A-L-K, R-I-D-E, C-A-T, and L-E-A-S-H. He knew where his leash was and he would go F-E-T-C-H it from the cabinet. He could also get plastic packets of Gaines Burgers out of the box and drop them (unopened) in his F-O-O-D dish.
I miss that dog.
Used to spell walk but yeah he caught on. Now we say “you know”. Pretty sure he’s sussing it out. Not that he needs help, he usually just drops his lease in my lap if he “has” to go.
Can’t use the words “walk”, “ride”, “eat”, “hungry”, “leash”, or “treat”. They’re onto us now if we use the first letter of each – Jack The Malamute will immediately cock his head and start wooing loud enough to split your eardrums :eek:
If I make any move toward the half bathroom that’s just off the kitchen, Ember The Little Brown Dog will leap after me because the “L” things hang on the closet door opposite.
If you look at both of them and say their names with a certain inflection, they automatically think they’re going to do something fun. Sometimes hubby teases them by doing such – they know better because if they wait for me to do the same, then they know that’s they’re really going to do something fun.
Never say the F-word around the dogs unless you want them to gallop for the bedroom, bouncing each other off of the walls as they make the turns into and out of the hallway.
That’s FOOD, by the way. They get fed in the bedroom.
Our old Basset Hound, Shilo (RIP), knew this as well. And there had damn well better have been seven of them, because she could count. We couldn’t even give her a broken one as part of the count; she knew they weren’t as much as a whole one!
