My Dogs are so much smarter than I thought they were

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Short story: They cover their own shame.

They live in the back room, sleep in boxes, do dog stuff back there. Mostly shit and piss outside, because they are good dogs. Every now and then one makes a movement on the floor (usually my fault for not getting them out on time. I’ll own it). I’ll cover it up with a paper towel and clean it up later…

I go back there today, and someone is sick. Laid little puddles of runny shit all over.

But, each one was covered with an old dried up paper towel, or piece of chewed up mattress. Something they found. Wow.

I said to myself, “You gotta be shitting me!” Not really. I was kinda pissed off.

These little creatures amaze me every day. Dixie walks backwards into her box, so she can get under the blankets with her nose sticking out. Who knows to cover their own shit with paper towel?

2

Omg!
That is amazing.

Good dogs!!

3

Amazing. But still stinky. And Nasty.

I took them all out in the Jeep tonight as usual. I kept a good eye on them. All seemed to be cutting solid rope.

I spend way too much time watching Dog Ass.

4

The interwebs figured out that I like dog videos, so it feeds me a constant stream. There have been some amazing developments with teaching dogs to talk with buttons. It turns out they actually have quite the inner life.

The one that really got me, the dog kept hitting the “mad” button. Owner comes to investigate, turns out the “beach” button was broken. While owner messed with it, the dog paced around a bit, then hit “want” “go” “water” “outside.”

I was not surprised that dogs could learn to associate a specific request with a specific button. I was very surprised when one devised a synonym.

5

Dogs watch us every waking moment. They’re great at observing us. Even when we’re not paying attention to them, or when we’re doing something and not even thinking about them, they are watching, and learning. Always - it’s what they’re good at. After a while living together, they can tell how you are feeling, and your mood, just watching you come thru the door after you’ve been away (skiing - heh). I am not too surprised they picked-up on your habit, but it’s cool they took the extra step of doing something physically like that. Good dogs!!

6

My Labradane has a “word” – a noise he only makes when he’s excited to go for a walk and I’m too slow getting my boots on. It’s kind of a half-yawn, half-growl: Aaa-ROO! I think it means, “Come on, lardass, you said we’d go for a walk so let’s go already!”

When our son’s dog stayed with us for a few weeks, he started making the same noise for the same purpose.

7

Our golden retriever can understand a large number of words. She’s got a “toybox” with various toys, each with a different name. Mama can ask her to "go get the ___ " and she’ll go get that one thing. She also knows the usual words like walk, park, treat, ham… but then, the cats also know when treats are coming, usually by the sounds being made.

I can ask him to go (bother) another family member. I say “Go to ___” and she’ll head to that person.

She’s under gentle voice control during walks and outings and will not run bother others, even if they have dogs, if we ask her to stay by Daddy or Mommy.

She senses fear in other dogs, and will very gently approach, not making eye contact. For puppies, she will lie down to make herself small (she’s quite tall). Very empathetic. If anyone is annoyed or angry in the house, she runs to someone else, leans on them, and shivers. Doesn’t like anger.

And she has ways of talking to us, with different growls and noises as described by @Akaj. When she wants something she will look at us and make a “ho…” sound. Want to go out? A different sound, sometimes even a slight whine when she really needs to go. Happy to see you? Loud groans and full-body wiggle. Yes, dogs are definitely smart. Cats, too, but that’s another tale.

8

Bayliss walked right up on my deck a fully grown dog with no history of us. (A drop-off dog).
He immediately tuned into me. He likes everyone, loves a few. But he knows me.
He’s a kind, gentle and observant dog. Knows how I feel before I know myself.
But he don’t cover up his poops.
Of course they’re outside and I’ve never felt the need to carry a paper towel or anything to cover them out there.
And here I thought Bayliss was the perfect dog.

9

I walk our three dogs on a trail in the woods behind our house. They’re off-leash when we’re back there. We’ve had a nice hard packed path in the snow. The last few days though, because it’s finally warming up, there are spots where I will suddenly sink up to my hip in the snow. When my Great Dane sees me sink (and hears me swear!) he runs over and stands in front of me so I can grab is collar and have some leverage while I extricate my leg from the hole. I didn’t teach him this he just started doing it.

10

My black lab doesn’t let me sleep late. I’m supposed to be up and working.

11

I’ve had my chihuahua about four months now. He’s ten years old and spent six years of his life as a semi-hoarded, undersocialized, untrained, underexercised granny dog and four as an increasingly neurotic shelter resident. He bites, which, along with his health problems, was the reason he stayed in the shelter for so long. But also, it meant most of the staff couldn’t handle him, so he didn’t get a lot of enrichment.

When I adopted him, I knew I was taking on some work and expense with his health issues. I knew he was grumpy. And I knew he was old.

What I didn’t know was that he’s an evil genius bent on world domination. Some smart dogs are smart and trainable. This one has spent his whole life doing basically whatever the heck he wants and he’s not about to start caring about what other people want him to do any time soon.

For example, I spent the whole months of December, January, February, and most of March grinding away at some tiny bit of housebreaking progress and… nothing. He absolutely refused to go outside and I figured he just didn’t really get it because he’d never been trained and might never catch on. Well, now the weather’s nicer and… guess who’s suddenly basically housebroken. He understands. He just doesn’t wanna.

One of the biggest rules and struggles in the house is that he is NOT allowed on any table. And he really, really wants to be on the tables.
The kitchen table is, of course, the ultimate most tempting table. He has two tricks here. One is that he has learned to push the kitchen chairs out in order to use them to climb up to the table.
The other is that he knows if he rings the “I wanna go outside” bells by the front door, I will get up to let him out. So when I sit down at the kitchen table to eat my dinner, suddenly, that bell starts ringing.
So I get up to let him out. And, while I’m getting the door open and getting his sister tethered, he races back to the kitchen and goes for my dinner. I’ve learned to put it on top of the refrigerator if I have to leave it unattended.

I’ve been crating him when I’m not home consistently for a little over a week now (he normally had run of a small guest bedroom, but this dog’s middle name is havoc and it was a real pain to clean up every single day.) and so far, he’s escaped twice and moved the whole crate halfway across the room and pulled a blanket through the bars once. I have no idea how he did either one of those things- it’s a pretty secure crate. I even asked my landlord if he had messed with it (he sometimes lets my much-more-docile bigger dog out during the day) and he was like “lol absolutely not, I would never go anywhere near that little hellion”

Here he is. I know he looks sweet and harmless and like mommy’s cute little baby boy, but don’t be fooled. This is the face of a criminal mastermind.

12

I don’t know. That curled lip tells the whole story. Wow. You have more intestinal fortitude than I would for taking on such a creature! My hat is off to you!

13

When I first started dating the woman whom I married, she owned a dog: Max was a golden retriever / Brittany spaniel mix, and was just exceptionally smart. He had a large vocabulary of words he understood, and was a good problem-solver.

It got to the point that we had to spell out certain words when we said them, because Max would get all wound up if he heard a word that he associated with something he liked to do: “bone” was about the Milk-Bone snack he’d get every night, “walk” was about going for a walk, etc., so they had to become “b-o-n-e,” “w-a-l-k,” etc.

Anyway, one evening, shortly after we’d gotten married, I was sitting on the sofa in our living room, watching a Milwaukee Brewers baseball game on TV, and Max was sound asleep on the sofa, beside me. My wife was in our bedroom, the doorway of which opened into the living room.

The Brewers, at that time, had a pitcher whose name was Ricky Bones (last name pronounced like “Bonus”), and he was pitching that night. My wife was walking out of the bedroom, and saw that pitcher on the mound. “Is that guy’s name actually ‘Bones’?”, she asked me. Max instantly woke up, sat up, and stared at her, clearly thinking to himself, “You just said ‘bones’!”

14

I can do you one better: like you, we had to start spelling the trigger words and, of course, da mutts figured out to associate the spelt words to the trigger words and we’re back to square one.

15

Sometimes we tease our dog with words, because just saying “I’m going to take her on a double-U (“W”)” she already understands. So now we say stuff like “Wanna go to Milwaukee?!?!” and “Let’s go to Waukegan!!” and of course, she knows to pick out the words she wants to hear.

16

We did run into that with Max, on at least one word: he figured out “w-a-l-k”, too. My wife, who had taken like six years of German between high school and college, started using the German word “Spazieren” (“stroll”), which Max never quite figured out.

17

IIRC, with our first dog, we had to assign numbers to certain phrases because it seemed like the demon had every variation down pat. "burpette, number 6!** would be code for “walkies,” she would respond with a grunt and I could actually make it to the door without getting trampled.

Sapphie the pomsky has something you really need to hear (possibly, NSFW):

18

That one ought to get reported to serious researchers, if that’s not where it came from.

I’m not all that surprised; but I suspect many of them would be.

Sweet and harmless? That bared tooth is a threat.

I’ve known more than one dog who learned how to spell “b i s c u i t”.

One of them also said “water” when she wanted some. She couldn’t pronounce the consonants; but she had the vowels, the intonation, and the syllables right down. And she only said it when she wanted water, not when she wanted anything else.

That same dog taught my mother what to do when opening the door to a stranger. If my mother had or put her hand on the dog’s collar, as if to hold her back: low rumbling growl and threat stance. If my mother decided the person was OK and let go of the collar: entirely friendly dog. My mother didn’t teach the dog that – the dog taught it to my mother.

19

My first dog, Bear, knew more synonyms for “walk” than we did. Walk, W-A-L-K, stroll, perambulation, constitutional, hike, trek, excursion, outing, whatever. Towards the end, we resorted to just leaving a blank in the sentence: “I think I’ll go for a _____, want to come?”

20

Spring started today, and I had the patio door open. Hickory figured out how to open the screen door and get into the house. Sitting here on the couch and I look up and there she is, standing in the dining room. And since I suspect she might be The Mad Shitter, we can’t have that! Glass door is closed again.

Without a doubt!