Here on the Dope, there’s been a plethora of all the really intelligent stuff that our pet/s do and that just adds to our kudos as the smartest and hippest people on the planet. We’re smart, and our dogs and cats and budgies are brainy as well.
I must confess, however, that our family dog is the dumbest pile of canine excreta that Og ever breathed life into. Boris, the maltese/shi-tsu mongrel was not endowed with a lot of brain matter, in fact, if he were human, I’d say he was intellectually disabled. He’s cute, and fluffy (when he hasn’t been sheared), but on a scale of 1-10 for dog-smarts, he comes out at around a 0.5.
So we’ve just come into the early stages of cold weather here in Aus. The last couple of days have necessitated a fire going, much to my delight!! And Boris too has loved the fire…except he lies right in front of it, with the blazing logs and the heat radiating out like crazy…so he pants and huffs and pants and huffs, but he won’t leave the fire, no-sir-ree. I’m sure he’d burn up in a frizzle of singed meat and hair if we didn’t kick him off the hearth every few minutes. Fugging moronic dog.
So, tell me, what really stupid things do YOUR pets do, the ones that have you shaking your head in amazement at how they’ve survived all these years etc.
Hey look a small hole with little yellow buzzing things coming in and out…I wonder what it smells like.
I could understand if it just happened once, but if there’s a hive on my yard, they’ll go smell it every day. I assume the fact that they haven’t been stung yet is why they keep going back. Though last year I did have to pick a bee out of one’s fur right by her mouth.
My lovable, sooky, 33kgs of stupid with feet dog - gah!
There are so many things, but my favorite is that every. single. day. he sniffs the cat. Every single day, the cat hisses and scratches him. I’ve even seen him make a face, close his eyes in anticipation of the scratch…then sniff the cat anyway.
My sister’s dog used to hang out right next to the fire, too, but he was smart enough to move when he got overheated. He’d get up and move to the back of the room until he got too cold, then move back to right next to the fire. All evening long, back and forth. He never managed to figure out that there’s an area in the middle where he’d be comfortable the whole time.
Our dog just likes to steal socks and dishrags when we’re not looking and chew them up. He also thinks moving the laundry to the dryer is a game. The rules are that he has to steal something small before it makes it to the dryer’s interior. It was adorable for about a day.
Here,throw my ball for me! Nope I’m not going to let it go, just press it on your leg until you reach for it, then grab it back. If you stop reaching for it, I’ll press it back on your leg again.
A former cat: Like many cats she liked to crawl into paper bags. Fine, but when she got tired of being in the bag you’d think she’d turn around and come back out through the opening. Wrong, she’d try to come out ***through the closed end. ***What resulted was: shredding the bag just enough to get her paws on the floor, then running around the house blindly, still mostly in the bag, running into furniture and walls, tumbling down stairs and scaring the hell out of the other cat. Finally, she’d manage to get out of the bag, then sit there with a dazed expression.
Cat-like creature refuses to play with toys, string, ball of yarn, catnip mouse. Humans try to interact with it, get soundly snubbed for their efforts. Efforts are met with yawns and bored look. So - cat gets all fired up late at night and goes rampaging through the house in a burst of energy a 5 year old human would envy. Dammit, cat, down into the basement with you! You had your chance for some fun and exercise, you rejected it - into the hole with you.
Most of our current pets are little genius members of PetMensa…except Cosmo the cockatiel, who has the hots for Buddie, his beautiful…sister. Buddie will occasionally get hormonal, despite our attempts to manage her breeding behavior with restricted daylight and even hormone shots, and she’ll crouch down and make her invitation noise.
Cosmo gets all alert and runs back and forth in front of her, calling. So far he’s demonstrated no inkling of what to do when a female calls to him except to panic.
Many years ago, we had two cats…littermates Tigger (male) and Kirby (female). Tigger was the smartest cat I have ever known, who would open doors by turning the doorknob (I kid you not!). Kirby was…less smart.
She was, in fact, afraid of doors, because she remembered that they hurt. So she wouldn’t go near a door if a human was holding it open for her. Oh, no, no door for me, thanks! Instead she’d hide and bide her time. Then, when the human wasn’t paying attention, and had already gone through the door, Kirby would spring into action, squeezing through the door juuuuust as it slammed shut. Well, partly through. During her lifetime that cat got pinched, whacked, slammed, and caught in more doorjambs than anyone could keep track of. She would literally refuse a held-open door and then moments later try to squirt through just as it shut.
Once, when we moved to a farm, she also attempted to make a meal of the rooster at the new place. Perhaps because he was a bantam jungle fowl, and smaller than she was, he looked vulnerable. That contest – dimwitted domestic city cat vs. angry semi-feral jungle fowl with two-inch horn spurs on his legs and 27 hens to die in defense of – did not go well. It was not a proud day in the House of Bast.
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Our cat Amadeus apparently had parents who were too closely related. She would cry by a door to get in a room. Open the door, and she goes to the *hinge *side and continues to cry piteously that she couldn’t fit through there.
We have a brother-sister pair of cats. Bridget is effing brilliant, fast, coordinated, lethal, and an evil mastermind. Her brother Oliver is definitely not. The sad thing is that she looks like a plump little harmless delicate sweet plush toy, while he looks like a fierce jungle creature. She minces and prances and trills; he slinks and paces with the body language of a jaguar.
But he longs, LONGS to go outside. When he does, under supervision, he mostly cringes along the house foundation. If it’s cold or raining, he runs to the door to be let back in. Twice now my husband has taken him out before coffee in the morning and forgotten to bring him in. Hours later, we find Oliver hiding in the darkest corner of the woodshed, afraid to come out. But Oliver still, every day, cries and cries and CRIES to go out again. While he’s crying, he stands up and scrabbles his front claws on the glass of the back door.
Last week, he started doing the same crying routine with claw-scrabbling… on the glass of the door of a bookcase.
(We don’t take Bridget out at all, supervision or no, for fear she’d kill off every bird in the neighborhood in an hour or two.)
My dog loves to go on rides in the car. She thinks every car is there to give her a ride. Even the cars that are driving past us on the road. When we’re walking and a car goes past, if I don’t have her on a short leash she’ll go right up to it.
Luckilly, we live in a quiet neighborhood with few cars driving by.
Our cat, Jack, likes to fetch. He will occassionally fetch toys that we throw, and loves to chase anything.
But he also likes to fetch laundry, particularly dish rags or socks. Every night, without fail, we hear his muffled crying with a sock or towel in his mouth. (Mind you he doesn’t make a peep unless he has something stuffed in his mouth). Every morning, my husband and I wake up to a neat pile of socks, underwear and dishrags on the floor of the master bedroom.
The muffled crying is funny, and putting away the fetched laundry every day is mildly annoying. But really the whole thing is just – WEIRD!
My last ferret loved to get a really good stretch going. She’d do it on the top floor of her multi-level cage; she’d stand up on her hind legs, put her front paws up on a (horizontal) bar of the cage, and just streeeeetch out her back.
Now picture this. She was standing on a platform in the cage, which ran the depth of the cage but only 1/3 the width; this was a multi-platform cage with ramps and things to let her get to the top. She would be standing along the narrow width of the platform, near the edge, then stretch and push up. Her paws would start sliding along the bar because of the force of the stretch, and she would always push in the direction that would slide her front paws over the edge of the platform. Inevitably, this meant that her body would follow, and if we weren’t right there to catch her front paws and slide them back into place, she’d sometimes just follow that momentum and slip down into the bottom of the cage - and into her litter box. Ew.
She was very fastidious about her fur so you’d think she’d figure out the cause-and-effect of this problem, but no. I moved a hammock to try to block her from falling, but having to readjust the cage levels to move lower as she aged and was less spry made that difficult to manage. I also had to reduce the number of platforms in this process, so blocking the fall with an intermediate platform wasn’t possible then. I did a pretty decent job at kludging something together, but every now and then she’d come up to the front of the cage to greet us, then stretch herself out and, whoops. Once she caught the edge of the platform with her front paws and looked at me in shock; I quickly popped the cage door open and scooped her up to safety.
Unlike every cat I’ve lived with previously, Izzie does not look before she leaps. Lately I’ve been trying to observe her and keep track because I’m beginning to wonder if she has some condition that prevails, or she’s just a lunk head.
She races at full speed from one end of the apartment to the other. At one end is the couch, and at the other, the bed. She will run as fast as she can from the kitchen with apparently every intention of jumping up onto the back of the couch. How it appears to me is that she just never considers the possibility that someone might be sitting on the couch, or the bed.
Other cats I’ve known have been able to course correct and assume what seems like an “oh that? I meant to do that” attitude. Not Izzie. She freaks out mid air. Sometimes she bounces head first off of whoever is sitting on the couch, or lying on the bed. Heaven help her when there’s one of each because wherever she got startled she heads to the other one to regroup.
It’s as if she repeatedly forgets that the people also live in her world.
My dog has a blanket that he sleeps on in the colder weather. He also is one of those dogs that regularly rolls around and does that “I’m running!” thing when he sleeps, laying on his side, little legs moving at high speed.
He burritos himself in his blanket probably 2-3 times a week. And can’t get out.
So I get awakened by this pitiful mewling of the dog, all wrapped in his blanket and struggling masterfully – and failing – to unwrap himself. I’ve taken to just grabbing a corner of the blanket and yanking, which results in dog rolling out, sometimes right out into the hallway. But he seems to like it, so it’s okay.
My cat is dumb as a box of rocks. He desperately, desperately wants to go outside, and sneaks out on a semi-regular basis when I’m taking the puppy out. I then have to retrieve him. This usually isn’t so hard because he is terrified of being outside. He immediately runs and hunkers down, and gets all fluffed up and upset. He tries to hide. Why do you want to be out here so badly when you hate it?! It’s irritating to have to chase him, but I live near a relatively busy street, and he usually doesn’t go any farther than the neighbor’s yard before I can outmaneuver him.
He also likes to play with the puppy. He’ll tease him and bat at him, but he’ll do it on the floor where the puppy can easily reach him. The puppy then pounces on him, holds him down and licks/playbites his face. He then sits there and mournfully meows until I liberate him. Two seconds later, he’s egging on the dog again. He doesn’t run away! Even if the dog lets him go, he just sits there like a moron.
I’ve tried to train him using the water bottle method, but he’s too stupid. If I spray him, he just looks really confuzzled but doesn’t stop what he’s doing. He won’t run away when he’s being sprayed, either. He just sits there going “Why is this happening?” Verbally saying no doesn’t help. Startling him (like shaking a plastic bag) doesn’t help - he doesn’t run, he just fluffs up and hunkers down.
He’s not afraid of people at all – always friendly with guests – but I manage to freak him out on a semi-regular basis just by walking into the room. Sometimes I think he forgets that I’m at home, despite me making a lot of noise. I’ll then go into the bedroom where he’s looking out the window and he’ll arch his back and fluff out until I repeatedly say “Kitty, it’s okay, it’s me” etc etc. Finally he gets a look of recognition and goes abck to normal. ??? How do you forget who I am? You see me every day! I’m the only person who lives here!
I have two boxers, one is agile and quick and the other is clumsy and dumb. Mojo can’t scratch his ear, his hind leg moves in that general direction but he can’t quite reach. Sometimes he tries so hard he falls over.
He’s also afraid of close spaces. He sits under the table at dinner and if we leave the chairs too close together he’ll sit under the table and whine until you move one so he can get out. They are light and the slightest touch makes them move.
