We say perambulate so the beagles don’t spaz out.
Have any of you tried texting?
I wonder if a dog would eventually recognize sign language.
My dog really only gets excited at *dinner *or breakfast. However, she does get excited if she sees me putting on jeans, because she knows that means a walk. Also she gets excited when she hears the Windows shut down sounds because she knows I am done for the day.
Cats are so much easier to handle. “Walkies!” may be an aphrodisiac to a dog. To a cat, not so much.
My cats spazz when they hear “tuna,” “anchovy,” a can opener, or anything related to fish.
We spell out w-a-l-k, too.
Oh, and it’s the height of cruelty to open up the drawer where the dog leash is kept unless we mean business. He can hear that drawer open from the next county.
Cats just have different triggers. Ours would go nuts searching if we said “mouse,” “bird,” or “treat.” And don’t use a can opener else the cat would be meowing like crazy for tuna, when we were only opening some fruit cocktail or something.
Years ago I knew a dog who knew the word “Beach”
Dog then learned to spell “B-E-A-C-H”
Dog then learned the Spanish word for beach, “Playa”.
Last I saw, the dog was working on “P-L-A-Y-A”
By now, dog can probably spell beach in 6 languages.
I don’t know if a dog could pick up on the complexities of ASL, but they can definitely learn a few individual signs, and trainers frequently use gestures. I’m not much of a dog trainer, but mine learned a “sit” gesture and a “get out of the kitchen” gesture.
We used to keep our leash for our Beagle/Collie mix in a junk drawer with a bunch of other stuff. We’ve since learned that in order to eliminate the despaired howling of broken walk promises to keep it in its own place to avoid accidental chain jangling!
I had a cat that knew if you were thinking about getting a piece of cheese. I swear, she only perked up and followed me, meowing hysterically, if I was going to get some cheese. I don’t know how she knew, but she did.
Are you sure it wasn’t picking up other cues? My dog, for example, perks up when I put on a shirt or put a plastic bag in my pocket, without me saying anything.
I remember a TV show where non-verbal commands were part of a dog training competition.
My cat would stand guard between us and refrigerator. If we moved slightly, the cat would adjust slightly to be in our direct path. He would also pretend to be affectionate, and slowly draw us towards the fridge by making us reach a lil’ farther to scratch him, and step-by-step he would bring us to the fridge.
However, that cat was actually supporting a stray mother cat and kittens that were living in our backyard. When I gave him a hot dog or something, he would give it to them.
Everyone knows dogs are verbal, cats are psychic.
Awww, My Boston does that head thing if I say, Walk, Car, Treat.
Since we can’t say ‘walk’ or ‘park’ without the dog going nuts, fortunately we’ve still been able to get away with saying ‘take puppy to the place’. I think he’s catching on, though.
But the real reason for this post:
If either my wife or I have a message to leave the other, we have a small dry erase board hanging on a door knob. I didn’t even realize I did it, but when I left my wife a message last week, I wrote something about taking the dog up the street to the place. I didn’t even spell ‘park’. When I got home, she was like ‘you know the dogs can’t read, right?’
Once in a while our beagle will go nuts over some random word, like “dishwasher”, and we’ll stand around trying to figure out which of her trigger words rhymes with “dishwasher”.
My family’s bullboxer understands - and freaks out to - Walk, Out, and “Go for a ride” or “get in the car” or “go outside” are completely out of the question. He’s now picked up on spelling “o-u-t”. Any mention of his best friend’s name will set him off. Also, I pick up dog bones for my parents at Costco, so I’m careful to ask “Do you need any b-o-n-e-s?”
Yet. 
I give our rabbits a small amount of timothy hay pellets in the morning before I go to work. They know that morning-before-work approximate time is “we get pellets time”, and start revving up, running back and forth in the cage, running up to the “dish gets put down here” spot, looking up at the bag of pellets on the shelf*, etc. I’m really worried they’re going to learn what the word “pellets” means. Rabbits can be trained to do tricks rather like dogs, so it’s definitely possible that it could happen.
- Oh yes, they know exactly where the pellets are kept. Twice now, one of them jumped out of the open hutch - I was standing right there, getting ready to put some pellets in the dish - and landed on a stack of towels on the shelf below, immediately under the bin containing the pellets bag. :smack:
As the mother of a two year-old human, I think it’s hilarious that you could substitute “toddler” for “dog” in most of these posts and they’d still be relevant.
Tears of laughter at this thread.
Not a problem for me anymore, because the last thing my 18-year-old beagle Boomer heard was my scream at Devin Hester returning the opening kickoff for a touchdown in the Superbowl a few years ago.
I used to have loads of fun with him, his mother, his brother and aunt, by whispering “squirrel” - they all went frantic wanting to go outside to deal with this threat.
And you couldn’t talk about “biscuits” in the woodworking sense, because they heard it in the “yummy treat” sense and went apeshit.