What have you accidentally trained your pets to do?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I saw this one on some stolen-from-reddit clickbait listicle (I know, I’m a sucker.) and now I’m bringing it here- what have you taught your pets without meaning to?

We had a dog at the shelter a couple years ago, Carlos, who learned by himself to alert to the dryer.

He’s a very smart dog and he LOVED toys, but would tear them up really quickly. I kept my stash of dog toys (used ones that weren’t sturdy enough for the kennels or new enough for new adoption goody bags, but were still in decent shape) next to the dryer because that’s where we had space. The dryer has to be going at all times, so as soon as one load finishes, you have to put another load in (in between your jillion and two other duties). So I would poke my head back to check and if the dryer was still going, I would go about my business with Carlos at my heels (where he was at all times). If it had stopped, though, I would change the laundry and, since the toy basket was right there and Carlos was right there and I had a MASSIVE soft spot for that dog, I would give him a toy.

It didn’t take him long to learn that stopped dryer=new toy, so every 45 minutes or so, he’d jump up, run to the back, and then come back to get us. And the first few times he did that, I didn’t get it- I would get up to see what he was so excited about, notice that the dryer had stopped, change it, and… give him a toy. Once we were on the same page, though, it ended up being a pretty great system.

He was a magnificent dog. He ended up going to a nice home a couple weeks later, but I sometimes wish I had kept him.

So what about you? Tell me about your wonder-pets!

2

I once had a cat who would come running into the kitchen when she heard/smelled me chopping hard boiled eggs in a mixing bowl. She knew that the next step was that I would open cans of tuna, and give her a bit. She loved the water from the can. I have always been glad that I had made tuna salad on the day she unexpectedly passed, and she got a treat that day.

3

Oh, so many things.
Here’s two:
I had two dogs that I used to walk together. I trained one of them to walk on my right, and one to walk on my left. One day, i had a friend come over and we went out for a walk with the dogs. He complained that the dog wouldn’t go where he wanted - he wanted to follow the line that marked the bicycle lane. Yep - that’s how he knew he was walking on the side I wanted him to.

Gracie, the world’s most lovable dog, wanted to be in the kitchen, so as a puppy, we trained her to stay out of the kitchen, and on the carpet. Well, that worked great, until we ripped out the carpet and put in hard surfaces. She then became Gracie the world’s most neurotic dog. She would not walk on ANY hard surface. We had to put down rugs to get her to leave the bedroom. It was really bad, and took years to reverse (and never completely went away).

4

Our now-deceased flat coated retriever loved to play ball. He learned that I had to close the laptop before I went outside, so it got to the point anytime he heard the sound of it closing, he would fly outside so fast the air thundered. Even if he was asleep at the time. Don’t be in his way!

5

My golden retriever was really afraid of thunder, despite my best efforts to avoid it. Before storms, I made a habit of turning off my computers, back when Windows still had a shut-down song/tone.

She figured out that the Windows 7 shut-down tones meant a storm, and she would lose her fucking mind when she heard it. Then that evolved in to other computer boops and beeps. I couldn’t ever turn off a computer without her going into full panic mode, and this was at a time where I was doing a lot of computer side work at home, fixing other peoples’ computers. I finally learned to shut off all system sounds on computers in the house.

6

I have a friend who had a dog and the dog’s vet prescribed an anti-histamine for some allergies.

She would give the pill to the dog wrapped in a bit of a cold cut meat. When the dog would start sneezing, she knew it was time to give it the pill. One day the pill fell out of the cold cut, but the dog’s allergy symptoms miraculously disappeared. She had managed to train the dog to sneeze for a treat.

7

Bear, my male Siamese learned to target with his paw. That turned into slapping at anything walking by and near enough. He gets my attention putting a paw on my chin or the back of my head. And a few times my nose. He is insistent and determined in these attention getting theatrics. The claws are gonna come out eventually and I’ll be the one bleeding. Yep. It’s gonna happen.

8

Several of our cats have taught themselves to fetch. Being cats, there are rules involved of course, but if you play on their terms, you could end up tossing the big blue rubber band across the room for an hour.

9

Our cat liked to sleep next to the radiator. We have oil heat and turn it off in the summer. Every year, when we turned it on he heard the furnace and went to the radiator to nap.

10

I’ve said “Mommy loves the kitty, but she doesn’t want a cat in her lap right now” often enough that they when hear the “Mommy loves the kitty…” part in a certain tone, they understand it to mean “Get off my lap.”

Also, they know that, under normal circumstances, I’m either home through the day or I go out early (for work) and am gone all day. If I’m home but prepare to go out later in the morning, they take it to mean that someone’s going to the vet. They don’t each go to the vet more than once or twice a year, so I don’t know how they formed this idea in their furry little heads. But if I’m going out mid-morning for some other reason–to pop out to the store or for a doctor’s appointment of my own–I have the fun of watching them look alarmed and scurrying to hide as I pick up my car keys and put on my shoes and coat.

11

My Cats head for the beams in my cathedral ceiling at any alarm. As long as a threat of any kind is perceived they stay up there prancing around. Stopping occasionally to give me the stink-eye.
They often jump from beam to beam. Scares the crap outta me.
Nibble footed critters.
This is all self learned. They’ve been doing it since early days.
They can perch on top of an open door. I do not know how they hang on. The pantry door in my kitchen is a favorite spot. If they are up there and I go to close it they leap to a transom ledge going into the laundry room and through that opening down to the top of the washer.
I call them flying Monkey-cats.

12

Take them for a (unleashed) walk, cats. They hang out by the backdoor, and when I go out at the right time of day (IDK what that is, they’re cats) they will proceed thru to the front yard, being sure to look back the whole way to make sure I am following. That’s it. I have no idea what they want .

13

I was raised, from an early age, by a dachshund. We trained him to roll over on his back whenever anyone asked him to do anything he didn’t want to do.

Especially, leave the room. If you shouted OUT! and pointed to the door, he rolled over on his back and everyone said “Awwwww how cute” and rubbed his belly.

If you just pointed to the door, he rolled over. If you just quietly said “out” he rolled over. If you gently said “Please leave the room” he rolled over. If you looked at him cross-eyed, he rolled over.

14

I worked for a research group that studied language acquisition in bottlenosed dolphins. We talked to one dolphin acoustically, using various computer-generated whistles from an underwater speaker as words, and hand-and-arm gestures as words for the other dolphin.

They knew words for “left” and “right”. So you could put two frisbees or two basketballs in the water, one on each side of the dolphin, and use phrases like “left frisbee” or “right basketball” and they would go to the correct one.

It happened before my time there, but the story went that they learned that by accident. Their tank had a piece of fence in it with a gate, and a window. They were supposed to learn words for “gate” and “window”. But they were always stationed in between the gate and window, so that the gate was always on their right and the window on their left.

There was another window on the other side of the gate. So one day, they put the dolphin on the other side of the gate. Now there was a window on the right and the gate on the left. Strangely, the dolphins now went to the gate every time they were told “window” and they went to the window every time they were told “gate”.

The trainers eventually figured it out. The dolphins hadn’t learned “gate” and “window” at all. They learned the words to mean “the thing on your left” and “the thing on your right”.

So the researchers decided it was cool that the dolphins’ vocabulary should contain a few adjectives, so they let those meanings stay, and began combining the words (now meaning “left” and “right”) with other nouns, as described above. The dolphins were then taught other new words for gate and windows.

15

Just outside Honolulu there is a dolphin-and-sea-lion show type of park called Sea Life Park, originally created by Tap and Karen Pryor. They were still running the place when I was involved with that dolphin research project.

We were not connected with them at all, but of course we and they all knew one another. (Likewise, we knew the guys doing that dolphin work with the Navy.)

Karen Pryor wrote a great book called Lads Before The Wind, a memoir of her adventures there. (The title comes from a line in Moby Dick.)

She tells of the days getting the park started, trying to train the animals for their first show on Grand Opening Day. Nobody really had any experience at running a place like that except for Ken Norris, who had helped start Marineland Of The Pacific in Southern California. All was chaos!

She writes that, as opening day approached, they still didn’t have a show! The dolphins hadn’t learned anything. (Actually they had learned a lot.) They had trained all the trainers to give them fish for nothing!

16

I used to smooch the top of my late kitty 's head when he came for cuddles. He apparently liked it because he started presenting the top of his head to be smooched before napping on me.

17

I have had several dogs learn to spell a number of words, not just in English, but in Hebrew. I have always trained dogs in Hebrew; when I got my first do as an adult, I was naive enough to think a dog might answer anyone’s command if they were trained in English-- you know, if some other owner called “Come!” to his dog, my dog would go to him. So I trained my dog in Hebrew.

Of course, I was dumb to think that dogs respond to just anyone-- they respond to their owners, and barely that. But I was in the habit of using Hebrew, so now I always use it with dogs.

Anyway, I would say “outside” in Hebrew before a walk, and “bath” in English for a bath. I had one dog so well trained that when I told her “bath,” she walked into the bathroom, and got into the tub. Slowly, with her head down, as though she was walking to the gas chamber at Auschwitz, but she did it.

So we started spelling B-A-T-H. She learned that. We started referring to baths as “Chaucer’s wife.” She learned that. She learned every nickname we thought of for “bath.”

I have a cat who pokes me with her paw when she wants to be pet, and is pretty aggressive about it. I think maybe she taught that to me, but it’s absolutely a behavior that’s been reinforced.

The best is my shelter dog. She has a lot of anxiety, and she has learned that when she is anxious, she should find a chew toy, and subject it to violence. She sometimes will start to bark, or shake, or do some of her “anxious” things, then suddenly, she’ll dive around looking for a Nylabone, or some rawhide, and chew like a maniac. When she is left alone, as soon as she realizes she is being left, she goes for something to chew.

It happened because whenever she would go into a barking frenzy, or some other sort of anxiety attack, we’d hand her a chew stick, sometimes give her a small dose of trazadone (per the vet), and pet her to soothe her.

Now she self-soothes by viciously chewing something. Once in a while, she gets “stuck” going into an anxiety attack, and I say “Chew something!” and then she immediately goes for a Nylabone or other type of chewie.

Before we are all in bed, I make sure she has a couple of little no-rawhide sticks, and her dental stick. She gets her last “out” about an hour before everyone’s bedtime routine is done (and her second walk after supper), then she knows it’s time to go to her futon she sleeps on in my room, and wait for her chewie.

This behavior is such a good distraction, she no longer needs medication. But we have to make sure there are plenty of long-lasting chewies around.

18

I used to smooch the top of my late kitty 's head when he came for cuddles. He apparently liked it because he started presenting the top of his head to be smooched before napping on me.

19

The border collie is ridiculously protective of her food.
We feed her in the laundry.
The laundry door comes off the hallway to the bathroom.
The kids walk past the laundry door to get to the bathroom.

We accidentally trained the border collie to jump up and growl at the children whenever we said “Go brush your teeth”.

20

Our cat tried various methods to wake us up to get us to feed her in the morning, including scratching the furniture. But when she did that I refused to get up (to avoid encouraging her) and yelled at her instead. However, we also have a scratching post in our bedroom, so she learned that if she scratches that REALLY LOUDLY not only does it wake us up but she doesn’t get yelled at and sometimes we actually get up.

Really, this is more a story of the cat training us.