Our GSD Kali is scary smart. She once used her foot to hold onto a gate, then hoped backwards to swing it open. Kali did this because the gate seperated her from my gf, who Kali loves. My gf praised her and set everything up to see if she’d do it again so she could get video.
Ever since then we have to be super careful locking gates, lest horses escape. A horrible trick indeed!
I taught our African Grey, Rocvo, to drink juice from my cup. He loves apple, orange, grapefruit, cranberry, etc. When I offer him juice, I say, “Juice” in a slightly exaggerated way. For awhile I’d try to reinforce the word-item pairing by bringing him juice anytime he said the word.
But, it turns out his mimicry of the way I said “Juiiiicce” sounds kinda like he’s saying “Jeeeeews”. We’ve had guests over who think we have a crazy antisemitic bird.
I actually mentioned this in the thread about snooze alarms a few months ago: I always feed my cat first thing after I get up in the morning. Which means I accidentally trained him to be my snooze alarm. If my alarm goes off and I don’t get up and feed him soon enough, he’s on the bed inquiring about his breakfast. Interestingly he doesn’t do it on the weekends when I can sleep in. I think he’s learned that the alarm clock means food is coming soon.
When I was a kid we had outdoor cats. We always fed them in the shed in the backyard. Since the shed was always kept locked (there was a cat flap so they could go in and snack or sleep or whatever), they learned that the jingling keys of the shed being unlocked meant it was feeding time. We could get the cats to come just by jingling some keys.
Back in the 1960’s my family got the game “Battling Tops”, where each player would send a top spinning into an arena to knock into other tops. Last top spinning was the winner. The tops made a hell of a whirring sound, which caused our collie to bark insanely. Since we launched the tops to spin after saying “one two three go” or “on your mark get set go” soon our dog bark whenever we used those phrases, without tops present. This lasted for years after the game was tossed out.
Back in the 1960’s my family got the game “Battling Tops”, where each player would send a top spinning into an arena to knock into other tops. Last top spinning was the winner. The tops made a hell of a whirring sound, which caused our collie to bark insanely. Since we launched the tops to spin after saying “one two three go” or “on your mark get set go” soon our dog bark whenever we used those phrases, without tops present. This lasted for years after the game was tossed out.
I used to have a rabbit and two guinea pigs in one stall (yeah, I now know that this isn’t the best combination, but 30 years ago it was common and worked quite well), and there were rodent treats in the form of yogurt drops. They just loved that stuff, and involuntarily, every time before I gave them the treats, I rattled the case with the drops a bit for a time. Of course in a short time, every time I nearly touched the pack with drops and they heard a faint noise of drops rattling, the guinea pigs began squeaking frantically and storming towards me (Aljoscha, the rabbit, kept quiet like rabbits almost always do, but he ran to me as fast as the guinea pigs). I somehow felt like Pavlov.
In the Winter of 1995 I had a wonderful cat named Livvie. I also has a great deal of outrage about the government shutdowns which were affecting my ability to make a living. The news would come on in the evening and I would sit and watch it and just rage at the TV.
It slowly dawned on us that any time anyone said the name “Newt Gingrich” our cat would hiss and run out of the room.
When my neighbor’s dog barked, I yelled out the window to shut up and he did, and does. Why am I responsible for disciplining everyone else’s dog? Dogs speak with a one-word vocabulary: “Bark”. It means “I want attention”. It’s amazing how many people spend their life living with dogs, and cannot learn one word.
“You employ me as a watchdog, and I just alerted you, I don’t know if you heard me, I need acknowledgement, is that too much to ask? Oh, good, the neighbor heard me.”
’
Our neighbor has two cockapoos, both of whom are barky. One will go into the backyard and bark until acknowledged and then shut up. The other one will bark until acknowledged and then will bark twice as much. I make sure I only say hello to the right one.
I was fortunate with our dog - no unintended training. I learned from my neighbours who had a lovely Golden Retriever.
They inadvertently trained him to lie down on walks - he was out on a walk once and lied down and wouldn’t get up even tugging at his leash. They gave him a treat to get him up and going again. Huge mistake, instant training. They never had a regular walk again after that, every 10m he’d lie down. It was seriously awful.
@Senegold
Great story, that’s exactly why when researchers say the animal (like Koko the gorilla) has a vocabulary of XX words or hand signs, it must be taken with a grain of salt. Independent observers are needed to verify.
We’ve been using DoorDash much too much lately (and will be…since we’re self-isolating), and the delivery person has to call on the intercom that rings on our phone. So, now whenever the phone rings (even on the TV), he’ll wake up from a sound sleep and look at the door…waiting for the food to come.
Ah - away from the world of pets… Our elderly neighbour feeds the local foxes every evening. She has a routine: at about 10 PM, just before foxy dinnertime, she lets her dog out in the back yard - you can always tell because the dog runs around and barks like crazy for a few minutes. So this has trained me, if I’m upstairs, to go look out the front window. The reason I do that is because it has also trained the foxes who, the second they hear barking, emerge from the undergrowth and literally run up the street to line up on her drive.
