“Flash, go get your ball.”
“You couldn’t find it? I don’t know where you left it. Maybe you left it in the computer room?”
He ran into the computer room and came back out with his ball. We never specifically taught him “computer room”, he must’ve just picked it up from us.
Ummmmm … up there? In my post about me and Suzi and the fly?
Could y’all please imagine that after the phrase, That is a true story Y’all!, I then wrote the following: I really did pass out.
Dang!
I kept lookin’ at that, and lookin’, and askin’ myself “What is wrong here?” and didn’t see it till just now. :smack:
I bet y’all saw it though, right, and were just too sweet to say something?
Man! That is so awesome nice!
Thank You!
Q
Yeah - easy enough - but were all the answers “woof”?
Not sure about *smart, *per se, but this was… interesting. From my journal.
Bridget is… special
10/17/07 07:58 pm
Last night, one of the cats yuked up most of their dinner in the basement sometime late in the evening. I noticed the evidence when I was headed back upstairs with my arms full of laundry. “Gagh!” I said to myself. “I’ll have to come clean that up – but not until after I’ve folded this here laundry and put it away, because if I don’t, Bridget will probably pee on it.” And I went upstairs and forgot about the barf on the floor.
Throughout the day today, like all work days, Bridget came into my office several times and commandeered a treat, or some attention, or the scratching pad, or a spot in the sun. Today she also delicately carried in a little red mousie toy and left it on the rug for me to admire for a few minutes. (She may have just killed it.) Then she took it away.
This evening, when I went to feed the kittens in the basement, I noticed that the cat barf (“Damn! I forgot about the cat barf!”) had dried up, and that precisely centered in the middle of the crackled pile of former puke, a little red mousie toy had been placed.
Both our late dog and our current dog have learned to translate our cockatiel’s squawks.
In particular, the cockatiel, either because of his vantage point or his heightened senses, is able to tell when one of us is coming home. While the humans in oujr family can’t tell the difference between the bird’s “family is coming” tweets and any other random noise he makes, both dogs were able to quickly pick it up and charge to the door to greet the ones who give them food.
We had two dogs, my Sheltie (Krillyn) and my brother’s Great Dane (Zena).
Both dogs loved chew sticks, but Zena liked hers right from the package, and Krillyn liked hers a bit chewed first, Zena chewed the bones more often even though we would give one to each of them, and usually Krillyn would just stand near and beg.
So this is what Krillyn figured out, and I say figured out cuz she did this ALL THE TIME. She figured out that if she runs to the front door and starts barking, she will cause her bigger sister to run and bark as well, thus leaving her chewed bone open.
There Zena would be chewing away while Krillyn stands and begs. Krillyn would then mosey on over to the front door and bark her little head off (at nothing). Zena scampers towards the door barking, while Krillyn runs and grabs the bone.
I loved watching her do that cuz she was not only smart enough to see what was going on, but openly plan to do this often.
Basically, she learned to manipulate.
Chaco, The World’s Most Adorable DogTM was barely a year old and fell in the river. We stopped on a sand bar and he took off running and threw himself into a full-on ‘Pete Rose’ style slide; again and again. After a few minutes of this, he simply shook off the dry sand and was a clean, dry, happy puppy. Voila!
Have you posted this on a previous occasion, or am I having a deja-vu moment?
S^G
My evil spy for the Russians–also known as Kermit the Dog–had a habit of “playing” with any bug he found. He was an only child and always looking for someone or something to play with.
I found him with a tiny bug of the beetle variety–literally such a small bug that I only knew it wasn’t a speck of dirt because it moved in a linear manner–and when I went to pick up his new friend, Kermit snatched up the bug in his mouth and ate it.
Or so I thought.
I come back a few minutes later and Kermit is playing with a microscopic friend again. I’m mystified…where are these tiny bugs coming from? I reach for it and Kermit again snatches it up in his mouth and blinks up at me, swallowing convincingly.
I make a big deal out of walking a few feet away and ignoring him…and after a couple of minutes, Kermit slyly spits out his tiny friend. Totally mobile, obviously unharmed.
How it’s even possible for a dog to snatch up a tiny bug and hide it in his mouth without swallowing it or even harming it is one thing…
But to be savvy enough to try?
I let him keep his friend. It was just too clever.
Our dog has learned “upstairs”, “downstairs”, “outside”, and “inside”, without us deliberately teaching them to her.
One our two full-grown cats will mewl like a kitten when she wants treats, because she knows I think it’s adorable.
Here’s an article about some very smart stray dogs in Moscow:
Basically, these strays live in abandoned houses in Moscow’s suburbs. They’ve learned how to ride the subway to downtown, where they can find food. There are always a lot of people walking around downtown with food in their hands from street vendors and such. The dogs have learned to sneak up behind someone with food, and bark loudly to startle them into dropping it so the dog snatch it up. Sometimes the dogs will con food by acting cute, like laying their head in a young girl’s lap and giving her “puppy dog eyes”. Then they take the subway back home.
When I was about 12, our neigbor’s dog spent a lot of time with us. His name was “Lucky”, he was an English Springer Spaniel. My Dad was cutting down some overgrown hdges…and our jon was to drag the branches to the back yard. The dog saw what we were doing, and grabbed a branch with his teeth, and dragged it to the back yard!
This looks legit.
I may have referred to it in a previous thread, I’m not sure. I’m old and like to tell my stories over and over again.
Speaking of pets, both my now-deceased and my current dog learned how to translate our cockatiel’s squawks…
The smartest thing Buddy the Beagle ever did was look really, really cute when my husband went to pick out a pet.
Last night we had ribeyes for dinner. He’s sleeping now in his fuzzy dog bed. He is adored by three women who make sure his every need is met. He’s too stupid to even register on a canine IQ test, but he lives the life of royalty.
It’s good to be King.
I dunno about absolute smartness, but one of my cats is smarter than the other.
I haf one cat. One day I come home and find it playing with wads of toilet paper – it had figured how to unroll an entire roll from the holder. This repeated a couple of times until my sister told me, “My cat did this. Just reverse the roll. When she paws it it, it will roll back up instead of unroll.” Worked like a charm, she never did it again.
Then I got another cat, and the same thing happened. But this time, reversing the roll DID NOTHING! Cat #3 figured it out in a day – paw the other way. Put cat #1 to shame.
New solution – close bathroom door.
Heh. My cat will unroll the toilet paper, but *only *when I’ve locked him in there so I can get the laundry, or bring in groceries, or do anything else that requires the apartment doors to be open. He’s clearly punishing me.
He can also work lights of both the wall-switch and and pullstring variety, turn the water in the kitchen sink on and off, and push the snooze button. He’s my little pain-in-the-ass genius kitty.
One day I heard my dog grunting. Quincy was dragging a box of books to the chair i was sitting at. I looked inside the box and found a milkbone he had stashed in there long ago but could not reach. He knew I would get it for him.
The Siamese cat we had growing up had one deliberate litter of kittens (and two unplanned, but we won’t discuss those). Of that litter, two at least were blindingly smart. One cat’s family spent summers on an island in Puget Sound; the cat wandered onto the ferry one day, got off on the other side, and everyone figured he’d never turn up again. Until he did, a month later, well-fed and obviously well-cared-for, riding the ferry back home. He must have been visiting his girlfriend or something.
The other one was the smartest cat I have ever met. He could open doorknobs easily. His human sold antique glass and every surface in their house was covered with expensive breakables, even windowsills, and he would wander delicately among them, never breaking a thing. But most amazing of all was his food jar. His human would keep the food in a big earthenware jar in a bottom cabinet, and when his bowl was empty, he’d bring it over and scoop food out with his paw. But when the food in the jar was too low to reach with his paw, he would pull his dish out away from the jar, placed just so, and then carefully knock the jar over so the food spilled into it perfectly. He had a remarkable grasp of physics, obviously.
I used to have a small dog that was an evil genius. She would escape under a privacy fence a few times a week to roam the rural neighborhood I lived in. Except that since she was too small to dig quickly, she would bark at imaginary things to get my two big dogs riled up and have them dig for her. After they were digging alongside her she would come back into the house through the doggy door and wait on her bed until the others were finished.
A few years before she died I was given a small rescued mutt by a neighbor. My evil dog was noticeably withdrawn and jealous of the new arrival. One day while I was at work they both escaped from the yard and the rescue-mutt was led off, unable to find its way back. My little evil genius was inside the yard as happy as a clam when I got home. I never saw the other dog again, and I know this was planned.
Every time I go feed my friends’ cat when they’re away, the cat tries to eat my watch. It’s a Mickey Mouse watch and I am convinced she knows there’s “a mouse” inside.
