the curse & the humor of the overtrained dog

click to watch the video on my youtube channel https://www.youtube.com/shorts/SGmnA8Es1OY

so in this video, i set up the camera in front her “place.” i was going to work on ‘knock on the door equals go to place,’ then she offers “chin” when she is ready for the person to enter. but normally i don’t set the camera up right in front of her, especially when she is sitting there (yes, nipples ’n’ all).

so when i cued her by knocking on the door, she thought i wanted her to interact with the camera, so she goes up to it, first noses it, then touches it with her paw. she kept looking at me after each, for reinforcement of her behavior. it took me a minute to realize what she was doing.

sidenote and a reminder that the dog chooses what is reinforcing: me laughing meant she did it 3 more times even after i moved to camera to its usual spot. we had to revert to early training of pairing the knock on the door with cue “go lay down in your place,” before we could remove the verbal cue and just have the knock itself cue the behavior.

pook has been doing more independent thinking lately in training and it is fascinating to me. i believe it was really accentuated a couple of weeks ago: we were doing “go find _____ (named toy).” the toys we were searching for were upstairs in her travel house (soft crate). i had just seen “celia the seahorse” there like 5 minutes before. so i said “go find celia, upstairs, in your travel house.” she kept going upstairs and searching her travel house, then coming back to look at me from the top of the stairs. she did this 3 times and i kept cueing the same thing. finally, i heard her root around in the travel house again (many toys in there), then i heard her jump on the bed, squeak squeak squeak, she found ceilia and ran downstairs with her. so at some point since i had seen ceilia, pook had moved her to the bed. but she kept doing what i asked, till she realized she had to use her own dog brain (and clearly mom was a moron). she figured out the behavior by ignoring part of my cue. independent thinking. pretty cool.

part of the problem is that i have taught her sooooo many things in her 7½ years, and she seems to remember all of them, but i don’t always. so i will cue something and maybe i wasn’t speaking clearly and i get another behavior that i forgot i taught her. lol!

reminder: when you dog is bored or anxious or annoying 10 minutes of training is a great cure.