The smartest doggie - an old blog.

Keisha, asking to see her puppy.

I don’t believe in reincarnation, but if I did, I would have to say that Einstein came back as my dog.  The above picture was taken a couple of years ago.  That is Keisha, on the right.  We taught her a lot of tricks when she was a pup herself, and she remembers all of them.  What’s amazing though is how she uses the things she has learned to communicate with us.      In the above picture, for example, she is saying, “Please.”  We would hold a treat and say to her, “Say please,” so she would sit pretty and get her treat.  What was really cool though was that she learned to generalize.  Her Please trick became a way of asking for things.  Hold something that she is interested in and she asks for it ever so nicely.  Toy, treat, baby, whatever.      What is funny is that she uses the same technique to communicate with the two other dachshunds we have at home.  Smudge (our male) will have a toy she wants.  Why struggle when you can ask?  So she goes up to him and says, “Please”.  Now Smudge comes from the other end of the gene pool.  He just sits there wondering what this silly dog is doing.  Needless to say Keisha figured out that struggling is going to get her further, at least with Smudge.      I decided to do this piece because it is 2:37 in the morning and my Nobel laureate canine has just woke me up.  You have to hear this.  Sleeping soundly I hear a scratching at my door.  “Goofy dog,” I say to myself.  She wants out.  So I crawl out of bed and ramble over to the door to serve my dog (isn’t something backward here?).  I open the door, expecting her to run out as she has on many other late night exchanges.  She just sits there.          Either she is playing a joke on me, or she wants something.  “Ummies?”, I ask.  Nothing.  “Drink?”  She runs around in circles excitedly.  I walk over to her water dish and it is empty.  Picking it up I fill it and return it.  I hear lapping sounds. Now, what I love about this is that she problem solved to get what she wanted.  “Let’s see, I want water, and the fat guy is sleeping.  If I scratch at the door he will get up to take me out.  Then I will sit there and annoy him.  But, for a human, he is pretty smart.  Maybe he will figure out what it is that I want.  Then again, these two legged things are destroying the planet they live on, maybe he won’t.  I wish I had done more when I was like them, other than the E=mc squared thing.”  Isn’t she a smart doggie? Thanks for reading.  www.ericspix.net   Eric Svendsen