Can You Believe That I Have To SPELL WORDS In Front Of My Dog??

Whenever I'm talking to my partner we have learned that our dog Mitzi (see photo below) is actively listening to us. She may seem disinterested and she may seem like she's busy doing her own thing, but she's listening. So... I say things like:

"Did you take Mitzi 'O-U-T' this afternoon?"

"You need to fill the 'T-R-E-A-T' jar whenever you get a chance."

She even knows people's names and gets excited at the mention of my mother's name or Mike's sister's name.

Dogs are SMART!

S-M-A-R-T!!

I had one like that!

W-A-L-K T-R-E-A-T and R-I-D-E were the first.

Along with C-A-R and the ever famous 0-U-T!

I swear, he could read my mind. Literally. Whenever I asked him if he wanted to "go for a walk," he'd go to the back door and jump straight up into the air repeatedly until I got his leash and went out with him.

I swear the following is a TRUE story. Verbatim. Honestly.

One quiet Saturday afternoon, as I was sitting in my comfy chair reading and Bo was lying on the floor sleeping (deep breathing; paws twitching), it occurred to me that I wanted to stretch my legs a bit. Without even whispering or moving my lips, I looked at Bo and thought "wanna go for a walk, Bo?" He abruptly snorted, lifted his head, twisted his neck to look at me over his shoulder, got up, and trotted to the door and started leaping into the air repeatedly. We went for a walk.

I never repeated the "experiment." Some things are better left alone, I think.



LaMist Bojangles ("Bo")
1977-1989
My Best Friend .... Ever

I had a dog who was totally telepathic, just like your experience. Walks, treats, the whole schlemeil...and it wasn't like I was any good with "routine" because I wasn't!

I could call her from another room or even another floor of the house simply by thinking "Get over here, pal!." I suppose it was a little creepy if I analyzed it all, but at the time it seemed normal.

and Loco is starting to get that too - he definitely knows O-U-T-S-I-D-E.

Oh well. He will respond to sit and lay down with either verbal or hand signals too.

And he'll lay down to the phrase "what do good dogs do?", as we make him lay down when we are eating if he wants to clean the plates.

He's just been kicked off the bed for the summer - so he's feeling a bit dejected right now.

spelling periodically.

c-o-o-k-i-e-s to b-i-s-c-u-i-t-s to t-r-e-a-t-s to g-b-l-a-r-n-a-x

Gblarnax is Weenie's favorite thing. :shrug:

:hi:

that you couldn't say pizza, out, car, drive, go, or any other thing that indicated you were going some where. When we started spelling he learned to spell.

a 15 year old blonde cocker, had to put him down last summer. He loved bananas, if I peeled a banana and he was outside he made a bee-line to the door he could smell them.

:hug: ... that's a tough decision to have to make. I'm sorry you had to go through that.

... a friend of mine lost her poodle and swore that she would never EVER have another dog because it was just too painful and that nothing could ever "replace" Cricket.

But eventually she realized that having another dog it wasn't a "replacement" dog, it was just ANOTHER dog... and that she still had enough love and room in her life for dog.

Personally, I can't imagine NOT having a dog. If (when, if) we lose our Mitzi, I know I'll need time to move on... but I'm pretty sure that we'll always have a dog in our lives.

xo, Allen

Weenie is my heart of hearts...somtimes I start crying just thinking about it.

Your Mitzi is very cute, bet she's a real cuddle-bun. :)

I don't see it that way. It broke my heart to have to let go of my Beatty a couple of years ago but it horrifies me to think of one of my beloved furrfaces having to go into the world without their mighty protective mommyperson.

When it was time for him to go, I found a vet who would make housecalls because I didn't want his last emotion to be fear as it would have if he'd gone to a vet. And I held him against my chest as he loved to be. He didn't even flinch when the doctor put the needle in his little arm. And then he just relaxed against me. It was heartwrenching but perfect at the same time.

Beautiful story.

How did you find a vet who makes house calls? Oh wait I guess the thing to do would be ask your usual vet for a referal....?

Weenie has plenty of time left, but I'm a pre-emptive worrier.

...the letters sound like the words. My grandfather was quite skeptical and said "I bet if you ask her if she wants "m-u-d" she'd react the same". So I asked, "Teesha, (her ears perked up), would you like some m-u-d?" Her ears went down and she turned her head away.

WE know that our dogs understand words to the point that many of us turn to s p e l l i n g out the words. And they learn how to spell.

So why are they shocked about the word comprehension of this one dog in the BBC link below.

The two smartest dog breeds I've had in terms of word comprehension are the poodle and the Chihuahua and I'd also have to say our Basenji was also highly intelligent -- because she also tried to talk.

For years dog owner's claims were dismissed as the dogs merely were responding to the "tone" of voice and certainly they couldn't understand words.

But each of you has anecdotal evidence that your dogs do understand words -- and I'd have to add that my cats also understand words. My Japanese Bobtail cat already has a 20 word vocabulary -- and he understands "outside" and "walkie".

Collie dog's word power impresses
Rico. Is he smarter than the average dog?
A very smart collie dog named Rico has stunned German researchers by learning words with the apparent flair of a young child, Science magazine reports.

Rico understands more than 200 words and can work out the meaning of new ones, by a process of elimination.

What is more, Rico can often remember new words after a whole month - even though he has only heard them once before, the scientists claim.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3794079.stm

She would say, I wanna go OUT, quite clearly. She was a Heinz 57, with a good dose of poodle and some sort of terrier. Smartest damn dog I ever knew!

:bounce:

It didn't take her long to know what R-I-D-E was.

its all that damn snickering.

My beagle figured out that if I put something in the oven that means soon it will be dinner time and SHE WILL NOT GO OUTSIDE!

I'll open the back door and she'll just look at me and turn around and jump up on the sofa. Any other time she loves to go outside.

Of course, all my beagle's smarts involve food in some way. They do say that beagles are a stomach surrounded by a dog. :)

My niece has a fat little one appropriately named "Muffin."

No food is safe around her.

and some others.

Our roommate yelled at me one time for teaching him how spell! It ruined it for her dogs because they learned from him!

Sometimes, he reads my mind - all I have to do is THINK about taking him for a walk and he's right there, by his leash, ready to go without my even saying anything.

If he heard it he would hide under the bed and not come out!

B-)

And lately I've noticed that when I start saying letters, my aussie stops what she's doing, snaps her head around real fast and stares at me. Okay, so now she's figured out that I'm spelling something in an attempt to keep her "in the dark"... Curses!!!!!

And how the hell does she KNOW when it's exactly 5:00 PM, even with the time change? Her dinner is served at 5 PM every night and if we run late or try to ignore her (tv got to interesting or something), she promptly puts her head on the coffee table at exactly 5:00 PM and gives you "the look" until you go get her food.

And how can an animal be so smart and still be scared of a balloon? I'm just sayin'.

in a dejected voice. :)

language, answer to their names, have limited sound languages of their own, and have clear personalities. They suffer from depression, obsessive compulsiveness, and recognize playfulness and humor.

The idea that humans are somehow far and above and separate from the animal world is so blind.

This is from a 2002 BBC article: "Origin of dogs traced"

Dogs today come in all shapes and sizes, but scientists believe they evolved from just a handful of wolves tamed by humans living in or near China less than 15,000 years ago.

Although I believe I've read more current research which pushed the human/dog connection back a few more thousand years.

Anyway the interesting part of the article relating to this thread was at the end.

The dogs had to choose which bucket had food hidden underneath it, and the experiment was designed so they could not rely on their superb sense of smell. The scientists helped by pointing or looking in the direction of the hidden food.

Researcher Brian Hare said the dogs outperformed even the chimpanzees, and the puppies were as good as the older dogs, proving the skill was innate and not learned.

"During domestication there was some kind of change in their cognitive ability that allowed them to figure out what other individuals wanted using social cues. The biggest surprise was the puppies - even as young as nine weeks old, they're better than an adult chimpanzee at finding food."

He said the research might ultimately provide some clues as to how social skills evolved in humans.

Except, SHE'S LEARNING HOW TO SPELL!!!

Like, I'll say "should we give her a C-O-O-K-I-E?" And my dog yoko walks up and looks at me just like if I had said "cookie"!

Same with "W-A-L-K", "P-A-R-K", "B-A-T-H", and a few others.

When your furbaby spells back the words!

:bounce::bounce::bounce::bounce::bounce::bounce::bounce::bounce::bounce:

o-u-t-s-i-d-e and her name. Also have to spell w-a-l-k.

But outside is the biggest one.

And her treats are kept in an airtight jar with one of those latches on the top, but we also use jars like that for the brown sugar, regular sugar, tea bags, so whenever we open those, she comes running all freaked out and we have to give her a treat.

F-R-I-S-B-E-E

my dogs only have one trick, though:

responding to the command: 'go find something to DO"

It' a really good trick

Well, he tried anyway. That damned dog would do anything in the world to please me, and he hadn't been trained to do a thing when I got him at about 1 1/2 years old. He even wound up being a hell of a cow dog.

In the last few months before my dog died, about 6.5 years ago, her eyesight got worse and worse. She'd had problems with cataracts, but it got apparent that she was going blind. When she was moving around, I took to calling out directions for her, like "right" or "left" or "stop." The funny thing was that I didn't even think about doing it. And even funnier was the fact it took a while for me to realize that my dog was responding to a set of words that I'd never used in relation to her.