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It turns out, old dogs
can learn new tricks. I know mine learns them all the time. What I’ve
come to realize over the past nine years is that it usually takes me
longer to catch on.
If there’s one thing my dog knows about me, other than the fact that I
feed and walk him, it’s that I am utterly and 100 percent gullible.
It’s true. When it comes to him (and in my husband’s opinion, my
daughter) I am a total pushover. What I can’t figure out is after all
this time why I don’t recognize it.
OK, here’s the
situation … I’ve written many times in this column that my dog has
found countless new and inventive ways to get to and eat our cats’
food. This is one reason why my dog is less than skinny. But, in the
last couple years I thought for sure we had this problem licked by
instituting a simple child gate in the basement doorway. It’s high
enough that the cats can get under it, but low enough that the dog (and
our toddler) can’t. Though the dog can still see the food, he has no
way of reaching it. That is until I did something very simple - which
proved to be something very dumb. I put a rug under the cats’ dishes.
My dog seized this simple, mindless action and capitalized upon it
immediately. And once again, he proved that he is in fact smarter than I
am.
Because the cats’ dishes are on the landing that leads down into our
basement, the dog, even though blocked by the child gate can still, as I
mentioned, see the dishes in full view. This drives him insane of
course. So much to my surprise, I recently kept finding the dishes in
the middle of the landing empty. A quicker person might have recognized
the situation immediately, but nope, not me. Instead I assumed someone
(that someone being my husband) had removed the child gate to run
downstairs and never put it back, therefore leaving the perfect
opportunity for the dog to eat the food. After this happened a few times
I asked who might be leaving the gate open. No one in the house seemed
to have an answer.
Then one day as I was busy around the house it happened. I saw who the
culprit really was. Remember that rug under the dishes? You guessed it,
my ever-amazingly-smart-always-hungry-mutt realized if he stretched his
paw under the gate and caught the edge of the rug with his nails he
could maneuver the rug closer to him slowly but surely and eventually
slide the dishes under the gate and then EUPHORIA! Sometimes
he didn’t even need to slide them all the way under, he could simple
reach his snout under the gate far enough to eat the food.
Seriously, it shouldn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that a
hungry dog will go to great lengths to achieve a goal. I’m, once
again, chalking it up to the fact that my dog is an exceptionally smart
border collie. Or is it that he’s just that much smarter than me?
Please don’t answer that question - especially if you’re married to
me.
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