Tonight Conan found two of his tennis balls in the basement, where they had fallen down the stairs and become lost. I picked each one up in turn and threw it up the stairs, to the main floor. Each time he thought I had thrown it across the basement, and went and searched the other side laboriously.
Then, after I finished lifting weights, we went back upstairs where he found the balls. He grabbed one and was running around showing it to everyone as if to say, “Daddy is a wizard! He threw this ball in the basement, and it reappeared on the main floor! Look! Wizard!”
4 comments:
The canine combination of intelligence and stupidity is truly remarkable.
At Mongil-san, we had a site dog, a German shepherd named FUD (stood for a couple of things, depending on how he'd been behaving lately) who loved for us to throw rocks for him to retrieve. Not just pebbles, either, but serious rocks. He had to be able to pick them up with his teeth, but not much smaller than that. It didn't matter if we threw it into a rock pile or out by itself; he always came back with the one we'd thrown. At least as far as we could tell.
Eric Hines
He detected the scent of his own saliva. If you threw a fresh rock he would not find it. We learned this with one of our fetch-obsessed dogs forty years ago. I was so frustrated with the hyperactive mongrel that I once threw that day's rock into the lake. She swam around the exact location where it went in for twenty minutes, and for a blessed hour, actually napped when she gave up and struggled to shore. It was the only time we ever wore that dog out.
He detected the scent of his own saliva.
Except the first time we threw any rock, it didn't have his saliva on it. More likely, he was detecting our scent on the rock, and its freshness relative to that on all the other rocks thrown into an area (it was a mountain top; the area was large enough to exercise a healthy dog, but not much more than that).
Also: we threw into an area over the edge of a hill so he couldn't track it to the ground, but the hill wasn't steep or deep enough to endanger him when he went charging over that horizon.
Eric Hines
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