The small bells on a string hang on our back door so that whenever Charlotte needs to go outside she can ring them.
This morning I heard her get up and walk to the back door, but no sound came. A moment later she turned around, came into the living room, and looked at me expectantly. I asked her what she wanted and she turned around and walked back to the kitchen door. Again, no sound came from the kitchen. She came back and tried to get up in my lap the way she does when she's insistent about going outside.
I said "that is not how we ask to go outside. What do you need to do? Do you need to ring the bells?"
She went back in the kitchen, but again no sound came. This went on a couple of times with me asking, her leaving and then returning with never any bells ringing. She was getting fustrated and I was slightly annoyed.
Finally I got up to go and see what she was doing and why she wasn't ringing the bells. I thought maybe the behavior was beginning to extinguish and I needed to point them out to her again. When I got to the door however, there were no bells. They were completely missing from the door not just caught in the door jamb like they sometimes are. I felt really bad and apologized to the dog, giving her a hug as I attached the lead to her collar and then let her out as she so desperately wanted to do.
It took some doing but I found the bells, in pieces, on my husbands desk. The string must have broken and he must have forgotten to tell me that it needed to be repaired.
This just goes to show that she knew what behavior she was supposed to offer.
1) Walk to the door.
2) Put your nose on this spot.
3) Push the object at this spot with your nose.
Before finally getting up, I had watched her appear to complete 1 and 2 and in fact she actually had completed 1 and 2. She had followed all the instructions she was capable of completing. She was unable to follow through to the last step however because of something the humans had done.
I have to wonder, how often this is the case in our training sessions with our pets? We think that they are refusing to follow through on a behavior or a trick, when in fact they are offering us as many steps as they are capable of and either we left out an important step, or we weren't clear in how we taught it to begin with. Just goes to show, the dog is smart, it's the human that needs work.
