Recently I noticed that Birdee would come into the living room and scratch on the front door with four clear purposes –
- She wanted a walk
- She was out of water
- She wanted to go to bed
- She was bored and wanted to play
I was explaining this to a friend who mentioned the book How Stella Learned to Talk by Christina Hunger. I downloaded a copy to my phone and listened to it on walks and in the car. It was interesting for sure. So I purchased some buttons on Amazon that you could record your voice on and placed them in four different locations in the house.
- Walk by the front door
- Outside by the back door
- Water by her dish
- Game in the living room where we do all sorts of training
Birdee immediately started pushing buttons. She used the Outside button first – pressing it once and not seeming all surprised that I ran up the stairs to the back door and said ‘good girl, do you want to go out?’ – and opened the door. Out she went. I believe that was not intentional but you could see her little brain working on this. Then she realized the power of pushing the walk button. She loves going on walks and started using that button a lot. So much so that I had to figure out how to tell her we could not go on a walk all the time. I listened intently to the book trying to figure out how it was that the author had a dog that would not ask repetitiously for something…what did she do? Then finally – she said she would use the word ‘no’ and ‘later’ and added those buttons. She did not recommend picking up the buttons. Birdee on her most frustrated attempts to get me to log off and go for the 100th walk of the day finally started pressing the button so much the battery ran out. It isn’t like I didn’t know she was tenacious, but this made me laugh out loud and also want to pull my hair out at the same time. I would be on the phone talking with someone and they would hear – ‘walk’ ‘walk’ and then if that didn’t work she would march over to the game button – ‘game’ ‘game’ and then she would hit it so fast you couldn’t hear what it was saying. It was as if she was trying to escalate the need for my attention.
I was hooked on this process now. So I did some additional looking on the internet to see what other folks were trying this – and sure enough there is a Facebook group for it. Also, there is a research project for a beta version of an application being used to gather data on how often the buttons are pushed. Now I thought I am getting somewhere. It includes an entire training guide that is downloadable via pdf.
So here is where we are – we have a new set of buttons. They are now located in one place. Her current buttons are – walk, game, bedtime, no, and find it. She also has a water button over by her water dish. I did not change that one up.
More to come…..