Training your humans

Some dogs will tell you that humans can't be trained, but I say those dogs just don't know how to train them. I've found that my humans are quite trainable, although it takes a lot of repetition and sometimes endless patience. For instance, I recently trained my humans to leave my favorite binkie on the floor for me. (They think it's their binkie. How human of them.) Here's what I did.

It started when my male human, Mr. T, was out of town and Bunny was pretty much either gone or in her binkies sleeping. Sometimes she would leave at 7:30 in the morning and not get home until 10:30 at night. Now, I don't mind a little solitude, but when she's gone that long, I start to wonder if she's going to come back! Anyway, I would voice my displeasure when she came home, in addition to making sure she knew I was happy to see her. You see, humans don't train well if you only scold them. A system of praise and rewards works much better. After a few days of this, I could see that Bunny was getting the message. While she would make sure I got to do my normal rolling around on the rug in the bedroom, which Bunny calls "the scratchy thing," it seems like I got shooed out of the bedroom almost as soon as I got in. I just wasn't getting enough quality time.

I started by using that old tried-and-true method of the sad look. It's far more effective than whining, which humans seem to find annoying. I would sit in the middle of the bedroom, watching Bunny run around doing those strange things that humans do, and I would just keep my big brown eyes on her. Eventually she'd look over at me, stop what she was doing, and come over to give me a pat. Step one accomplished.

Step two was to get the binkie on the floor. This was more complicated, because Bunny had to realize that by continuing to give her the sad look after she gave me pats, I wanted something besides more pats. Bunny's a quick human, so she picked up on that pretty fast. I had already trained her to know which binkie was my favorite, and after a few training sessions she put that one down on the floor. She put it in the closet, which is sort of inconvenient for me, but you take what you can get.

We settled into a pretty good routine after that, with Bunny making sure I could get to my binkie if the closet door was closed or something was in the way (like a big, scary pillow). Soon after that Mr. T got back in town, and it was a simple matter to train him to do the same thing. One day, though, all that training looked like it was going to go to waste. Bunny got it in her head the clean out the closet, which was great fun for me because I got to sniff all sorts of things I normally couldn't reach. When she announced that she was finished, I went into the closet to take a look, and, would you believe it, no binkie on the floor! I looked high and low, but I smelled it nowhere. Back to the brown-eyed stare, this time mixed with disappointment. Notice, I didn't scold, but you do have to let your human know when she's done something wrong or she won't learn. Well, shortly after that Bunny got my binkie down off the shelf, and it's been on the floor for me ever since. Good human!