I am not joking… seriously, Lou is psychic. Think about it – dogs can detect cancer, they can sense strokes coming on, there have been numerous tests that prove they sense things well beyond our abilities. Okay, if you’ve stopped laughing and/or rolling your eyes, I will explain.
I have always used key words with him for our activities. When it is time to go to bed, I say “bedroom.” When we are going outside in the backyard, I say “outside.” When we go for a walk, I say “walk.” Pretty simple stuff – right? It took no time at all before he learned those and a whole host of other words, like “toy,” “ball,” etc. (and he knows the difference.)
My thinking is that his training went a step further and rather than respond to the word, he would take subtle cues from my actions just prior to saying the word because it seemed like he was getting a step ahead of me. As I was saying the word “outside” he would already be heading toward the door. After this happened a few too many times to be a coincidence, I decided to conduct an experiment.
I made sure that when it was time to go out, go for a walk, or the bedroom etc., I wouldn’t change my actions and instead, just think about where we were headed. Lou continued to sense my intentions without even the verbal cue! I then decided to see if he was hearing the word as I thought it (ESP?) I discovered that just thinking the word did nothing unless I truly intended to follow through with the action.
I would sit there and think the word “outside” with no result, but without fail when I decided to actually go “outside” he was up and running to the door. Freaky, huh?
I have discovered it doesn’t work when he is sleeping (hey, I wanted to test is as much as possible.) It doesn’t work when he is really into something like eating. It does seem to work when we are just hanging out or when we are wrasslin’ around with his toys etc. So far, I have documented about 50 test runs and he is hitting on over 85% of the time. He hits on “walk” much more than anything – I am guessing because it is his favorite thing to do.
Color me strange – but I believe it… Lou may not read minds, but he is reading something.
Greetings from Fluff and me. I did a search for “Wheatables” and your site was one that came up. Your dog Lou looks a lot like our dog. I just learned that Fluff is probably a wheatable also. We live in Houston and I found Fluff in 2003. He has a webpage on Dogster.com if you want to see it. His i.d. for Dogster is 131147. Not sure if many of his photos look like Lou. But in real life his hairstyle right now makes him look a lot llike your Lou. I also think Fluff is psychic in the same way as Lou. Want to see if you have more pics of Lou on your blog.