Haiku: Obedience Ring vs. Snack Bar

Succulent smells waft

From snackbar to Lager’s nose

Heeling abruptly ends.

This is how we do kibble...

Recently, I bought an interactive dog toy.  I have two others that I use to feed both dogs their dinner.  We don’t use them to feed breakfast, because that would require either my husband or me to be cognizant before finishing the first cup of coffee.  No, we use these toys to feed the dogs their dinner, because after being awake and at work for most of the day, we have the tools to figure out how to load up the toys with kibble.

Anyway, about this new toy…it’s rectangular, with little drawers around all four sides.  The idea is that the dog will pull out the drawers to get the kibble or treats.  We chose Lager to be the first to eat his kibble out of the new toy, because his method of getting kibble from these toys is more finessed than Lacey’s.  Lacey simply beats the crap out of the toys and rolls them around until the kibble falls out.  On the other hand, Lager pushes the moving parts of the toys with his nose or paws until he figures out how he can get the kibble, rather than beating the toys into submission.

Of course, a human being has to first show the dog that there is kibble in the drawers.  I knew that much without watching the training video.  So we gave Lager the new toy with his kibble in some of the open drawers, and waited for him to eat that kibble.  When he finished, we placed more kibble in the drawers, closed the drawers and waited for the fun to begin.

Lager ran his nose over the toy, pushed it with a paw, and then abruptly sprawled out next to it, put his chin on his paws and sighed heavily.

Meanwhile, Lacey, having successfully accessed and eaten her kibble by beating up her toy, made her way over to the new toy.  Without a moment’s hesitation, she swatted the toy, which knocked it around and partially opened some drawers.  Using her nose to further pry open the drawers, she gobbled up the kibble in those drawers, and then swatted at the side of the toy, knocking the toy around enough that the other drawers opened. 

Lager watched all this happen, his nose only a few inches away from the toy.

My husband, thinking Lager needed some help to pull out the drawers, found a piece of black ribbon and stapled it to one of the drawers, and then I refilled the drawer with kibble.  I tried putting the end of the ribbon into Lager’s mouth, but he spit it out.  Ed put some peanut butter on the ribbon.  Lager licked the peanut butter off the ribbon, sighed heavily, got up and walked over to his food bowl, where he stood, staring at me. 

However, he wasn’t going to get off that easily.  I put his kibble in one of the other toys, so he still had to put some thought into getting to his food.

I decided I needed to watch the training video, to get some tips on how to get Lager to eat from this toy.  Well, there’s some nice promotional footage, but probably only 5 seconds of footage of this toy, consisting of the dog’s owner smiling over this thing while the dog gobbles the food out of the drawers.  That’s it.  That’s the extent of the “training” on the video.   However, I am happy to report that after a few sessions of me pulling out drawers for Lager, and Lacey showing Lager how to beat the crap out of it, Lager has figured out how to get kibble from the toy.  He beats the crap out of it.