Ring the Bell

When we brought Lady home, we had given thought to what we would teach her. We would only teach her useful things – no parlor tricks. She would not fall down and play dead for the amusement of guests. We soon learned that Lady had her own ideas.
She did not differentiate between useful behaviors and parlor tricks. All behaviors were parlor tricks if there was a chance that the human she was showing off for would give her a treat. She would sit, lie down, and stand in rapid succession, all the while casting a happy smile and shining eye on her target.


Also, she loved to learn new things, and we quickly ran out of standard obedience commands and had to find some new things to teach her. This is not to say that Lady was (or is) completely obedient. But she knew the commands, if she was inclined to follow them.


That’s then we started looking for more novel but still useful behaviors. Ring the bell on the door when you want to go out. Spin three times on the towel on the floor to wipe your feet. Take it to the kitchen – it being anything from the newspaper and mail, to the bag from the pet shop holding her treats. Do your business right now. I’m tired and I want to go to bed.


How did we teach lady these behaviors? All we did with the bell was to hang it on the door. In a perfect example of classical conditioning (think Pavlov and his dogs), she learned to associate the opening of the door with the sound of the bell. In short order, she was pushing the bell with her nose to ring it and to make the door open. As always, consistency was the key. We opened the door each time she rang and the behavior quickly stuck.


Why did we teach her to do this? Quite simply, we were having trouble reading her mind. She would get that look on her face. Did she want a treat, some attention, food, water, or did she need to go out? She had not yet developed the complex body language that answers those questions today – touching the treat jar with her nose is a pretty good indicator that she wants a treat. We knew we would never get her reliably housetrained if we couldn’t figure this out. The bell solved the communication problem.


The downside of this behavior was what I called in and out and in and out and… One other command Lady learned fairly early on was no.