My girlfriend has been nagging me to buy her a dog for the past year, ever since she watched the movie hachiko: a dog's story and suddenly decided that she loved dogs. I finally bought her a Labrador pup as a birthday present last month. BAD IDEA. 2 days later she shows up with the pup and tells me the pup chewed up her moms handbag and her mom would probably end up murdering the poor animal if she sees it chewing anything again. GREAT. How am I going to explain to my mother I spent 6000rs on a birthday gift? Now I am stuck with something that I never wanted. I thought about taking it back to the pet-store but after looking at that poor pup's face, I couldn't do it.So I decided to keep him and wound up naming him spartacus. After a month of cleaning up after the dog and hearing my mom curse me day and night for getting a dog( god bless you mom) I finally decided to start training him a few days back.And A lingering fear of mine was confirmed last night: My dog might be mentally handicapped.
I've wondered about his intelligence ever since I got him and subsequently discovered that he was unable or unwilling to climb up or down stairs.
I blamed his inability on the fact that he'd spent most of his life confined to a small cage. I figured that maybe he just hadn't been exposed to stairs yet. Accepting the noble responsibility of educating this poor, underprivileged creature, I spent hours tenderly guiding him up and down the staircase - placing biscuits on each step to lure him and celebrating any sign of progress. When he still couldn't successfully navigate the stairs after almost a week with me, I blamed it on his extreme lack of motor control. This dog is uncoordinated in a way that would suggest his canine ancestry is mixed with traces of a species with a different number of legs - like maybe a starfish or some sort of snake.
I am no stranger to training dogs - much of my childhood was spent working with various canines because I lacked the social skills to interact successfully with people. With so many years of experience behind me, I was sure that training this new dog would be a very simple task.
I was wrong. Not only is training my dog outlandishly difficult, it is also heartbreaking. He wants so badly to please me. Every fiber of his being quivers with the desire to do a good job.
Over the past few days,he's made some progress, but it's been painfully slow and is easily forgotten. Still, I was living under the assumption that maybe my dog just had a hidden capacity for intelligence - that all I had to do was work hard enough and maybe he'd wake up one day and be smart and capable like a normal dog. Until last night.
Last night I was lying in bed, mindlessly surfing the internet when I looked up and noticed my dog licking the floor. Just licking and licking. At first I though maybe I'd spilled something there, but his licking did not seem to be localized to one spot. Rather, he was walking around the room licking seemingly at random. He lay down on his side and kept licking out of the side of his mouth while looking directly at me. At that moment I realized that I needed to know for sure whether my dog was retarded or not.
I Googled "how to tell if your dog is retarded" and after a bit of surfing, I found a dog IQ test that looked legitimate. It involved testing your dog's ability to solve a few very basic problems, like figuring out how to get out from underneath a blanket.
I gathered the necessary supplies and began testing.
The first test asked me to call my dog using a variety of words that were not his name to check if he could tell the difference. I called out "chicken!" and was pleased to see that my dog did not respond. He also failed to respond to "movie," "pulsar" and "banana." I was beginning to feel very proud of him. Then came the crucial step: I called his name. Nothing. I called it a few more times to be sure. Still nothing.
The words hung like a neon sign broadcasting my dog's failure. "It's okay," I thought. "he'll do better on the next one."
In the second test, I had to put a blanket over him and see how long it took him to get out. I threw the blanket over him and started my stopwatch. He made some small attempts at freeing himself, but as the seconds ticked by, it became clear that he was not going to pass this test also.
Still, I gave him the benefit of the doubt and assumed that he just enjoyed being under the blamket and could get out if he wanted to. I added a few extra points to his points tally for faith's sake.
After failing three more tests, it came down to the final trial. If he could score five out of five possible points on this section of the test, he could pull himself out of the bottom category into "below average." This reminded me of my exams :( ....
First, I had to make him sit, which was a test in and of itself. Then I was supposed to show him a biscuit, let him sniff it, then - after making sure he was watching - place the biscuit on the ground and put a plastic cup over it. If he knocked over the cup to get the biscuit within a certain amount of time, he would pass the test.
I put the biscuit under the cup and started the timer.
My dog ran over to the cup and sniffed it. he walked around it once and then looked up at me like I was some sort of wizard. I pointed to the cup. I knew it was cheating, but I wanted to help my dog pass his test.
he didn't understand, but he knew he was supposed to do something, so he just started frantically doing things because maybe - just maybe - one of those things would be the right thing and the magical wizard cup would let him know where the biscuit went.
After five minutes of watching my dog aimlessly tear around the house, I finally accepted that he was not going to pass any part of the test and yes, he was most likely mentally challenged. But damn it, I was not going to let my poor, retarded dog feel like he failed. So I just clapped my hands and said good job, gave him a couple of treats and let him outside to play, and got mentally prepared to hear all the new curse words that I was going to learn from my mom in the near future.
