How To Teach A Dog To Count

I have always loved dogs and hanged out with them but at that time I still didn’t have my own pet and I use to go out with my friend and his dog. These delightful creatures make me excited and I was amazed to their loyalty for us humans, their boundless confidence, and especially their ability to be joyful any time when they see us, even when they saw us last time just a few minutes ago. Always shocked me how dogs can be that smart and what they are be able to learn. They are capable to learn many things like most basic: come, sit, lie, to more complicated: walks close to our leg and keeping pace, to skip over various things on command, to bring us something when we throw, sit still in front of shops and waiting for us and many other things.

In the part of town where I lived and went to elementary school, was a large park where we played as children and later as teenagers we gathered there, talked and played basketball, football at the nearby terrain. This place was always vivid and colorful, filled with people, children, sportsman’s who are training at a nearby club and of course the pets that are walked by their owners.

There was one dog trainer, who often comes to train his dogs. I loved to see him in training dogs. He was an extraordinarily dog trainer and it was interestingly to see what all these smart pets can learn. One day I went as usual to my friend’s place to go out and walk his Rottweiler dog. We went down to the park and found the man who trained dogs. We used to watch how he trained his dogs, talked to him, asked for advice about a dog and so on. Later he told us that he learned his dog to count. The two of us laughed out loud and told him that we do not believe it, although we have seen many times, what he is able to teach the dogs. He said: "You would not believe, do you? Now you will see”.

He called his Doberman dog, which ran at lightning speed, and ordered him to sit in front of him. He looked dog straight in the eyes and said “five minus three” and the dog barked twice, then he said two plus two and the dog barked four times and etc. My friend and I watched all this and not believing what we see. He looked at us triumphantly and said: "Ha, what do you say now"? We looked him, and exclaimed at the same time: "How? How did you learn your dog to count”? He smiled and said that is a secret! We went home thinking, how he could learn dog to do this.

It's been a while we went together to that park to walk my friend dog and found a trainer from the neighborhood how work with his dogs. We were there for a while watching a dogs training and we asked him to show us again how his dog counts. He just smiled and said no problem. Once again he asked a dog and dog barked exactly as many times as needed. I watched my friend who was standing so, that he can look right in the trainer face and he noted that trainer winked to dog and "big mystery”, was uncovered.

What was the all about? He saw that the dog barks, exactly as many times as his trainer winks at him. The secret is revealed, so we were a little disappointed. Later when I think about that the dog was not so much wonder as we thought, I asked myself: How much difficult can be, to teach a dog to bark, when you wink? Certainly that was also a outstanding success!

Later when I got my own pet, a great female Pekingese dog I realized how much more worth having such a friend. I tried to teach her to count haha that was a complete failure. She just looked at me in amazement and walked away showing me that such things will not be possible in her case. In the future I will leave it to the professionals and just going to enjoy in my dog!