elvenferretots:

animal-welfare-not-animal-rights:

pinkmanthedog:

honey-wheat:

fractiousrvt:

followthebluebell:

konmari-dogs:

pinkmanthedog:

What are your best animal training fails?

Mine:

- when I was teaching my dog Pinkman to boop she thought she was getting food for hitting her head on things so for like two full weeks she ran around indiscriminately smashing her face into walls and furniture and then asking for a treat

- trying to teach my baby horse Nugget to bow but now he’s just constantly checking his armpits for food

• A dog that can open fridges

Almost every trick my cat has learned has been mutated and used for evil purposes.

Training him to sit means he sits on my feet whenever I’m carrying food.  I have tripped over him.  A lot.  He especially loves plopping his ass on my feet as I open the fridge. 

Platform?  Oh shit, that just means he learned how LEDGES work and now he treats the entire house like his own personal platforming video game.  I had to re-arrange the kitchen to move the chairs further from the counters.

High five?  He repeatedly smacks my hand if I’m holding food, because he assumes that’s the same thing as a high five.

The ultimate result of scent-training was that he hunted down the box I kept scented things in and tore it apart.  I MEAN, I GUESS THAT’S THE SPIRIT OF THE GAME BUT STILL.

So far, teaching him to jump through a hoop has been harmless, but I’m still concerned.

Teaching my dog how to spin short circuited her brain. She spins over, and over, and over, and over when excited.

Food excites her.

Training excites her.

I have been unable to teach her anything since I taught her how to spin, because she gets excited and… spins.

my sister taught her service dog to pick up her shoes and hand them to her.

every time she drops them on the floor to put them on he’ll pick it back up and this will loop for like 5 minutes

The notes on this are endlessly entertaining

I was trying to train my last dog as a service dog and was therefore teaching her to do tasks for me while I was in the wheelchair. One of these things was ‘opening doors’, which is all well and good and a useful skill for her to have.

Except…she absolutely refused to learn to close them again. Utterly refused. Did not see the point to doing that. She, in fact, became adamant that all doors should forever be open from that point onwards. No room in the house was allowed to have a closed door ever again. If I got up to close a door she would just get up and open it again. If I went to the toilet and locked the bathroom she would stand outside trying the handle over and over again and occasionally howling about the fact that her magic trick had stopped working.

The only thing that saved us from her opening the front door and escaping was that it used a knob rather than a handle.

….my dad’s house, which contained a total of 3 dogs when I brought mine round there, was not so lucky.

I taught TenSoon to turn off lights. He’s a sport dog, not a service dog, but why have a smart house when you have a doberman? Right? Wrong. He has quickly figured out that I need light to read. And that he can end this dog-ignoring activity by turning off the light and bopping the doorknob to ask to go out. I now read by lamp.

My best ferret stories were all things I accidentally trained. Hobbes knew how to get attention via WiFi router. He once accidentally unplugged it, and it summoned everyone right to him. He never forgot. If we ever ignored him too long, he would mosey up to it and wait, like a cat. If that didn’t work, he would unplug it and wait for someone to notice. He was of the conviction that negative attention was better than no attention, so the roommate holding him up and yelling “come get your ferret!” was great reinforcement.

these are all great