I’ve always liked that commercial where the guy is sitting lazily on the couch watching the game on TV and he looks at his dog and makes a little gesture and the dog hops up from his spot snoozing on the floor and trots over to the fridge. Fido chomps on a tea towel that’s tied to the fridge door, pulls open the door, reaches in and snags a can of beer in his chops and brings it right back to the guy on the couch. Wagging his tail happily (the dog not the guy).
I can tell you that about the only thing that I was ever able to teach any dog was to sort of ‘shake a paw’ but getting any one of our beloved mutts to bring me a beer, or bring back a ball or even better – to stop barking when someone came to the door, well, forget it.
But some people either have some sort of mystical gift for training animals or the special animals themselves are unlike any animal we’ve ever had in our family – and we’ve had everything from canaries to turtles. Take bees for example. Now we’ve never had a pet bee but if we ever did I doubt that we’d ever consider training a bee to be a bomb sniffer bee. I mean, can a bee be that kind of bee? (Right now I’m trying to resist saying, ‘To bee or not to bee’.) But researchers in the U.S. are in fact finding that bees can be trained to detect explosives and are “just as effective as dogs”. Sure, but can they fetch you a beer from the fridge?
An animal site on the interweb tells of a story from the 1800s whereupon a South African trainman named James Wide had a really bad day at work and fell in front of a train which unfortunately ran over his legs. James was still keen on being a trainman so they trained a baboon named Jack to help him. Jack was so good at pushing James’s wheelchair and even operating the signal switches the railway company hired the marvelous monkey. Baboon Jack worked there for nine years and was paid 20 cents a day and a half bottle of beer every weekend. (Sounds like my time in high school.)
My sister-in-law had a number of pet ferrets but I’m pretty sure she never put them to work as electricians like the Boeing Company did. Up until the 1960s the aircraft manufacturer apparently used ferrets to quickly scurry into small areas dragging electrical cables, areas that engineers couldn’t squeeze into themselves. And in 1999 it’s reported that ferrets were used to solve access problems when technicians were stringing cables for rock concerts. There may have been beer involved (with the roadies not the ferrets.)
In Sweden wild crows are being trained to be “street maids” picking up cigarette butts and dropping them in garbage cans. In San Diego the navy is training dolphins to guard piers and ships. Asian countries have found macaque monkeys pick 20 times more coconuts than humans. And since 2011 Larry the cat has become somewhat famous as a rat catching member of the civil service for the P.M of England, although he only catches the non human kind of rat there. Larry also “tests 10 Downing Street’s antique furniture for napping quality”.
And speaking of cats, I’ve been making great strikes with Chicket our own calico fuzzball princess. So far I’ve trained her to beg for food constantly, jump up on the kitchen table and scratch the leather couch. And it’s only taken me six years.
Harley Hay is a Red Deer author and filmmaker. You can send him column ideas to harleyhay1@hotmail.com.