Jonh

He has his moments of pure playfulness, canine goofiness, and inexhaustible energy, and then he has these moments of lucid intelligence that just astound me. My daughter and I were eating ice cream at the dinner table, and the dog was standing motionless on the floor staring (I knew it without looking) at me. He's in the habit of waiting like a zopilote for a morsel of food to fall. We resist the urge to satisfy his craving, but there are just enough accidental crumbs to maintain positive conditioning.

I had filled his food and water bowls before dinner, and I turned to my left to see that he had drunk most of the water but hadn't touched his dinner yet. Not surprising, he's been a little off his meals lately. Teething maybe, though I thought at 15 months he'd be done with that. We've been adding water to his dry food to make it softer for him, but this last time I left it dry. So I gazed at him calmly to get that rapport we have, and since his water bowl was nearly empty I said, "Water? You want water?" Then he did it. He did the behavior that blew my mind.

Calmly and deliberately, he took a few steps toward his food bowl, not his water bowl, and gestured toward the food with his snout, and then stood absolutely still and gazed at me. It was plain as day that he wanted me to add water to his food.

I did.

He let the water soak in for a minute, and then he ate it.