We had these with our jack russells for years: basic things like outside, walk, car ride, etc. It took a while for my jacks to pick up the idea but after about 3 or 4 months they would start pressing the outside button without interaction from me. I would let them outside and give them rewards. Success!
But oh no. Now the dogs think it’s a treat button. I hear the outside button go off, I walk into the kitchen and then they run directly to where the treats are and wait. So that’s an annoyance.
They started to figure out that they couldn’t just push the button and get a treat. They had to push the button and THEN go outside to get a treat. So they would push the button, go out of the back door and stand on the patio then come back in and run up for treats.
Then the buttons get scootered around on the floor. I’m in the kitchen making dinner and I bump into one of the buttons and OUTSIDE blasts crackily from the speaker. Now all the dogs come running to the back door because they think it’s treat time. And don’t bump into one of the middle of the night when you’re trying to get a snack out of the fridge for yourself, you’ll hear all the dogs run downstairs because hey it’s treat time again!
I think it’s a fun game to be able to communicate with your dog in such a way but I probably won’t buy them again. We ended up just buying one of those little hotel bells to put on the floor. When he wanted to go outside he would ding the bell, which was good enough.
It’s going. I’m really tired of working in IT and I want an exit from this career field so bad. I’ve been doing this since 1995 and IT has become the bane of humanity. In the '90s we all had pie in the sky dreams about the ways we were going to make the world better with computers and programming, and it’s just turned into lots of complicated ways to take money from people.
I learn languages very easy so I’m going to go to a local community college and just start taking language classes. I can speak three languages right now, but for the next semester I’m going to go back and take Latin. That will give me a reading boost for Spanish, Italian, and French.
Will I ever do anything with it? Who knows. But I’m so tired of IT that I am almost thinking about going to the airport and working a ramp job.