A California pet owner has shared footage of her dog doing something unexpected on the porch outside their home.
Jeri, from Lake Arrowhead, was inside with her husband when they started hearing a “loud banging” coming from outside the front door. “We received a motion notification that someone was at the front door. Before we could even get up to go to the door, we heard loud banging,” Jeri told Ring.
However, when Jeri’s husband went to see what had made the noise, he was surprised to discover the most unlikely of culprits: Shorty, their dog.
Ring
It wasn’t a surprise to see Shorty out on the porch. It’s one of his favorite spots. “Shorty likes to sit out on the front porch. We had the AC on, so kept the front door closed,” Jeri told Ring.
Yet the idea that he could have been the one making that racket seemed absurd to his human companions. Shorty had never done so before. He didn’t seem capable of doing so. Besides which, he had no reason to. Or so they thought. It was only later, when reviewing footage from their Ring doorbell camera, that Jeri discovered the truth.
Dogs are a smart bunch and studies have shown they are capable of imitating certain human behaviors. In 2013, a study published in the journal Animal Cognition found dogs are capable of copying human behavior for as long as 10 minutes after it has occurred.
As part of the study, researchers trained eight dogs to match their own behavior to the actions of a human demonstrator. The dogs were then trained to pause for a short interval of time before demonstrating the action.
They were then tested on how well they remembered the actions in a variety of conditions. The study concluded that dogs were typically able to reproduce the actions for as long as 10 minutes after they first saw them, even with distractions.
Maybe that goes some way to explaining what Shorty was seen doing on Jeri’s Ring camera. In footage shared with Newsweek by Ring, the super smart pooch can be seen quite literally knocking on the door with his paw, evidently keen to be let back into the house.
This isn’t the first time a dog has been filmed knocking on their owner’s door or, as in one instance, ringing the doorbell. What made the footage so surprising to Jeri and her husband was the fact it was something Shorty had never done before.
It left them both understandably shocked. “After we let Shorty in, we went back to the video to watch it over and over. It’s the first time he’s ever done that,” Jeri told Ring. “We laughed so hard and immediately shared it with neighbors on a Ring.”
Did Shorty learn his trick from Jeri or her husband? It’s entirely possible. But dogs aren’t the only pets to knock on doors. Cats are also known to not only knock but ring doorbells in an attempt at getting inside. Dog doors and cat flaps could soon be a thing of the past.
