Ask Lemmy

My dogs go to their leashes and sit when they see me loading my pipe...

"High five" instead of "paw" for two dogs which wasn't the accident. The accident is they learned to associate high five with wanting something. When they want pets, food, bones, or toys they obsessively high five at you.

My cat does it now too. Maybe they learned it from the cat who saw they got treats for high fives. My wife hates it. I think its hilarious.

Not a command perse, but my dog has learned that "hey Google, what's the temperature outside" usually means a walk is coming and gets excited.

"Alright" means whatever we're about to do, it's just about to happen.

“Nikko, get out of the kitchen” backs up till his feet are over, but still touching, the threshold.

Wife taught our dog to crawl.

She was trying to teach the dog to lay down and stay while she backed away with the treat. Our dog figured that if she kept her belly on the floor and crawled over to the treat it should be fine...

So my wife said "Good crawl!", and kept working on it with the dog. Now the dog crawls on command.

The xbox ding when turning off means I'm getting up. They can be dead asleep, hear the tone, and know they are probably going outside.

My cat twists his whole body in a very funny way when we are eating chips to ask us to give him some

I guess at some point I made a positive reinforcement without noticing and now he does it all the time

When one of my cats is on my lap, she responds to "ok" as time to get up. Started with, "ok kitty, I need to get up," but now just the "ok" and she jumps down so I can stand up.

my cat thinks "up" and "down" both mean "get off my lap".

she also recognizes that when I sit and talk to myself (voice chat) is perfect petting and cuddles time. she's well known to my therapist and team because of zoom meetings.

and both guinea pigs and the cat have all decided that we do cuddles about 830pm. I thought it was "after work and dinner, sometime before bed". but the number of times I look up to see what the fuss is, and it's 830 and all 3 are looking at me expectantly... I assume they figure the time by daylight, because it's not consistent when I get home.

My bichon/poodle mix has learned the sound of a telephone call. Whether it's vibrating ringing, the ringtone sound, the ringing sound the phone makes when you are calling someone, or just the inflected way that I say "hello" when answering the phone. He even picks up on any of the above sounds on TV, and he seems to be able to differentiate between the short vibrate of a notification versus the long vibration of a ring.

I have a lot of phone anxiety which means I often get up and pace around my apartment a lot when I'm on the phone. He thinks this pacing implies that I want to play with him, so he gets super excited, chases me around, and tries to grab my ankles or jump on the furniture and nip at my fingers. When I want to play with him, these behaviours are cute and fun. But he has associated me walking around my apartment with wanting to play which is distracting and frustrating when I'm already on edge from my phone call anxiety.

"Face".

She will put her head through any circle if she thinks I want her to, because I would always get annoyed at her when she wiggled too much trying to get her harness on as a puppy.

My cat blesses people when they sneeze

My cat loves riding around on my shoulder, and also loves food. He figured out that he has a better than average chance of getting treats after a shoulder ride. The counter in the bathroom is the highest in the house, where he can get the closest to my shoulder. So I apparently taught my cat to come running when he hears the toilet seat go up. Does it every. Single. Time.

I have yelled "Hey!" so many times at so many pets over the years (dogs and cats) when I caught them messing around with something they shouldn't be that they all started to think "Hey" was their name.

Not specifically a command, but my dog knows the sound of me taking my headset off. She figured out that me taking my headset off means I'm getting up, which means there's a chance I'll let her outside.

I could never get dogs to go around properly a tree on a retractable to unbollox it. Their instinct always seemed to be to go the wrong way and I just cold not get them to do it in such a way they realized that was the fix. My current dog basically just did it as a puppy and then I associated a word with it.

F O O D

My Chihuahua mix is a very eager lapdog, couch potato, and bedbug. However if she is in any of those places and I say, 'excuse me,' or, 'I gotta get up,' then she knows it's time for her to move and gets out of the way for me.

My cat Siegfrieda thinks that "bitte" (please) means "free petting". That's because I usually tell her bitte when she's taking too long to obey the command. For example...

• Zizi! Komm nach Hause! (Zizi, come home!)
• [Siegfrieda ignores me to chase the shadow of a butterfly]
• Frieda, komm nach Hause. Bitte. (Frieda, come home. Please.
• Prrrwwwwn? [runs in my direction]

My dog responds to swear words by doing the kinds stuff you see emotional support dogs do in videos- press on your chest, give you kisses, nuzzle your face, etc.

Except she's small, blind, and a bit... intense, so she kinda launches into you if you're sitting, with some intense affection.

IDK why. I guess we don't swear very often, ao when we do, its special, and we swear with enough gusto for her to think we're very, very upset.

My cat and I slow blink at each other a lot. She usually wants to eat breakfast on the catio, but it's not fully screened in yet, so I would prefer she ate inside as it attracts other cats and sometimes ravens. I stand in the doorway and ask her to come in, but if she slow blinks and then keeps her eyes closed while still pointing her face at me I know she's not coming in. That's my signal to put down the damn cat food woman, it's al fresco today!

Did I teach her "eyes closed for outside breakfast" or did she teach me "give up when I squinch my eyes closed at you"?

My cat once hurt their foot and was limping so I gave them some treats and food.

They now limp around with their front paw raised anytime they want food.

I train my cat to speak. I wish I knew it was forbidden cursed knowledge. She dose not shut up. If it's 10am and im late on breakfas, she will meow non stop.

I can't sleep in anymore.

For a while he learned that "this is the last one" meant we were about to stop playing fetch and he'd pretend to have noticed something odd or been distracted to avoid bringing the ball back and having it taken away. We worked through that one with some treats, so now "this is the last one" means "treat upcoming".

We air dry our clothes on a balcony he doesn't often get to access and he gets to walk out with us when we're doing that and bark at birds and neighboring cats (which is why he isn't allowed out there all the time). He's learned to set up camp next to the door when he hears the washing machine beep after a wash cycle. Also when he sees us grab the container we use for the laundry, in case we're about to go pick up a dry load.

It wasn't a command, but I distinctively remember the first time my cat growled at me for picking him up and I set him down immediately. Now it's his way of telling me to let him down whenever. So I guess he taught me the command instead!

My cat has learned how… delicious? ear wax is. I was itching my ear once, she started licking my finger, and now if I even raise my right hand near my head she flips out and runs up into my space just in case it’s ear wax time.

Note I don’t actually have a ton of ear wax or feed it to her, but something about my finger after I scratch my ear just drives her crazy.

Seriously though my ears are clean 😂

Border Collie — go get mom. She’d go and find the now ex-wife.

And “Attack!” She’d just stand there and bark like mad.

The dog was sweet; and your biggest problem was she roll on her back and pee on the both of you.

We put a battery powered doorbell on the door leading outside. My puppy Veronica quickly caught on but mostly rang it when excited rather than when she needed to go out.

But about six months ago it kicked in what it's for and she'll surprise us by going across the house to hit the bell and tell us she means business.

So it wasn't exactly accidental but took a year.

Also same as yours, "Go get your sister." She'll go try and figure out what her older sister is up to and bring her back.

“Car” When we are walking in our neighborhood (there are no sidewalks) I’ll say “car” and he’ll move into the grass area when a vehicle approaches.

"After you".

My dog would walk right on my heels and nearly trip me. Taught her "after you" kind of accidentally and now she goes ahead a distance and then waits for me if I'm not fast enough.

Taught my cat not to use his claws. This was when him and I were playing together one night. The really cool thing about it is he caught a chipmunk one day. And I talked him into letting the chipmunk go by repeating, no claws, no claws!

I taught my pet rock to "stay" in 1988.

It hasn't moved since.