You might have noticed that a lot of the article headlines about Cooper call him a "genius" or say things like, he's "smarter than most toddlers." However, you need to understand that these are just clickbait headlines designed to get you to click onto the article. As his owner, I
A lot of people wonder why I (Kirsty, owner) chose to get a shih tzu (instead of a different dog breed). The short answer is: the shih tzu ticked all the boxes for the traits I wanted, and was a good fit for my lifestyle.
In 2012 I was preparing
I do it partly because I like to challenge him and keep his mind active, but I also think that dogs are capable of a lot more than most of us give them credit for, especially when it comes to communication. Have you ever heard of Koko the gorilla? Did
I started training Cooper a few days after I got him when he was 8 weeks old. I would ask him to sit, and when he did I would praise him and give him a piece of chicken. He figured it out very fast! I used this same method to
Unfortunately there isn't a clear time length for any of them, and many of them involve improvement over long periods of time. For example, he got the concept of putting the shape in the shape sorter hole within about 5-10 minutes, but to start learning the shapes took weeks, and
Nope, it's not! Based on his photos you might assume that his tongue always hangs out, but that's just because I tend to upload photos where it's out. I normally ask him to stick out his tongue before I take a photo!
Although his tongue does hang out a lot
This tutorial will explain how I taught Cooper to “count” pieces of kibble. You must follow the “Communicating using buttons” tutorial before you follow this one.
You’ve probably seen videos of dogs counting and doing math before. Most of these dogs, even the famous ones, are receiving extremely subtle
This tutorial will explain how I taught Cooper to press a button which has a symbol representing a type of food. This tutorial is the prerequisite for the “counting” trick.
Cooper does a few different tricks using talking buttons: pressing a button which represents an object or type of food;
This is the trick that people ask about the most so I thought I would explain it first! Ever since Cooper was a young puppy he has had his tongue sticking out some of the time. When he was 3 months old I decided to turn it into a trick.
Getting a dog to play with a shape sorter is a multi-part process. He needs to be able to:
I used only positive