Coming up with activities to keep Geordie occupied during his first winter proved to be challenging.  He never has been the type of pup to play by himself.  He would much rather have someone else there with him.  (This can be exhausting when your puppy is awake 20 hrs a day!)   Our family dog loved to play “Find the Biscuit” and would search and search until he found every treat we had hidden.  Hoping to buy myself a few minutes of peace and quiet, I introduced Geordie to the game.

Since Geordie wasn’t good at Sit/Stay yet, I had my Mom hold him in one room while I hid a biscuit in another.  After we released him to search, we sat down where we could see him and had a chat.

Geordie searched for a few minutes, then came over to my Mom, made eye contact, and made a noise that had the cadence of “I dunno”.  He clearly wanted her to tell him where his treat was.  Without gesturing, she said, “It is over on the register, behind the end table”.  Geordie paused for a moment to think, got an “Aha!” look on his face, then ran behind the end table to the register and grabbed the biscuit.   The two of us were completely stunned.  Until now, we had no idea that this little 8 month old puppy had the linguistic skills to understand that sentence.   So surprised, we kept jumping around yelling, “He knew what we were saying!  He understood!”

We didn’t realize it, but that was the first indication that we had a puppy Noam Chomsky on our hands.