Dogs Are Smarter Than We Give Them Credit For

Most people do not realize how smart dogs can be. So bright in fact that you might need to enable the child protective locks on your windows in your car. Usually, you would do this if you have children, not expecting to have to do it with a dog.

Recently I went on a small road trip, and we took our puppy with us. Typically when we drive around town, we roll down the back window partially for our dog. Cognac likes to stick her head out the window. However, it was raining and very windy, and we could not keep the window down for very long.

She did not like this very much at all. We were a good 3 hours into our 5 and half hour trip when she started pawing at the door. We thought it was because she needed us to stop to let her out. After all, she was not used to such a long car ride. It turned out she was trying to figure out how to open the window because she pawed at just the right spot and managed to hit the window button and roll down the window.

Her head shot out of the window faster than we could blink and we had to hit the button to stop it from going all the way down. After that, we enabled the child locks. At least for a little while. We chocked it up to be a mistake because really with the way she was pawing at the door we just thought she was restless and it was an accident.

On our way home it was windy, and we knew that we would not be able to roll the window down for her. At least, not as many times or for as long. It sucks, but we need to be safe driving and not endanger ourselves just to make the puppy happy. We had planned to make a few more stops than we did the first time and to stop at one of the truck stops that had a dog park and let her run around.

Oh, that wasn't enough for our precocious dog. Cognac remembered how she rolled down the window before, and my fiancee forgot to enable child locks as he was driving. We were going down the highway probably 75 or 80 depending on if he felt like speeding. We'd tried to roll the window down once, and she loved it, but it was too dangerous to keep it up, so we didn't choose to do it again.

We did not have too, Cognac rolled down the window herself and darted her head out. It was probably my gasp that triggered the action. We had to tell her to move her head and roll the window back up. We caught it before she could get the window down very far but the lesson learned is, whenever we are taking our puppy on a trip: enable child locks.

My puppy, as smart as people don't realize she is, remembered how to roll down the windows.