take that, lab rats!
Ever since we reintroduced the Buster Cube as a way for our dog to get a little extra exercise and stimulation (the weather has been cool enough to take him for walks again--YAY!--so he's getting both walkies AND the cube), I've been watching his progress with it. And it's been very interesting.
At first, he would just push the cube around randomly and hope for the best. Since then, however, he's refined his technique quite a bit. In order to get the food pellets to come out, he has to get the cube rolling, not just sliding across the floor. It does this better on rough surfaces, like rugs. However, we have a very limited number of rough surfaces in the house, and quite a bit of finished wood flooring. If he merely pushes the cube with his nose on the smooth wood, it just slides across, which means no pellets. So he's worked out a little trick: he flips the cube over his paw with his nose to get it started. (Or over my foot, if it happens to be handy. Ouch.)
He also has less trouble with the cube getting stuck under furniture, because he's learned to steer it a little better--if he sees that its trajectory will take it underneath something, he's sometimes able to bat it in a different direction. And when it does get stuck, he's gotten much more skillful at extracting it. He finally figured out, for example, that if it gets under a chair or something he can sometimes bat it all the way through so that it comes out the other side. (This took some rather clever dog reasoning--after all, if a dog wants a toy to come *towards* them, it's counterintuitive for them to push it away.)
The last pellet can take a long time to come out after the others are all gone, and sometimes he gives up before he gets it. So I've taken to checking the cube by shaking it. And he does now seem to understand that if it rattles, there's still some food inside, and if it doesn't, there isn't.
Isn't dog psychology cool?