idly I was chatting with the house about the sort of dog that would be good to do Matilda's job. You know, the "pester ADHD human when stuck" task and the "make that human go to bed on time" tasks are really useful, but they're very experimental for me--I don't know many people who have trained them in a service capacity.
So I was thinking about whether you could teach these tasks to a dog who's a lot less... *gestures* that than she is. I've run into a few people who consider the idea wistfully, consider Matilda, and visibly go "yeah, but I do not want to handle that dog." Which is fair. I did this to myself on purpose, but I'm aware that I'm sensory-seeking in some very specific ways. So I spend a fair bit of time thinking about what is working for me about her training and her nascent tasks, and whether you could do this more easily with dogs that are better tuned to public access needs.
Obviously yes, you could teach the tasks in the sense of, the skills she is learning are not difficult skills to achieve. You can teach a touch target to an eight week old puppy. I'm extremely certain that you can teach just about any dog to aggressively touch-target a human in response to a acoustic cue (since I use both phone alarms and vocal cues, both of which appear to be incredibly helpful when I get stuck).
The thing is, I'm not sure whether the task is something a retriever would enjoy. I feel like this is something where the dog has to actively enjoy being in conflict with its handler a bit, like friendly wrestling or the kind of rough teasing that is actually fun for all parties. I often wail and try to mildly resist Matilda's cues; I am very very very careful not to undermine her understanding of what I will reward her for, but there's also a reason I thought it would be worth it for me to train a dog to do this task. Getting up myself in response to an alarm doesn't work; I need an external push to get up quickly, and I tend to resist a little.
Matilda, because she is the kind of asshole I really do enjoy in a dog, apparently finds pushing me around really fun. Once she understood that I wasn't really upset when I zone or whine, and will in fact tell her "good girl! well done!" if she successfully herds me through my tasks or makes me listen to a recorded alarm, she seems to have conceptualized any flailing from me as play conflict: fun to push through, ritualized and not a big deal, and a fun game.
The question I have is: do those of you with softer, "easier" dogs think that your dogs would be happy to play a game like this? I'm really curious. I think I could teach most terriers to do this without a problem, but I'm not sure how more traditionally biddable herders and gundogs would respond to it.
@doomspaniels , particularly curious about your thoughts: I know you do similar task work with your spaniels and have been doing it much longer than I have!
Have a cute dog photo for good luck.