A dog owner from Philadelphia thought she found the best solution to keep her dog from going downstairs while painting the house: placing a gate atop the end of the stairs. Her dog Lottie, however, did not let herself get fooled.
In a clip shared on Instagram in February by the dog’s owner under the username lottiethehottiepup, the beagle is seen standing behind the gate as her owner makes sure it’s locked before making her way downstairs.
But as soon as her owner is out of sight, the pooch immediately finds her way out by getting through one of the spaces in the stair railing.
A caption shared with the clip reads: “We couldn’t figure out how Lottie was silently getting around the gate at the top of the stairs during painting, sneaky beagy!”
Dogs are among the most intelligent animals. Their intellect is often compared to that of a human toddler.
According to Fetch by WebMD, the average dog can understand between 100 and 200 words, and is capable of problem-solving, while some can even learn to count and do simple arithmetic.
However, dogs don’t have a perfect understanding of command words, they mostly just understand the basic sound of important words, and respond to similar-sounding words in the same way, although they don’t respond to nonsense words that don’t sound like command words.
The video quickly went viral on social media, attracting viewers from across Instagram. It has so far received over 1.3 million views and 47,442 likes on the platform.
One user, Susan.fifer, commented: “Haha we have these in our kitchen to family room and our beagle prefers to run and jump onto sofa to go outside instead of using 4 stairs down to family room!”
Lynzyt3001 said: “Our friends had a stair gate at the bottom to stop their two beagles going up during the day, we visited with out Beagle who proceeded immediately to jump the stairs gate & toddle off upstairs, followed by their Beagles, she taught them a good trick.”
User luna_the_bubba added: “Lotties like ‘thanks mom, for setting up these new challenges for me.'”
Newsweek reached out to lottiethehottiepup for comment via Instagram comments. We could not verify the details of the case.
Do you have funny and adorable videos or pictures of your pet you want to share? Send them to [email protected] with some details about your best friend and they could appear in our Pet of the Week lineup.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.