Cgray posted this in another thread.
This is an amazing story and I hope Carol will forgive me the copyright violation[
].
So this is how to keep working dogs (Australian cattle dogs in this case)
busy.
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Hope you'll have something for those dogs to do, or else they will become self employed at something not of your choosing. The problem with smart working dogs is they need work to do, or else they get a little loony and find something to do on their own. We had family friends when I was a kid who ended up creating an agility course in their backyard for their blue heelers. They had a signal rigged to go off randomly to tell the dogs to run the course, those dogs spent all day waiting for the signal, instead of whatever negative behavior they had become self employed at. The neighbors all got a kick out of watching those dogs run the course when the bell rang.
This was the 70s pre video era, although I would bet at least one of the neighbors probably got some super 8 footage. They had to do the random signal for the dogs because when it was first set for every hour the dogs kept doing whatever until one minute before the signal, and then would line up waiting for the signal. Once they put it on a random time system they spent all day waiting for the bell.
One of the owners was a mathematician and computer programmer back in those pre-personal computer dark ages, so he programed it to run off a Rube Goldberg combo of a Radio shack digital clock, some mechanical clockworks, a school alarm bell and as I remember a calculator. He died a couple of years ago, I wish I could ask him exactly how he did it, but those dogs quit digging up his wife's asparagus and salad beds. They were her dogs, but he got the job of creating their electronic babysitter.
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