Meet Stewie! This five-year-old Scottish terrier has been learning new skills since he was three months old, and recently added arithmetic to his repertoire.
“Like most puppies he would wait by the door and bark at it when he wanted to go out. But after a few weeks when he had to go number two he would instead enter one of the bathrooms and start barking at the toilet, having made the somewhat embarrassing connection on his own of what really goes on behind those closed doors,” Ian shared.
“It had never occurred to me to teach him the word for keys because I just didn’t think it was relevant or something he would be remotely interested in. Anyway, that was the beginning of a beautiful friendship, one which I realized could never be a one-way street where I merely imposed all my expectations or wishes.”
“I wondered if instead of 2000 toys I could teach Stewie to differentiate between 2000 numbers. I basically replaced one kind of object, a toy, with a different object, a wooden number, teaching him not just the name of each object but also showing him the corresponding numerical value of that object ,” Stewie’s owner shared. “Once I realized I could teach Stewie how to count, I taught him to do math exactly the way I remember learning it myself.