oooohh....poor Zeus.

As most of you know, we have two dogs...(shown in profile picture above) Zeus and Bella. Bella is the red girl, and she is fiesty, fast and smart! She always gets everything we've ever tried to teach her pretty quickly...now, she also has a strong will-so she might not always do it if she doesn't "feel like it". Then there's Zeus.....he's the black one and he's the boy. We like to call him our "special needs" dog. He doesn't always get things. When we first got him all he did was sleep. He slept so much that there would be an imprint outside from where he laid that day.
Well he finally got over that stage (although he still sleeps a lot) and he's much more playful. He's actually learned to sit, and down. He's the kind of dog the is scared of everything...even treats. He somehow thinks you might be trying to poison him or something...he's a unique dog to say in the least.
Well, we have this doggy door in our house. And as soon as we got it Bella knew exactly what to do. She goes out and in whenever she pleases (and thankful to go to the bathroom). They always say dogs will follow other dogs-its best to teach them something together so one can lead right? We tried that with the doggy door. It took about 6months and many hours of training Zeus in and out of the door for Zeus to finally at least just follow Bella outside the doggy door. But then we ran into the problem that he wouldn't come back in. We were afraid when we left the house Zeus would run outside and of course, never come back in. But we still wanted Bella to be able to go out there to go to the bathroom...so we've been kind of in this rut of not knowing what to do about this whole doggy door thing and Zeus. We just have been leaving them out, and if Zeus goes out, then he's stuck out there-whatever.
So last night was a pivitol point in Zeus' dog life. We came home from a long night away from the house, got out of the car and realized Zeus was in the backyard (not anything super unordinary). Then we came INSIDE the house and there was Zeus barking and frolicking around out of joy that we were home.....wait a minute. Zeus was inside. We were just outside and he was outside. What is going on? So out of sheer excitement we quickly ran outside the door around to the backyard/gate area and called Zeus. We saw him run out the doggydoor (as we were peering through the fence posts) then we ran around and went in the front door-again calling Zeus-and low and behold HE RAN INSIDE the DOOR! If you're reading this and you don't understand why I'm actually dedicating a blog to this story-then you've never met Zeus. We were so proud of our little boy dog, we did it with him a few more times and gave him lots of praise and treats when he came back in on our own!!
I will conclude this story with how this morning went. We woke up-let Zeus out. When we called him to come back in (still excited from last night) he looked at us with this blank face and just stood there. He never came in-we had to "let him in"....
what is wrong with this strange dog?
hopefully one day he'll "get it".