A video on Chinese social media shows a pet dog following his owner’s voice commands over an online surveillance system and turning on cooking appliances. Lucky has been trained to do a range of household chores, such as flushing the toilet, turning off and on taps and lights and even fastening seat belts. — SCMP
A pet husky named Lucky in China has managed to cook a meal of rice for his owner who used a home surveillance system to remotely instruct the dog.
The husky’s remarkable cooking effort was recorded in a video uploaded to mainland Chinese social media last week.
The dog’s owner, a man surnamed Zhou from Zhejiang province in eastern China, had already washed the rice and placed it in an electric cooker before going out to buy groceries.
Zhou said he took longer than expected after he decided to get a Covid-19 test and decided to ask his dog to start preparing dinner by speaking commands through his remote home surveillance system, the Qianjiang Evening News reported.
“Lucky, it will take me a long time to queue up for the nucleic acid test. Can you press the power switch for the electric cooker on?” Zhou is heard asking the dog in the video.
Lucky is seen lying down on his stomach, but on hearing his owner’s voice request he stands up and is then seen using his two front paws to press the “on” switch on an electric power point board where the rice cooker is plugged in.
Zhou then asks Lucky to go to the rice cooker and press its on switch as well so the meal can start cooking.
He said he was confident his dog could turn on the power board strip, as he had trained Lucky to do this previously. However, it was the first time that he had asked Lucky to turn on an appliance like the electric rice cooker.
“The electric cooker, not the power strip. The nearby one,” Zhou was heard saying in the video.
He had to repeat the instructions a few times, but Lucky was eventually able to understand his owner and turn on the cooker.
“Press that button ... You didn’t press it correctly. Try again and press it harder.”
Shortly after this Lucky managed to turn on the rice cooker.
“How fabulous! I will prepare delicious food for you when I return home,” Zhou told the dog.
Zhou said he has had the six-year-old Lucky since he was just a puppy. The dog has been trained to do a range of household chores, such as flushing the toilet and turning on and off taps and lights.
Lucky is very intelligent and a fast learner Zhou said; the husky figured out how to fasten a seat belt in his car in just minutes, he claimed.
The video of Lucky cooking the rice was uploaded to the Chinese video app Douyin last week and has since received 134,000 likes, 40,000 comments and 110,000 shares of the clip at the time of writing.
“You can see this video is just one minute long. But, to make it I had to spend plenty of time beforehand training the dog so that he could achieve this result,” Zhou said.
A full-time video blogger of pet animal clips, Zhou said he and Lucky have a “tacit understanding” between them.
“He will understand what I mean through the expression in my eyes or just from a simple hand gesture,” he said.
“But Lucky only listens to my orders,” he added. “He seems unable to understand what my wife says.” – South China Morning Post
