Due to our busy schedules, and changes in when we teach, we can’t always be home at a reasonable hour to feed Yoshi. As a way to assure that Yoshi will get fed at the same time every day, we purchased an automatic dog feeder. The feeder we bought allows for four meals to be programmed in sequence. We could feed Yoshi once a day for four days, or twice a day, etc. There is a clock and a timer associated with each of the feeding times. The best part of the appliance is that it lets you record a short message to play after the food bowl has been rotated to get the dog’s attention.
We’ve trained Yoshi so that he needs "permission" to eat when we put food in his bowl. If we are watching when we put the food in his bowl, he’ll wait until we say, "Ma Ma!", which is what you say to infants meaning "Eat!". Since the instructions to the machine came in English, and I was home when it was delivered, I was the one that recorded my voice saying the command to eat. Now whenever the machine is programmed to feed Yoshi, I’ll hear a voice saying, "Yoshi, Ma ma!"
Of course, the only problem is that when we set Yoshi’s food dish to feed him when we went out to watch a movie, we only had enough food for that day. The food dish cycles through the program for three days, because we didn’t bother to turn it off, but each time it would tell Yoshi to eat, but would only present him an empty dish. Talk about a mixed message.
The best reaction we got out of our talking food dish was when I went to feed Yoshi at the same time the feeder said it was time to eat. Yoshi saw me getting food out of the bowl and heard my voice coming from another room telling me to eat. He usually follows me when I go near the food, so when he heard my voice, he did a double take, as if he didn’t know what was going on with me being in two places at once. Messing with a dogs mind wasn’t on the list of features, but it should have been.
