Or if this is a mad scientist’s lair, maybe there’s a dog door big enough for you to crawl through but it only opens in the presence of an RFID tag on a dog collar and doing a retinal or voice scan on the dog (because mad science) and you’ve got the dog, but the collar is gone for some reason and you have to find it.
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Sorry this won’t play on the forum, but link to YouTube.
I think the answer is “[smart] dogs can figure out anything given long enough.”
A dog would have an even easier time with a latch-style handle they could press down on instead of turn.
Or a button-press. Or if they hold someone’s access keycard in their mouth and present it to the scanner.
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Vents! Love that idea. A clever enough dog could probably work his way through them, and then the lab door automatically unlocks when opened from the inside for safety reasons.
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Are you the dog? Or is there a human player character?
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You’re a human giving instructions to the dog, so the puzzles in this section are generally based around “what becomes non-trivial when you don’t have opposable thumbs”. A human could just UNLOCK DOOR WITH KEY but I don’t think even a very clever dog would have the dexterity to do that, so they need elaborate workarounds.
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When your only tool is a dog, every problem looks like a tennis ball.
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Depending on why the human can’t operate normally, what about a push bar? Those are pretty easy if you’re trained to open them (or there’s motivation on top of the bar) and you just have to put your paws on it and lean. If the human cannot push and move easily at the same time, then this could be a viable option.
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Wonder no more. Dogs will dig at carpet just because doing that is fun. Dogs and carpet are a bad mix for many reasons, but this is one of them. Put some bacon under said carpet and you’d have carpet confetti in no time.
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Repurposing a puzzle from Hand Me Down that involved a cat, I could easily imagine a big, old dog taking advantage of a warm shaft of sunlight that happens to end at your door. You’re the locked-door puzzle now, dawg! If the sunlight were to go away somehow, well, a respectable dog would have to move.
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Ooh, I love that! I don’t think it’ll work for this game but I’m going to have to remember that for the future.
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Just to clarify, is this a trained dog (specifically to help the human do tasks) or just a pet dog that the human is “manipulating” to get to do what they want them to do?
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Trained to obey instructions (i.e. you can say DOG, TAKE TOY and expect him to obey), but not a service animal. Having the dog open locked doors is more a one-time necessity than an everyday thing.
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Once I read about dogs on the Moscow subway that sneak up to a person eating something and bark loudly. The person gets frightened and sometimes drops the food, the dog eats it. “DOG, BARK” could be a command …
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I had a cross kelpie. She was very smart. She could open a door by pulling down on the handle (similar to the one in @HanonO’s photo). She could nuzzle a sliding door open with her nose. There was one time when the fly screen was broken on a screen door and she just walked through it like it was a flap on a doggie door. When she was very young, she used to jump over the side gate or dig her way under it, but she would never go far.
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There are “acrobat” dogs. We had a terrier who could jump probably five feet in the air when she wanted to so regular fences were no obstacle. There are also dogs and cats who are begrudgingly given the “Houdini” tag as they can escape from anywhere.
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that is, the Zorkian Ring, as I call it, (place a certain kitchen in the place of the lab and the familiarity is immediate…)
Indeed IS low cunning, enticing a dog to move whatever is slight ajar
thumbs up for the new twist to one of the most classical puzzles !!
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
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Don’t have anything to add on the puzzle suggestions front, but reading this thread reminds me of a toy poodle my father had when I was a kid that had dug his dog bed into the carpet under my father’s side of my parent’s bed. There was literally a poodle-sized hole in the carpet in that spot.
I’m also reminded of the Chihuahua that was originally my sister and inherited by my sister’s second child after my sister died. The Chihuahua would normally beg until someone would pick her up off the floor and put her on her owner’s bed, but that Chihuahua, when she got impatient, could get up on the bed herself… even one with an extra thick mattress and box spring and an unusual amount of floor clearance. and the chihuahua was on the smaller side for the breed while not being a teacup.
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