...I had no idea what I'd do with a potato that Flooper had probably found in somebody's dumped trash, so I threw the potato figuring she'd come back with her tennis ball. She came back with a goose down pillow, still sealed in its retail packaging. I couldn't throw that all that well, so it was the end of "Fetch" for the day.
That was about the time we realized dogs had discovered pure matter teleportation.
It was obvious in hindsight. When I walked with Flooper over to the bushes where I'd been tossing the ball, there were all kinds of perfectly spherical little divots in the ground of various depths. Some of them weren't just scoops of dirt, there was a big round hole in the side of what looked like an electric motor buried in the ground, the copper wires frayed and the core skewed once the magnets were partially freed of the axle. Somebody else digging in the area later found what he called a cairn of vacuum cleaners. Dogs mostly don't like vacuum cleaners I guess. At least not the cheaper ones.
Not all the dogs were on this. Labradors and retrievers were pretty good at teleportation, and could pretty much move anything they wanted, and what they mostly wanted to do was make their owners happy, but retrievers are pretty bad at guessing what makes people happy. Lots of reports of root vegetables materializing in front of labrador owners. Hunting dogs generally were better than other breeds. Beagles and other hounds tended to just move food and chewy things around, but they could at least do it reliably. Herding dogs had other things on their mind, although if you could train them, they could drop random small things right in the palm of your hand pretty unerringly. On the other hand, your typical overbred purse dogs were worse than useless, basically miniature psychic storms, and people got killed by small metal and glass objects flying through the air.
They mostly worked by trading the places of two similarly-sized things. So I had to lose that tennis ball to get the potato. The pillow I'm not so sure about, but I figure maybe Flooper had swapped up from a bag of trash or something.
Anyway, just around the time we started getting used to it, basically when the pit bull scare got superseded by the chihuahua scare, they stopped teleporting things. I mostly feel sorry for the scientist types who'd been working on this for so long, were beat to the punch by the dogs, who as far as I can tell stopped because they got distracted by something else.
That was about the time we realized dogs had discovered pure matter teleportation.
It was obvious in hindsight. When I walked with Flooper over to the bushes where I'd been tossing the ball, there were all kinds of perfectly spherical little divots in the ground of various depths. Some of them weren't just scoops of dirt, there was a big round hole in the side of what looked like an electric motor buried in the ground, the copper wires frayed and the core skewed once the magnets were partially freed of the axle. Somebody else digging in the area later found what he called a cairn of vacuum cleaners. Dogs mostly don't like vacuum cleaners I guess. At least not the cheaper ones.
Not all the dogs were on this. Labradors and retrievers were pretty good at teleportation, and could pretty much move anything they wanted, and what they mostly wanted to do was make their owners happy, but retrievers are pretty bad at guessing what makes people happy. Lots of reports of root vegetables materializing in front of labrador owners. Hunting dogs generally were better than other breeds. Beagles and other hounds tended to just move food and chewy things around, but they could at least do it reliably. Herding dogs had other things on their mind, although if you could train them, they could drop random small things right in the palm of your hand pretty unerringly. On the other hand, your typical overbred purse dogs were worse than useless, basically miniature psychic storms, and people got killed by small metal and glass objects flying through the air.
They mostly worked by trading the places of two similarly-sized things. So I had to lose that tennis ball to get the potato. The pillow I'm not so sure about, but I figure maybe Flooper had swapped up from a bag of trash or something.
Anyway, just around the time we started getting used to it, basically when the pit bull scare got superseded by the chihuahua scare, they stopped teleporting things. I mostly feel sorry for the scientist types who'd been working on this for so long, were beat to the punch by the dogs, who as far as I can tell stopped because they got distracted by something else.