Barking in heavy rotation

The video above is an ad that’s running in heavy rotation on New Zealand television. It’s only been running a couple months, but good grief it seems a lot longer! The reason isn’t the heavy rotation (with some brief breaks), it’s because it’s the first TV ad that’s ever made one of our dogs bark. In heavy rotation.

The ad is part of series of ads for the company using the theme of rhyming/repetition to drive home the name of the company or, in this case, what they’re offering (I shared their first ad like in the series back in September, 2015). Obviously, that’s not the problem, it’s the very start of the ad: The doorbell.

Every single time, without fail, that Leo hears the doorbell sound at the start of the ad, he starts barking. I know it’s literally every time because when I played the video above in order to check that it was the same as what’s played on TV, Leo started barking at the sound of the doorbell.

Leo does this because they had a doorbell at his first home. We don’t have one at the moment, and haven’t in all the time he’s lived with us, but he remembers the sound and it makes him nuts. Earlier this evening, the ad came on, Leo ran down to the front door barking, and stayed there making little “mffff” noises for quite awhile, even though I was sweetly calling him to come back upstairs, that everything was okay, the usual. He only came back up because he thought he might miss out on some treats he thought the other dogs were getting (they weren’t getting any, but he thought they were).

None of the many dogs we’ve shared our lives with over the years have ever done this, probably because we didn’t have doorbells then, either. That’s by coincidence, not design, but it did save me from dreading a commercial coming on.

So, when I turn on the TV for the evening news, I know this commercial will probably be shown and Leo will bark. And now I know that I have to be careful about even playing YouTube videos. It’s such a burden!!

Seriously, though, other people have problems with dogs getting into the rubbish, chewing up things in the house, digging holes in the yard, or escaping, and we have none of those problems (we had two beagles who used to escape all the time, which I can attest was a lot worse than a dog barking at a TV commercial…).

It’s actually kind of funny that he does that, and that he hasn’t worked out that there’s never anyone at the front door when he hears that sound. But I also think he’s a lot more entertaining than the commercial is. It’s in heavy rotation, after all.