Amazing Chihuahua Plays A Game Of Cups

My chihuahua can beat me at a shell game. I want to be clear about what I am saying here. There is a game, an ancient con, a swindle humans have used to relieve other humans of their money for roughly two thousand years, and a six-pound dog who cannot reliably locate her own water bowl (which is in the same spot it has been for her entire life) will win it every single time.

If you have not seen the shell game, the setup is simple. You take three cups. You hide a treat under one. You shuffle the cups around, you ask the contestant to pick, and the contestant picks wrong, because the contestant is a person, and people are bad at this.

The dog is not a person. The dog is good at this.

The Rules, Which She Follows And I Do Not

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Here is the part that breaks me. The game has rules, and she obeys all of them. She sits. She waits. She does not touch the cups with her nose (and her entire personality, all six pounds of it, is touching things with her nose). She picks exactly one cup. If she gets it wrong, which happens approximately never, she accepts the restart with the calm dignity of a small professional who bills by the hour.

I cannot follow rules like that. I have been told, in this same house, by the same wife, not to eat crackers in bed, and I have broken that rule more times than the dog has lost the shell game. The cracker rule has no shuffling. The cracker rule has no loud music. The cracker rule is just "do not do the one thing," and I do the one thing, while four feet away a dog is solving a centuries-old fraud with her eyes basically closed.

I am not making this up.

For a while I assumed she was guessing. So I tested it, the way a serious scientist would (which is to say badly, at the kitchen table, in a bathrobe). I shuffled slowly. She got it. I shuffled fast. She got it. I shuffled for what felt like four minutes, with an extra cup, in a pattern I personally could not have tracked with a pen and a witness, and she sat there with the bored expression of a parking attendant and then tapped the correct cup. I added music. The music distracts ME. It does not distract her. The only thing the music accomplished was that now I was losing a dog game with a sad trumpet playing.

The Boring Explanation I Refuse To Fully Accept

I looked into how she does it, because I wanted, on one level, to believe she was a genius, and on another level to confirm that I am not an idiot. The internet had bad news on both counts.

The trick, it turns out, is not a trick. Dogs have a sense of smell that is, depending on which source you trust, somewhere between ten thousand and one hundred thousand times sharper than ours. She is not tracking the cups. She does not care about the cups (the cups are theater, staged entirely for the benefit of the humans). She is following the treat by scent the whole time, the way you would follow a marching band, if you could smell a marching band from three counties over. She also reads my hands, my posture, and the tiny involuntary glance I make at the right cup, a glance I did not know I was making until a dog quietly pointed it out.

So to summarize the science: she has a superpower, and I have a tell. This is not the matchup I was promised.

I want to stress that this is genuinely good for her. The vets and the dog people agree that this kind of puzzle is real mental work, the canine equivalent of a crossword, and it is one of the better rainy-day activities you can do with a chihuahua who otherwise spends overcast afternoons staring at the radiator like it owes her an apology. She likes it. She is engaged. She is, in her small way, happy, which is the entire point of any of this, and which I will now ruin by making it about me again.

Because here is what actually keeps me up at night. I am the one who hides the treat. I am the one who knows where it is. I have, in every meaningful sense, the answer key (it is my own hand, the answer key is my actual hand, and I still cannot use it). And I lose anyway, because I cannot stop my own face from informing on me to a dog.

I am not making this up. I have started practicing a poker face in the bathroom mirror. I have a wife, a daughter, and a six-pound dog, and so far the only person impressed by the poker face is me, and even I am on the fence. The daughter (she is eight) calls it "the constipated look." The wife has asked, with real concern, whether I am okay. The dog has not asked anything, because the dog does not need to. The dog already knows where the treat is. The dog has always known where the treat is.

The dog, I am increasingly certain, knows where ALL the treats are, including the emergency ones I hid on the top shelf, behind the good plates, for myself.