Video: Smart Dog Locked Outside Rings Doorbell at 2:18am, Waits for Owners to Let Her In

Illustration - Kevin Duffy/Shutterstock

From the archives: This story was last updated in November 2019.

While dogs have a way of getting what they want, usually by being cute or lovable, one pooch in McDonough, Georgia, really took the cake for being the most ingenious canine in our books. After having gotten out of the house one night, Chika, a Labrador mix, wanted back in, and so guess what she did? She rang the doorbell, and it was captured in an adorable video.

Eventually, her human Rob Fox let Chika in from the chilly fall night in 2019. Later, the recording, captured on a RING doorbell device, was posted on Reddit, and Chika became an internet star.

According to Fox, it all started when she accidentally got locked out of the house on Oct. 29, 2019. “We have three dogs,” he wrote in a post labeled “Got ding dong ditched at 2:18am” on Reddit. “That particular one [Chika] sometimes sleeps with my son. He went outside to put chickens up and didn’t realize the dog ran out.” From there, each member of the family thought that Chika was somewhere else in the house.

Fox wrote on Facebook that there was “lots of chaos going on at the time and she ran out while putting up chickens without us knowing.” He added that Chika doesn’t always sleep in the same place, which made her whereabouts difficult to figure out. “She sometimes sleeps with Gavin and sometimes with us. So Gavin thought she was with us and we thought she was with him.”

After roaming around for several hours in the family’s yard, Chika tried to come back in at 2:18 a.m., only to find that the house doors were closed and her humans had gone to bed. From there, she put her noggin to good use, intelligently imitating people by pushing the doorbell with her paw and waiting patiently for someone to open up.

One commenter noted that if he were in Fox’s shoes, he would have been scared of a robbery attempt and called the police. Fox responded, “I nearly did. I grabbed my gun and headed to the door. My wife yelled out to me that it was the dog, but still couldn’t get back to sleep.”

To all those who were worried about whether Chika was okay, Fox posted some words of reassurance: “She is all good. Currently sleeping on her pillow in front of my entertainment center.” He joked that “in another video I won’t be sharing is me in my underwear two minutes later letting her in.”

Another Redditor who saw the video got confused and thought the dog might be a stray, especially because of her lean frame. Fox wrote that Chika is perfectly healthy but very energetic. “She runs all over the yard all day (and apparently last night too),” he wrote. “She eats a lot, but burns it off too. She is Lab and some sort of hound mix, just naturally skinny.”

Others worried that Chika had an anti-barking collar on, which Fox explained was in fact part of the fence system keeping her safe. “Our yard is partially fenced and to be safe, until we can finish fencing the entire thing, we are using wireless fencing.”