Perhaps someone can shed some light onto something. When I'm unable to supervise Casey (an 8-month old pup), she stays in a totally enclosed metal pen (top open, but enclosed all the way around) on our main floor (the pen is about 2 meters (8 feet) long by 3/4 of a meter (3-4 feet) wide. It's big enough for her to move around, it's got her dog bed and toys/chew stuff and a water dish. Beyond the playpen is just our house (there are no toys laying around outside her pen, she doesn't sleep on the couch - only her dog bed or the floor, etc., there's little or nothing on the main floor besides a couch/loveseat and our kitchen table and I'm not on the main floor when she's in the pen, I'm upstairs where she is not allowed to go). She has recently been trying her darndest to escape the pen (by jumping over - which is totally impossible for her). I understand that boredom is likely the cause of her escape attempts, but something really odd happened today that I'm wondering about.

I gave her a kong with a treat stuck in it when she was in her pen. About 20 minutes later, I went back downstairs to check on her because she was making a bunch of noise. She had managed to get the kong up and over the side of the pen and it was on the other side (the side that she was not on). There is no way she accidentally pushed it through the pen wall, because the metal bars are too close together for it to fit through (I checked). This means that she had to have the kong in her mouth, and then tried to jump over the pen wall and dropped it over to the other side when she was unsuccessful in her jump attempt.

Why would she go through the effort of jumping over the wall with the kong in her mouth? I could understand if some awesome treat was on the other side of the pen wall that she wanted to get at, but she had the awesome treat....so why bother jumping the wall with it?

Just a query...I'm trying to get into her head.