But that's MY bed!

Before we moved to the country, and before our children were born, we had Great Danes. Although not noted for their intelligence, we had some pretty smart dogs. One such dog was 'Britta". Britta was a homegrown dog. We had both her mother, Chelsea, and her father, Bruin. From the day she was born, Britta was what we called a 'comfort-hound'. As a newborn pup, Britta cried and yelped incessantly. We thought something was wrong with her. Her mother Chelsea was so freaked out by Britta's incessant protests that she began to actively seek a place to move her pups to, rather than the perfectly suitable spot we had picked. Finally, after deciding that we could not convince the first-time mother dog that her pups were not suffering on their bed of cardboard on top of carpet, with old blankets on top of that, we decided to take a twin size mattress and put the blankets on top of it to see if that would work. Immediately, Britta, the only pup who had continued to complain from the moment she sucked air into her lungs, became quite. This trait continued into adulthood. When grown, she would actively seek the most comfortable place for a dog to be in any given situation and try to put herself in that position. In our living room we had an extra-large, three foot by four foot dog bed. But, Great Danes are very large dogs, so this bed would only accommodate one dog at a time. Since we did not allow our Danes on the furniture, Britta tried her best to always be the dog who got to be on the dog bed. One day, when Chelsea was sound asleep on the bed I saw Britta walk over to the bed, look at her mother, and just stand there staring as if in deep thought. All of a sudden Britta began to bark furiously as though she heard someone at the door. Her mother, Chelsea, awoke and jumped to her feet running and barking toward the door. Whereupon Britta calmly walked over to the bed and laid down. When I told my husband about what had happened, he did not believe that the dog had deliberated in this manner, followed by an implementation of a 'plan'. Several days went by until my husband and I were both in the living room when the exact same scenario began to play out. This time when Britta came to the bed and found her mother had beat her to her favorite comfort zone, she did not at all hesitate to begin her 'intruder' bark. When my husband saw that Britta really did set-up her mother, not once even looking at the door when giving the alarm bark, but calmly and quickly head for the bed, he too was dumbfounded. We saw the same scene played out numerous times after that until we noticed that the sleeping mother dog was getting suspicious. She started to tone down her own intruder response in reply to her daughter's 'crying wolf'. Finally, after several days of awaking and consistently shortening her trips to the door, she finally just woke up and barked from the comfort of the bed while eying her daughter suspiciously. Eventually, the gig was up, and Britta's alarm bark when her mother was sound asleep brought only a suspicious glare from Chelsea before she would put her head back down and go to sleep. Britta would then just look at her mom, lay down on the carpet, and let out a huge sigh.