Dogs seek humans for help when they cannot solve the problem themselves. It’s one of the behavioural adaptations that distinguish them from wolves.
I can’t find the video of it, but there’s an experiment where a chunk of meat has a long piece of rope tied to it and placed in the centre of a cage so that only the end of the rope is accessible. Both both domesticated wolves and dogs are smart enough to start pulling on the reachable end of rope to get the meat to the cage edge.
Same experiment is repeated but this time the rope is nailed to the floor so that pulling on it will not work as last time. A wolf will eventually give up trying and ignore the cage. A dog will try every way it can think of and then seek out a human for help when all the attempts fail.
The behaviour of the dog in this article is more common than you think. What is impressive is that the human didn’t get in the way and actually figured it out.
Of course not. Republicans would still have a month or so to rile up another rebellion.