January 20, 2013

  • Another Progress Report

    Next week Annie will graduate from her beginning obedience class. She--Annie--will mark our family's first successful graduation from a dog obedience class. (Riley is a well-behaved, obedient dog: he 'flunked out' because a family reunion scheduled itself over his graduation.) Annie now sits, downs, takes it, sometimes leaves it, walks on a loose leash, comes when called and does not aggress on on-coming dogs. She is the star of her class. (I should probably mention her class is a controlled collection of problem dogs. Still.) We are working on 'stay' now.

    Teaching Annie to 'stay' was kind of a puzzling experience for Nancy and me. I told her to sit, she sat. I told her to stay and she sat there, gazing at me intently. In fact, we're having a harder time working on the release than we are on the stay.

    In our class saturday we each took everyone else's dogs and tested them on their commands. Annie charmed everyone. (AND she did not eat the doxie in the pink coat, the dust mop (Yorkie) OR the big white dog that bounded at her. She did not threaten Blue, who ambled over into her space to greet me. She never once growled at Cain, who is 9 months old and wobbles in every direction all of the time.) All of the dogs did well with each of us. Annie is not good at 'leave it' (partially because Cheryl gets flustered and forgets the command, all the while flapping like a mad duck.)

    We are already signed up for our intermediate obedience class. In intermediate class we learn to ditch the Gentle Leader and eventually, work off leash.

    In our class there is a man with a 10 month old pit mixed puppy. He is struggling to get his puppy under control. Like us, it appears he has never had a dog before, so many of the things I heard and dismissed are equally non-reassuring for him. He took his puppy to the dog park to practice come. Now had he said that that clearly in my presence, I would have sat that man down and had a long talk with him (Nancy did)  because he appears to be really struggling. (His dog did not come. Duh.) People at the dog park did the same for me: it seems worthwhile to pass along. I would have shared them all:

    Nobody's dog comes at the dog park. Well, they do. They don't 'come' at the dog park on their first visit to the dog park. They don't 'come' at the dog park when they barely know the command 'come'. There is no way a simple human with one-44th the sense of smell a dog has can understand the number of distractions available at a dog park. In our first obedience class with Annie she 'sat' every time I looked at her at home: at the class, surrounded by other dogs, she'd never heard the word before.

    Puppy brain. People who have had more than one dog talk about 'puppy brain' all of the time. They say things like, "He'll out-grow it." This is a transition a dog-owner has to see to believe. Riley outgrew his puppy brain one week. Literally. He was a bounding, insane, could-not-concentrate puppy on monday, and friday he was a mature, well-behaved dog. Annie--the current star of her class--decided she lives with us, we are her people, there are certain behaviors we don't like and she should stop those, all about a week and a half ago. She'd lived with us for five months. Suddenly we looked down and there, gazing up at us with love, was a calm, attentive little black dog. She's still a terrier, but the insanity is gone. We can rub her head. We can play with her belly. We can grab her and she doesn't dash away to Canada. Life is not perfect, but it is much, much better than it was.

    Our trainer says Annie didn't change: we did.

    Nice thought. I'm not sure I fully believe it, but it is a nice thought.