Mike’s Doghouse

Lorna and I went to the first class for the Basic Manners at A Good Dog’s Life dog training. Lorna will be taking Sam and I will be taking Mike. The first class was w/out the dogs. We discussed a lot of stuff we’d already covered in the puppy class but I think me and Mike are the only ones in this class that had taken their puppy class. Mike will be the youngest there, I think, at 6 mos (cannot believe he is that old already!). Sam will not be the oldest, though. In the class Lorna started to do earlier, I think he would have been the oldest by far at only 3 yrs. The teacher for this class will not be Gail (the Puppy Class instructor) but Susan Wilson. They have very different teaching styles. Lorna “got” what Susan was saying but didn’t really follow Gail. It is what works for each of us, just the same as the dog.

We have homework as usual. Most of it Mike and I already know or do so I will just work on distractions. This is when you have the dog do what it knows outside of the normal place it knows it. So since Mike and I train inside the house, we will be going outside some and, perhaps, going somewhere else such as Home Depot again. The idea is for the dog to do what you want him to do no matter where you are and no matter what is going on around you. If a dog will do a sit without reservation while in the middle of a busy pet store or hardware store, then chances are that dog is truly trained. This is especially important for Service Dogs. The safety and health of the handler is at stake, not just being embarrassed at misbehaving Fido.

Part of our homework is to list what behaviors we do not want or want to stop and what behaviors we do want or want to continue. I’ll post my list here when I get around to making it.