Impossible to work

Today was the last day of Henri’s first series of obedience classes. Today we worked on distractions and then towards the end the class worked on getting a reliable down without use of gesturing. Henri, who has been working on this trick for a pretty long time (since before class even started actually), passed the test with flying colors. More important (to me at least) was learning that what I was doing was the right thing to do”^a1a”. Most important of all is that the instructor (Jamie Damato from AnimalSense, who is a great trainer and teacher) said that Henri was the most improved pup in the whole class. Valedictorian was also bandied about in reference to my fearless bulldog.

It’s great and all, but we’ve still got a long way to go (I want Henri to get his CGC and he couldn’t pass that test yet). Some of the other owners in the class, as well as neighbors and passersby have noted that Henri is a very well behaved dog. I wouldn’t go that far just yet. I think he’s pretty well behaved for a puppy, but no dog is an obedience champ at age 6 months. At this age, everything the dog does is teaching it how to behave, and some of those behaviors are good, while others are bad. I’ve just been able to weed out a few negative behaviors, there’s more yet to do. We’ve got a lot of work to do regarding focus and recall in particular. Henri hasn’t completely learned proper manners when it comes to greeting strangers and other dogs (though his improvement has been remarkable over the last 6 weeks), and let’s not forget that it would be nice to teach him a few parlor tricks for when guests arrive (I’m just not up to it yet, fetch took a month to learn, and it got exasperating at times).

Henri has certainly learned a lot in 6 weeks, but I’ve learned a lot more. I haven’t become an ideal dog trainer, but I’ve learned to be a lot more patient and a lot less reactionary. These are good personality traits to work on. Who knew that learning how to train your dog would make you a better person?

Since Henri is a handful (and the first indoor dog I’ve ever had) and I have a lot yet to learn, we are going to keep taking classes. Fortunately for us, the next class is on Sunday afternoons, which is a lot easier to wake up for.

1. I assume that’s why it was successful. Though it took me a while to figure out what the right thing to do was, which is why it took me way longer to teach it to Henri than it took the instructor to teach it to one of the puppies in class aaa