A Girl and her Dog
July 25th, 2008
Filed in: Uncategorized
I was invited back to work with my old friend Lily this morning:
No, Lily hasn’t taken up biting the mailman, or peeing on the couch … it turns out that Lily’s young person, Julia, just wants to teach her dog how to do a few new tricks. Fun stuff! Julia was a fabulous trainer when I worked with her family last year, and it seemed like she caught “training fever” during our six weeks of lessons. A year later, she’s still afflicted with it. Julia greeted me with her clicker around her neck like a necklace, and regaled me with stories of the training games she plays with Lily, the dog books she’s reading, and her theories as to why Lily doesn’t like to play fetch. (It’s all about the breed mix, she says.)
We started off doing some foundation work to get Lily used to being “creative,” since she tends to either sit or go into a down and then wait patiently. Patience is a lovely behavior in her everyday life, but we want her to be bold and outgoing when we’re working on tricks. One of Julia’s goals is to get Lily to do things with her paws, like “shake,” “high five” and “touch,” so we spent a lot of time click-treating Lily for subtle paw movements. It was slow going at first. We took a break, went for a walk, worked on “roll over” (at my request) and then talked about her dog training homework. I tried to steal a few cute shots of Lily but she didn’t like my camera at all, hence the deer-in-headlights look in every shot.
I work with a lot of kids, but Julia really made an impression on me. Her sweet nature, her love of training and her devotion to her dog are inspiring, and I’m really happy to be working with this pair again.
Julia, du bist ein Stern! (She went to German camp, so I broke out my rusty German and we did some Deutsch sprechen during our walk.)
