Puppy Training

Yesterday, Kaidin and I took Pepper to her first dog training class. There was a bit of a scramble trying to find her immunisation record (The girls at my local vet are so lovely. Not only is their office open Sundays, but they printed me off a new record for free. My doctor charges $3 for a copy of Kaidin’s immunisation record!), but we got there not too late.

The classes are run by the RSPCA. It cost $99 and runs for 6 weeks, with a graduation ceremony in the last week. Apparently we have to teach our dogs tricks to show off on that last week.

The lady taught us doggie massage – one hand holding the dog’s chest, the other hand rubbing and stroking and massaging from the ears down while saying a calming word like ‘Calm’ or ‘Relax’. The point of this is that eventually, you can just put a hand on the dog’s chest, say the word and the dog will relax. Then you can stop putting the hand there and just use the word.

We gave our dogs (there were 5 in the class) treat while saying ‘Good’ and the the dog’s name. Pepper got bored after about a minute and would have rather sniffed the other dogs than eat treats – it’s good that she’s not greedy, but it’s really hard to make her pay attention. The ‘Look’ command is to make the dog look you in the eyes, which helps later when you want the dog to pay attention. Pepper is very used to looking people in the eyes, but she was more intent on looking at the dogs, cockatoos, boys on skateboards…

We did ‘Sit’ and ‘Down’ commands. Pepper was really good at the ‘Sit’ command, not so good at the ‘Down’. There was a chocolate lab puppy called Tully who was 4 months old and picked up the ‘Down’ command a lot quicker. he was so roly-poly-pudgy and cute too.

There was a bit where we all ran around calling our dogs and doing a ‘Play’ pose (bent over, hands on thighs) to try and get the dog to follow us. Pepper and another puppy called Minus were too busy trying to get to each other to pay any attention to what me and Minus’ owner wanted. Pepper did really well with the free lead walk around, but I feel like I cheated because she had her Halti on and she is always such a good girl when she is wearing it. By this time she was definitely sick of the treats.

After the class I let her sniff Tully a bit while Kaidin wanted to pat him. I thought some people might want to go for a walk or something, because it was a nice day and we were on the foreshore, but no everyone else jumped in their cars and drove away. So Kaidin and I walked up to the circus which is being set up. Kaidin was the official photographers for the day (hence the photos being slightly blurry) and he took a few shots of the circus before I decided that at any minute some clown was going to come out and scream at us. I’m terrified of clowns. We walked back across the bridge and went home.

Later that night when I was on the phone to Adam I was saying how I kept having to say ‘Pepper, Look’ over and over again, but when I said it, she actually looked up at my eyes every time. Maybe she is learning something! When I cooked tea, I cut up all the fat off the meat and made her ‘Sit’ and ‘Down’ for it – maybe next week I’ll just take meat scraps for treats. No dog can resist!