Apr 05 2009
Rewards and Hazards of Obedience
Sunny waits to do something more interesting than a down-stay
I admit it — if you tied my hands, I couldn’t say a word. I gesture quite a bit, and I gesture more when I’m into my subject.
Some time ago, when Sunny was a young dog, I visited my parents with her. She lay off to the side watching me, at an angle I couldn’t see her well, as I told my mother a story. My mother no longer remembers what the story was, but she does remember that I was telling it with a lot of hand-waving and other body language. My dog was extracting hand signals from this. She backed up (still down), sat, edged back again, went to the side a little, downed…
At this point my mother suggested that for the sake of my dog I should sit on my hands.
Instead I called Sunny over, patted her and released her from the obligation to pay attention, and stashed her beside my chair where she couldn’t see my hands anymore. We had worked a lot at that point. She could do “Doggy baseball,” as the urban-search people call it, over smallish distances from one overturned flowerpot to another — directed sends away from handler to the pitcher’s mound, to any base from there, and back again, or to first or third at the start. She had an excellent stop-and-drop. She could walk backward. Apparently, she could also crawl backward. She enjoyed the game, but that time she really wondered why I was ignoring her when she was being so good.
We started obedience and basic agility when Sunny was eight or nine weeks old, all food-based and jolly. Once she was older, I would sometimes use a toy reward for a good set of exercises. She thought of it all as a sort of “Simon says.” Occasionally, if I did something she had wanted me to do, such as massage her hind legs after too much romping, she would give me a toy reward. The obedience ring was a whole different world, possibly because I was tense and that made her want to protect me; in the obedience ring she was (as I posted on April 1) inventive. We did earn a rally title, because in Rally-O the judge cares far less if the dog performs the heeling pattern on average six inches off the ground. At home, my Simon Says games were more complicated and interesting by Sunny’s reckoning; the judge’s “Forward, right turn, halt, forward, fast…” Dullsville! No walking backwards? No directed sends? She watched the other dogs do Utility-level and refused to plod through Novice to get there.
I can’t say I blame her. I’m not crazy about the CD exercises either. This time around, with Dustin, I’m hoping to nonchalant from Rally to CDX before he notices the heeling pattern was really boring three times running. Sunny had six runs at it, passed twice, and made it clear on the last one that she really wasn’t enjoying herself. We went off and did more searches.
My mother reminded me of the hand-signal story as one of her favorite Sunny moments — thanks, Mom.
Photo by Tres Elliot
