Dog School Graduation!

I am a good dog!  I even have a piece of paper that proves it!  AND!  They didn't use my middle name on my certificate, yay!!

Tonight was graduation night for dog school.  We had to show that our humans knew to give us treats for each of our tricks.  All the dogs in my class have made a lot of progress with their humans, but I think Marty was best.  (I may be a little biased.)  Littlefoot's smaller human, Carl, was also awesome.

I destroyed the competition in puppy-pushups, even though Lyle counted wrong.  (Lyle thinks it should be sit to down to sit is one, sit to down to sit is two and so forth.  But really it should be sit to down to sit is one, and then you count sit to down is two, down to sit is three, and so forth.)  But even with Lyle's bad counting we won!  Marty has no problem luring the behavior and I like chicken!

We practiced polite greetings, which sometimes I don't even bother to wake up for, but this time I was awake and nice.  Miss Jessica shook Marty's hand and I just laid there and waited for more chicken.  Marty says she's not sure I should count this as a win, since dogs are supposed to at least pretend to be a little interested in the human, but I say it still counts.

I did not do my best job of walking on a leash, but a lot of the class had a hard time with this, so it was okay.  We practiced the run really fast to get a treat thing and I was AWESOME at that.  Of course, I have had LOTS of practice with that.

We practiced trade with cheese-smeared hooves.  (Cheese-smeared hooves, are awesome, by the way.)  Marty has been practicing trade a WHOLE LOT as a result of the unfortunate incident involving the snail, so I don't really have any trouble with that.  Marty would like it if I would look away first but most of the time I still make her show me that she actually has something good to trade.  I like to consider myself an informed consumer, that's all.

We did 'wait' with the bowl of food, and that is super easy for me because I don't usually get my kibble in a bowl.  Mostly I eat out of Kong toys or Marty gives me food for working, so the food dish is not a big deal to me like it is to some other dogs.  Marty can say "wait" and put it all the way on the floor and I still won't move.  Now if we tried that with a ball, I would definitely not be the winner.

We were supposed to do touch with the stick, but I don't like the stick, so I just did touch to Marty's hand.  I'm still barking a lot of the time when I touch too, which Marty thinks is "less than optimal".  Littlefoot definitely won this one, since she'll touch the stick wherever Carl puts it AND she doesn't bark.

Then we did tricks.  I showed the class "shake" and a little bit of "sit pretty" that I have just started working on.  Littlefoot did an AMAZING crawl and Duke did a little bit of a spin.

At the end of class, Miss Jessica brought out bags with our certificates in them (and some other stuff, Marty said there were people treats in the bag and I have to wait until later to go through it) and a special graduation dog that plays a song.

Don't ask me why Marty looks so ridiculous in this photo.  If you get your own humans you will learn that looking ridiculous is one of their best tricks.


When I graduate from the next class I am going to get a video!