We’ve now had four written tests and our first practical/hands on exam too. I did great on three out of the four written, and got an 80 on one that I think was pretty poorly written and unfairly graded. But written tests are only 10% of our total grade, and I’ve done well enough on the others that I don’t think I’m going to care. I do plan to write a note to the instructor just to get some things off my chest (nicely!), but I don’t care if she doesn’t change my grade. It doesn’t help at all that I got that test back on what had to be my worst day here. More on that in a separate post.
Heel on leash
One minute sit/stay
Three minute down/stay
Five minute place/stay
Sit at the door
Sit while friendly stranger greets handler
Recall
The down was the scariest. We were taught to train it using treats, and we had about a week to go from “yes, my dog will lie down when asked” to “my dog will stay in place as long as I leave him there, up to 3 minutes.” That’s a pretty significant leap. Joker turned out to be the bigger nightmare. Sugar seems to have figured out that, even when I step more than 3 feet away, I still almost always come back, and I bring food with me when I do, so she’s pretty chill about the stays.
But Joker was a lunatic. He got the sit pretty quickly, and we’d been working on place for so long that all I really had to do was phase out the treats, which wasn’t to hard. But down was a disaster. He would mouth all over me as I was putting him in position, he would bounce up the second I moved, he would roll on his back and throw a tantrum, he even learned to army crawl towards me when he started getting bored. So we worked REALLY hard at down, and on test day I would have given about 50/50 odds that he’d actually do it.
We had to test both dogs, and I did Joker first. My thinking was that I was much more nervous about him, and Sugar is much more sensitive to me, so if I went in nervous with her, she might screw up too.
First was the five-minute place. We all placed our dogs and all hell broke loose: barking, whining, dogs breaking. Blessedly, the instructor gave us a redo, and told anyone who wanted to move away from a dog that was antagonizing their dog to do it now. The second round went much better for everyone. Joker was perched, as is his wont, on the slippery edge of the place bed looking at me, and suddenly he started to slip. So I stood there helplessly as he scrabble-scrabble-scrabbled his little feet on it, and somehow he managed to stay on. Phew. Actually, I was even able to appreciate in that moment how cool this was. Not only did he not break his place stay, he very clearly demonstrated that he gets it. He knew the rules well enough to work hard to stay on the bed when gravity was working against him. Good little dog!
During the place exercise I was next to roommate M, whose dog, Heath, decided that this would be the day that he discovered how delicious leather leashes are. So we both stood their amazed as he chewed right through the leash. She totally deserves extra credit for an off-leash place, because he spent the last minute or so totally not connected to her, but stayed right where he was. She had to borrow a leash to finish the test.
The sit was next and went fine, and the down was similarly uneventful. I could not believe my good fortune. In fact, the whole rest of Joker’s test was astoundingly good, and the instructor told me that his recall was the best one she’d seen all day. Woohoo!
So we did our victory lap and I walked back to put Joker away and get Sugar, thinking “this is going too well, what kind of crazy stunt is she going to pull?” But she was her wonderful reliable goofy self, and did everything nearly perfectly. She was a bit laggy on her heeling, but kept catching up with me, which I also found pretty cool because it made me think that she actually does know what heel is supposed to look like, even if she's sometimes to lazy to actually get herself there. The only other thing was that when I put her into a down, she popped back up slightly, and I had to readjust her. If anyone saw it happen, I probably lost a point or two.
But all in all, I could not have been more proud of my dogs and myself. We all worked really hard in the week leading up to the test. Of course I know there was a fair bit of luck in it too, because there were plenty of dogs who didn’t do nearly as well as I expected them to based on past performance, so I’m thanking the stars as well.
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