Today was Intermediate Obedience graduation day for the Newfs! They both did really well on their “final exams”. Fargo easily won the pushup contest and Sadie blew everyone else away on staying with distractions. Sadly both were shamed by the Border Collie in our class when it came to the speed drills!

Fargo’s graduation picture:

Sadie’s graduation picture:

They’ll be taking a well deserved (and much needed) couple of weeks off before starting Advanced Obedience at the beginning of next month.

Yesterday was Ursa’s Canine Good Citizen test walk through. A nice little trial run to see what last minute things we might want to work on for the real test next week.

First, let me say that I’ve been through trial runs in other areas and I expected for things to be a bit bumpy. That’s usually the nature of the beast for these things. Boy, I couldn’t have been more correct!

From the very start, Ursa made it known that she didn’t feel like participating. The first thing to do on the test was to have the handler and dog go up to a stranger in the store. The dog is to sit on command while the trainer talks to the stranger.

Ursa who has known how to sit on command from day one, in fact she would sit on command before we even started training classes, would not sit…at all! No matter how much we tried to get her to sit, the Pyr attitude had come out and she wasn’t going to sit for anything.

The next thing for her to do was to meet a person and sit to be petted. Well, I think we all know how that went, as a particularly stubborn white dog wasn’t in the mood to sit.

The rest of the trial test went ok but to know that your dog had “flunked” the test before it ever really got going was very disheartening to say the least. The only saving grace is the fact that this was just a trial run and not the real deal. Obviously we will be working on basics this week before the test.

Oh, and just for the record, once we got home Ursa sat on command every time she was asked to so once we got home. Sigh, such an aggravating dog sometimes.