It’s been a while since the last training update, so I thought I’d do a post to get things up to date.

Ursa is doing pretty good on her training and next weeks training day is a dry run for her Canine Good Citizen test in two weeks.  I would be real surprised if we have any real problem. The only problem that I for see is Ursa just shutting down because we can’t use treats to have her do her commands. We’ve slowly been weaning her off of the treats and it’s caused the Pyrenees mentality come out. The “your not showing me why I would want to do this attitude” has started to raise it’s ugly head. Hopefully we can make it through the test before she gets an attitude.

Fargo has been a bit of a challenge the last couple of weeks. It’s become very clear what other Newf owners have said of this age. The hormones have started kicking in and the brain shuting down. Last week was a complete waste as he just didn’t want to cooperate. This week he wasn’t too bad but still wasn’t 100% there.

Sadie, usually our wonderpup in training must have been hanging around her brother a bit too much this past week. She just didn’t want to do a thing in training today. Very unusual for her but even the wonderpup is allowed an off day. Usually she picks up a new command in minutes. It took me 10 minutes to train her to go lay down on her bed but today she wouldn’t hardly even sit on command.

Both Fargo and Sadie have graduation next week which will be nice as we will have a couple of weeks off for them. Yea!!!

As you might have read in past posts, we have been going to training class with Fargo and he has shown to be quite quick at picking up things.

At home, for the last several weeks we’ve been working with Fargo to get him to ring a bell at the back door to let us know that he needs to go out.  Currently he goes to the door and will either just stare at it or sit there waiting for us to come open up the door.  When he does this, we go over and show him the bell and get him to sniff it or to paw it to show him that he needs to ring the bell.  We’ve also tried putting peanut-butter on it to get him to mess with it but so far, no such luck.  Fargo just has not grasped the idea…at all…not an inkling that the light bulb has even flickered on this, but we keep trying.

Tonight for the very first time, we were sitting at the dinner table and what did we hear?  Why it was the bell!  Oh my goodness, could it be?  Did Fargo finally understand to ring the bell to go out?  Could we be that fortunate after all these weeks?  Sigh, why no! Uku, our cat, rang the bell to go out! We haven’t even been showing the crazy cat what the bell is for!

Sigh, Fargo, you’ve been shown up by the cat….who got to go out!