Adult Training

For those faithful followers of our blog, you know that we are working hard to get Moose trained properly. We want to make sure that Moose minds his manners and is enjoyable for everyone once he is the size of most of us. J Our desire is that one day he will be able to be a therapy dog to hospital and nursing homes. We still have a long ways to go, given that he is still afraid of wheels, but his temperament is right on par for where he needs to be.

This past Monday was our first day of adult training with Moose. He is not even 6 months old but he is already considered an adult for training purposes. Or trainer Alex, with Sit Means Sit is great. You can tell that he is truly a dog lover. I think that he might do this even if it wasn’t a job. Moose loves him and responds really well to him. I think that if Alex was something in a previous life it might have been a mastiff. Not because of his size, but he demeanor is spot on with Moose. However, Alex is far from lazy and I think that Moose still gets in much more nap time each day.

This week we worked on heel with Moose and some with dealing with his distractions. I have to say- by the end of the hour session I saw improvement with him. He’s still Moose a big, clumsy dog with a sweet personality, but he was learning to ignore some of the more exciting things around him that would distract him from doing what we ask.

We also worked on Place with him. Basically, that means that he must remain in the place that we asked him to stay. In most cases it would be an object that we would ask him to sit on. The idea is that he will not move from 'place' until you let him up. We have a long way to go on that.

We will continue to work with him over the next week in spite of our busy schedule. Moose may not know it yet, but we have high aspirations for him. Maybe we are naïve, but we think that he will do great!

Alex’s dog Jackson does things that we will never see Moose do, but that we thought was rather impressive nonetheless. Check this out. Alex told Jackson to ‘place’ and he jumped up on top of the fire hydrant! He didn’t move until Alex told him he could. There was a couple of times that Jackson had to sneak in some Brad and Becky lovin’ but other than that, he barely moved an inch without permission from Alex. Pretty cool if you ask me.

Something had me tickled in this picture of me walking Moose. I don't remember what- but I'm SURE that it was well worth the head tossed back laugh. And NO, I do not exaggerate, nor do I add drama to any situation. ;-)