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From the time that I brought Tecumseh home as a puppy I could
see that he was an exceptionally intelligent dog. I trained him
to sit, stand, stay, come, lie down, roll over, and a
dozen other commands, all of which he learned rather quickly and
easily. I even taught him to hold a treat on top of his nose
until I released him with,"Okay!" At this time
he would flip the treat up into the air and then snatch it out
of mid air so
quickly that you could barely see it. The way he
did it was so impressive that people usually laughed, and he
even won a trophy for that trick at a dog show we attended. I felt that
because he was so intelligent he would do well in obedience
competition, so we found the best trainer in Utah and began
attending her classes. She was excellent. At the obedience shows
in Utah all the blue ribbons were usually won by dogs in her
classes. Nevertheless, obedience competition wasn't what I
thought would be. Don't get me wrong, Tecumseh loved it. While
we were training all of my focus was on him, and he thrived on
that. We went to obedience classes for about a year at which
time I quit. I just didn't feel it was very rewarding. The
whole process made me feel like we were in the military. It
wasn't enough that Tecumseh had to sit, but he had to sit
perfectly square facing exactly forward. No sitting on his leg
or foot, no leaning in on me, or any other inexactness. When he
heeled he had to walk with the hole in his ear exactly at the seam in my pants. This
meant that all the things I had already taught Tecumseh I had to
teach him over because the way he did them didn't meet their
standards. "Boring and irrelevant" was how I felt about it. My
thinking was that I would have more fun teaching him a thousand
cute little tricks, never mind that none of them "lined up"
perfectly. About a year after we quit these classes I decided to
give it another try, but it was even more boring than before
because now we were starting from the beginning for a third time.
Tecumseh, however, did very well. One day, for example, our
instructor introduced us to the hurdles. In our previous studies
we had never done the hurdles before. No problem, Tecumseh
jumped right over the hurdle the first time while all the other
dogs ran around the hurdles. We came back the next week and he
again was just flying over the hurdles looking like he enjoyed
it while the other dogs continued to run around the hurdles. Our
trainer asked, "How much time did you spend at home this week
getting him to do that?" I didn't even have any hurdles at home.
When I told her we hadn't done anything she replied, "That is
disgusting! Do you have any idea how many hours most people have
to spend to get their dogs to do this?" Even though I had never
taken Tecumseh to an official obedience show, from the very
beginning he had always done well. One one occasion our trainer said, "You know it's too
bad you don't show him, it's so rare to see a dog of his breed
do so well." I, on the other hand, was beginning to feel we
would get more intrinsic value out of training Tecumseh in "Search and
Rescue" (have you read my story about
how well he could sort out a trail from a mumbo jumbo of other
trails?) |
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