Congrats to Rio!

At the tender age of 6 1/2 months old, Rio has passed his Canine Good Citizen test!! The best part was the long stay, where I had to leave him with a stranger on his lead, tell him to stay, then leave the room for three minutes. We had tried this before and he was OK, but tonight, I left him in a sit position and he never moved! The trainer couldn't believe it and the "stranger" commented that he looked like a stuffed animal! I was so proud of him.

My trainer has CGC classes combined with Therapy Dog International training, so we were doing both. That means he had to greet a person in a wheelchair, walk near hospital equipment, get used to loud noises, etc, as part of the TDI training. He did fine with all that but he is too young to take the Therapy dog test (the dogs have to be one year old). We will go back in four or five months and do a refresher course, then take the TDI test.

All that testing has exhausted him--he has been asleep on the kitchen floor since we got home--we will have to celebrate tomorrow--maybe with a fresh cow hoof to chew on-- Congrats, Rio!

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Permalink Reply by Traci -Bexter & Maggie on July 15, 2011 at 5:33am

That's really impressive! When did your first start obedience training? I don't want Bexter to get behind. He's 3 months old. How often/long did you work with Rio?

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Permalink Reply by Linda and Murphy on July 15, 2011 at 6:28am

Great job, Rio!

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Permalink Reply by Ginny Nightingale on July 15, 2011 at 6:35am

We started weekly classes at the age of 12 weeks, since that is when his preliminary shots were complete. We had 6 weeks of beginners, 4 weeks of intermediate and 7 weeks of TDI/CGC. I have raised him from birth though, so there are some things he knew already before we started the class--I had taken my other dogs to this trainer, so I started teaching all the puppies some things right away. They all knew "sit" and knew to come to me when i made a kissy sound. I had them doing that at 5 weeks old! I made the sound whenever I gave them a meal and they learned it quickly--so when they got a bit older, if I needed to call them to one side of the pen or into the other room, I would make the sound and the whole litter would come running. Same thing with "sit"--I had bits of their puppy food and taught them to sit by holding the food over their noses until they sat for it--they got that fast too--doodles are so smart!

It is also so much easier to train a puppy when the older dogs know the commands. Rio copies Mattie and Lyric a lot--but some of the things he copies are not good things! It is amazing how he knows all the favorite places in the yard to eat grass, begs for some of my lunch and jumps up on the furniture --he just watches and learns from them!