1) paddling in the drinking water provided. Nell loves water. She did lots of homework practising in her water bowl at home. I am developing trench foot as a result of having to paddle around the kitchen in wet socks
2) learning to ‘sit’, ‘settle’, ‘down’ and ‘stay’ using the bribery of sausage
3) learning to come when called, again using the bribery of sausage and providing there was nothing more interesting going on at the time of recall
4) being very interested in many things other than the content of the puppy training syllabus. To be fair, she is only 15 weeks old and hasn’t yet mastered reading and I neglected to read the syllabus to her. And she wasn’t interested in watching the training videos because she isn’t a visual learner. She’s a bribery-of-sausage learner.
5) loose lead walking. More sausage. Always sausage. Sausage everywhere.
6) barking. Or, more precisely, ‘wuffing.’ Nell doesn’t bark. She ‘wuffs’.
7) using cones (that were supposed to represent a doorway) to perfect her skills in cone wrestling. I believe, in educational terms, this is called ‘thinking outside the box.’
8) general arsing around. Of course, these day students are encouraged to take charge of their own learning. Nell is very much an independent learner. Educationalists celebrate this. Puppy owners not so much.
9) selective hearing - ‘What was that? You want me to do WHAT? Sorry, I can’t hear you. I have sausage in my ears.’
10) staring at the instructors as if they were stark staring crackers. She was spot on with that observation with a couple of them.
Actually, joking aside she is doing pretty well with the ole puppy training malarkey. Andy and I do mini-training sessions with her every day and, being a spaniel/poodle cross she is a smart cookie. We shall continue on with post-grad training now we’ve got the basic gist of how it works. And here is her graduation photo with her proud Papa. She ate her robes and mortar board…
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KJ
KJ