Young dogs, new tricks

My dogs have learned all sorts of clever things in the past week or so. First of all, Hero has learned to fetch correctly. In the past, he would race joyously after a ball or frisbee, and run back to me with it, but refused to drop it unless I offered him a treat. But now he runs back to me and drops it-- after which I do reward him most of the time. The point is, however, that I no longer have to show him a treat to get him to drop it-- he does it automatically. I didn't actually try to teach him this; a switch just seems to have flipped in his brain.

I'm teaching Impulse the "feet up" command, where he jumps up and puts his front feet on whatever surface I indicate. He loves to do whatever Hero does, so I tend to run them through practice commands in tandem-- I have them both sit, both stay, both lie down, and so forth. The other day I told Hero "feet up," and Impulse looked at me so sadly ("I bet I could do that, Mom!") that I used the treat to lure him up, too. Since then he's done it perfectly, and seems very pleased by his new accomplishment.

I tried something new last week. I decided to try taking both dogs out for a walk together. It wasn't easy at first. Hero gets wildly excited, and tugs on the leash for a while, and Impulse gets wildly excited, and jumps all over Hero. So I had one dog pulling my arm out of its socket, and the other dog tangling the leashes together like crazy. But that only lasted till we got out of our neighborhood (a very short walk). Once we hit the path, they settled down and walked very nicely. It was funny to watch them; they walk shoulder to shoulder, like a team of Huskies. They're best buds, and it really shows. Anyway, from then on, the walk was easy, and I'm sure any neighbors who saw us coming and going wondered if it was the same pair of dogs. On the way out, they were maniacs, but on the way back in, they were perfect gentlemen!