Hero's education

Hero and I went to obedience class yesterday. Hero is almost through with the intermediate class. He's heeling beautifully, and yet continues to have problems with loose-leash walking. The instructor says this is because heeling has more structure. He stays very well, even when I drop the leash and step away or walk around him in a circle, but he has great difficulty in staying when the instructor plays with a ball or rolls it past him. He wants that ball so badly! A ball is clearly one of the most exciting things in the world to him, and asking him to stay while it rolls past him is like asking a human being to stay put while thousand-dollar bills blow past in the wind.

Hero's other major downfall is jumping up on people. He'd improved greatly on this, but this is one area where getting Impulse has been a bad influence on him. Impulse jumps up to greet people, and Hero has picked up the habit from him. I'm working with him to try to correct it, but it's a hard thing to fix. Sixty-five pounds of exuberant Aussie can be a dangerous thing.

But despite these issues, Hero is a smart boy. He knows the following commands, and usually obeys them:

Sit
Come
Down
Sit/stay
Down/stay
Shake hands
Wave
Give me five
Take a bow
Look sad (drops head to the ground when lying down)
Over
Roll
Crawl
Jump
Speak
Heel
Wait
Let's go (command for loose-leash walking)
Shhh!
Feet up (command to put his front feet onto something or someone)
Up (command to jump up onto a table or car or bench)
Off
Drop it
Leave it

We'll be taking the advanced class in January, which works toward getting the companion dog certificate. Hero isn't going to get his CD unless he learns to greet people more nicely and to stay even with distractions, so those will be the two big areas we work on, I think.

A younger Hero stays:



Hero shows he knows the "jump" command: