OBEDIENCE TRAINING

Not long ago I saw a cartoon that showed a man and his wife standing at attention and saluting while their dog strutted before them twirling a swagger stick. The man was whispering out the side of his mouth, "I'm not sure Obedience School was such a good idea."

Actually, there's a lot of truth to that cartoon. Our dogs train us just about as much as we train them. Here are a few examples:

Mickey has me trained to keep his water bowl full. When it gets empty, he digs furiously in it and scratches his nails HARD against the dry bottom. I hear this fingernails-against-the-blackboard routine and come flying into the kitchen and fill his dish. After several repetitions, I am now trained NOT TO EVER LET THAT BOWL GO DRY. I check on it periodically throughout the day and if the level starts getting low, I take care of it immediately. I don't want to hear that hideous sound again.

I saw a dog training video that said you could get your dog to do something by giving him a treat when he did it. So I bought some Pup-a-Roni and began training Mickey to "sit." "Sit!" I would command. After several false starts, he caught on: sit, and you get a treat. But then after a while he began training me by coming over and sitting in front of me and looking up expectantly. What was I supposed to do? If I didn't give him a treat, then it would undo all that training. So I would get up and get him a Pup-a-Roni. You can guess the rest. Pretty soon he had trained me to fetch Pup-a-Roni's on command. The result is, now I can no longer order him to sit; he sits when he feels damn good and ready, and I had better hop to it when he does.

I usually open the door and let him out in the front yard to do his business before we go to bed. (For some unknown reason, we don't have a door from the house to the backyard.) Sometimes he wants to stay out there and smell stuff and bark and run into the street. Aha, Pup-a-Roni to the rescue! I yell "Treat!" and he comes running. I felt pretty smug about this. Guess I outsmarted that little booger! But pretty soon he began expecting that treat. Now he has me trained. He won't come in unless I sing out "Treat!" And I have to draw it out, singsong fashion--"Tree-e-e-eat!" Only then will he come loping in. Otherwise, he stands out there at the bottom of the porch steps and looks up at me, annoyed--"Can't she learn a simple command?"

Last night we went through this routine, and then he scratched at the door to go out again. What is this? Did he forget to pee or something? I let him out, only to have him stand at the bottom of the steps and look back at me. I had a sudden, sinking feeling--now he is going out so he can come back in and get a Pup-a-Roni.

I'm sure you are asking yourself, why would he go to so much trouble? Why not just "sit," since he would get the same result--i.e., a Pup-a-Roni. I am afraid the answer is pretty obvious. He isn't content with teaching me simple commands. He wants to see if I can learn more complicated behaviors. I had better hide that hula-hoop.