[Dailydrool] Young Charlie is now a CGC

[Elizabeth Lindsey]

Young Charlie has been in obedience classes for the last four months,  
and last Tuesday he took the big test that will clear him for going  
into pet therapy training next winter. It's with enormous relief that  
I'm able to announce that he passed his test and is now an official  
Canine Good Citizen.

I'm very, very proud of him. I knew he could do it, it was just a  
matter of him wanting to. The week before the test, Charlie was  
feeling puppyish again and I was hoping it was just a passing thing.  
That it was a bad dress rehearsal that would lead to an excellent  
opening night performance. On top of his periodic immature behavior,  
Charlie also has trouble with anticipating what I'm going to tell him  
to do. If he thinks I'm going to ask him to come, then he gets up and  
heads toward me before I tell him to. His sit-stay is good about 80  
percent of the time because he's prone to making assumptions about  
what I'm going to tell him to do next.

Then there's the whole roll-over thing. This winter I taught Charlie  
how to roll over on command, which he loves doing because all of the  
humans in his obedience course who saw  him do it told him how  
adorable he is and then gave him treats. So when Charlie doesn't feel  
like following through on a command, he rolls over and looks up at me  
from his prone position. Then he rolls over again. He'll do three or  
four roll-overs, stopping after each one to see if he'll get a treat.  
He's very cute and it's hard not to laugh at him--and he knows it.

But fortunately, on the night of his big test Charlie felt like  
listening and following the directions he received, not the  
directions he thought he was about to receive. He paid close  
attention to me the whole time and stuck right by my side on a loose  
leash. There were two moments of suspense, one where he wanted to  
greet the tester in an overly friendly way when she tried to brush  
him and one where his bottom started to rise up off the floor as I  
was walking away from him after I told him to sit and stay. But it  
all ended okay. I dropped down to the floor to successfully distract  
Charlie while he was being brushed. Then later I caught him just as  
he was breaking his sit and I was able to quickly return to him and  
tell him again to sit and stay before he got too far out of position.

The tester was the same one who did our Elsinore's CGC test and also  
taught Elsinore's pet therapy course and tested her for that. She's  
very tough, which means when you pass her test, you've worked for it,  
it hasn't just been given to you. But she's also extremely fair and  
does whatever she can within the confines of the rules to help a dog  
do its best on the test.

So now I'm waiting for Charlie's CGC certificate to arrive so it can  
go in a frame on his crate, just like Elsinore's. And I'm waiting for  
Charlie to do just a little more maturing before I enroll him in the  
pet therapy course. After he settles a bit more, I think he'll be  
wonderful at pet therapy. In addition to being unfazed by sudden  
noises or wheeled things, he's very outgoing and has never met a lap  
he hasn't wanted to try to climb into for a cuddle. He excels at  
cuddling and is quite generous about sharing his snuggles with total  
strangers as well as with his own family. He's an indiscriminate hound.

Unlike Elsinore before she took the CGC test, Charlie kept me  
guessing the whole way through that last obedience course--would he  
or wouldn't he feel like doing well on the test? He felt like doing a  
bang-up job on it--and he did. Whew!

Elizabeth
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