Dog day afternoon

Raina Mortenson held an obedience class for dogs on Friday, July 1st in Trafton Park which included learning the rules of dog showmanship.

I attended the course with my Siberian Husky puppy, Kaya. We started out the event by making our own showmanship lead by braiding paracord, we then began practicing simple commands with our dogs. We had our dogs walk at the same pace with us on our left side, while turning and stopping randomly.

The hardest part of this course was definitely trying to get Kaya to pay attention at all times. After we had tried our best to perfect this seemingly easy task we moved on to showmanship. We had to walk in a figure eight with our dog and when the judge said to stop, we had to have our dog sit and wait to finish. Even though this seems like a fairly easy task, by the end of just these two things my normally super energetic pup was tired and bored.

Next we moved on to walking around in a circle with our dog always facing the judge, which involved some confusing hand switches at first. After getting the hang of it, we moved on to just practicing the hand switching and dog turning. Once it was clear we all knew what to do, we walked our dogs in a T formation. This was definitely the hardest part of all. By this point, my pup was tired from being in the heat and ready to go home.

After walking in the T the judge asked us questions pertaining to our dogs such as: "what breed is your dog?", "how often do you groom your dog?" and "how many teeth does an adult dog have?" This put an end to this obedience course. Five people and their dogs attended this obedience course and left with many tricks to dog obedience up their sleeves. Personally I think this course was very helpful in teaching me how to handle my dog better, and how to further train her to be very obedient.

I look forward to attending more classes like this one.