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A. Kristina Casasent, Author
Delightfully Weird. Occasionally Dark
Where the dog never dies!

Dog Tricks and a Wonderful Husband

It was another busy and strange Sunday around the Casasent Casa. There was some personal news that I still haven’t figured out how I feel about. We made homemade pizza again. I am trying to make a good gluten-free, nut-free, eggless crust. I think I have one that is pretty good, but I am still working on improving it. The improved recipe will be posted. (The recipe is already my favorite pizza crust. – Tod)

Tod was wonderful and did the final review on a horror story we are submitting. I wrote the first draft of the story… but I have been having trouble editing it. There are REASONS.

Tod also helped me do a set of recordings for the American Kennel Club (AKC) Novice Trick Dog Title. You only need to show 10 tricks, but… I had us record more than that. We are going to pick the best ones, or the ones that only qualify as Novice and are not allowed for higher levels, and submit them soon.

Our Novice list:

Catch

Crawl

Crokell crawling

Fetch!

Crokell fetching. Yellow cones to show distance.

Hand Signal “come”.

Crokell responding to a hand-signal-only come command.

High Five

Crokell giving a high five.

Kennel up and wait for release.

Crokell put himself into his kennel as is waiting to be released.

Kiss… sort of

Crokell licking air, because Anna pulls her hand away from the kiss.

Platform

Crokell on the low platform.

Press

Crokell with his front paws on a chair.

Shake

Crokell giving a paw to shake.

Twirl

Crokell doing a twirl.

Touch

Crokell moving to touch an oar with his nose.

And Push up…. I didn’t show a picture of pushup which is sit-down-sit-down-sit-down because it is more about the motion and I have a lot of him sitting already.

Crawl for Crokell is one that I don’t see us doing much more than the 3 body lengths. The Novice level is 3 body lengths. That isn’t much for a small dog, but for Crokell that was 11 ft, which is longer than the required “fetch” distant for Novice! And it goes up a lot at each level. I think doing short bursts of crawl is fine and even good for him. But I don’t know about longer distances or too much.

Other comments

We will probably record some of the other ones we skipped today. We only skipped 3 that he knows or that I had previously trained him on: Get in Box, Sit in Box, and Balance Beam. You might have guessed it was because we didn’t have the items. We used to have a box big enough for him to get into but when we moved we didn’t bring it. So, we are cutting down another box. As for the balance beam, it will be home-made, but he likes getting on stuff, probably because most of the time he isn’t allowed to.

Does anyone have a favorite dog trick that they have every seen or taught their dogs?

I think my favorites are the dual dog tricks like leap frog. I need to get a second puppy to train them.

Looks at Tod, Please?

“Someday.” – Tod

Stage whisper to the audience: “that means it will be at least a year.”

Happy Sunday everyone!

~Anna