Scout's Graduation

At Nan's prompting, Scout and I enrolled in a Beginner Education class at our local PetSmart at the beginning of February. Over the course of eight Monday nights, we worked on all the training basics, and he did pretty well for an eleven-month-old puppy. He still has difficulty with stays due to his extremely short attention span, but he's got the rest of it down fairly well, including sit, down, watch me, leave it, drop it, and heel, plus some that I taught him outside of class, like shake, this way, where's the ball/toy, and roll over.

What I learned was the magic of the clicker as a reinforcement tool and that Scout will do absolutely anything to get a treat, running through his entire repertoire of tricks when he can't figure out what I want him to do. We'll keep working on it and maybe enroll in the Intermediate class sometime soon.

Monday was graduation day. Scout and his classmate Greta donned their mortarboards and received their diplomas. Monday was also the first anniversary of Charlie's death. I couldn't help but think of him often that day and wonder if Scout will turn out as well as he did.