Humans!

I'm sure you're going to see many blogs with this title because we all know how they can be.

As many of you know, mama Nikki can be real tough. She has her rules, her expectations, her desire to be as perfect as any human can be, which means, she wants ME to be as perfect as I can be. However, there are times that I just don't live up to those expectations and I must say, there's times she doesn't live up to it either.

This past Sunday, I had search & rescue, which I must say, I did pretty darn good, especially when it came to cadaver, I nailed it. Anyway, this isn't about me. I did my work and then my mother put me down into a "stay" while she worked with the other dogs. "Stay" means that I'm supposed to stay in one spot, well, on this particular day, I had a hard time with it. I moved a few times before she released me and boy, did she give me that look. When I get that look, I move quickly back to my spot and if I had a tail long enough, it would probably be between my legs. Not that she beats me or anything, but you know that look where you wish it was just a beating and not the guilt that they put on you. You would think that she'd remember the good things I did instead of the bad things but nope, she's human and they sometimes get stuck inside of a box. Overall, I didn't get in terrible trouble. I was allowed to roam and sniff the deer tracks and stuff while she was eating dinner with the grandparents and boy was I tired.

So the purpose of this blog is to tell all those humans out there to stop concentrating on all the bad stuff that your dog does and instead, concentrate on the behaviors that you do like. If you start looking at the good stuff then that's all you will see and yes, the bad will still happen on occasion, we're not robots and you can't just program us to never make a mistake, but the bad won't seem so bad since it's going to be rare. Just like you, we're not always going to do the right thing but if you praise us enough, we'll start to want to do the right things more.

You see, we don't know right from wrong, bad or good, all we know is what gets us attention and what doesn't. When you acknowledge behavior, we will repeat it, if you ignore it, we will eventually stop doing it. Unless it's self-rewarding, but I'm not going to go into that in this blog. I want you to go right now and tell your dog how wonderful he/she is being and then reach into the cabinet and get him/her a treat and then allow them up on the couch with you, by invitation only of course.