Today we’d like to feature Michael Nichols, a Canine Good Citizen Evaluator/Instructor. Michael teaches CGC classes as Tails-A-Wagging in Bellingham, Washington.
On the video at the link below, you’ll see that by the time dogs graduate from Michael’s CGC class, they’ve exceeded the skills required on the CGC test.
On the CGC test, the “stay” requires walking to the end of a 20 ft. line and returning. While this is how Michael’s students will be tested, he teaches them more advanced skills during his course.
Tails-A-Wagging is doing a number of things that are “best practice” for dog trainers, such as having their students evaluate the instruction they received. We’ll be showing you more training from Tails-A-Wagging in future blogs.
Here is a short video of a recent CGC class practicing “stay” with some simple movement distractions.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coK8oZW-GWQ&feature=g-upl&context=G210246aAUAAAAAAALAA
AKC's Canine Good Citizen and S.T.A.R. Puppy Director, Certified Applied Animal Behaviorist
Nice video…What is particularly uesful about this exercise is that it is also a great preparation for the AKC Beginner Novice competion sit and stay exercise, where the dog has to sit and stay while the handler walks around the perimeter of the ring. This is such a nice functional, exercise too because it imitates how we really USE the stay in life. We tell the dog to stay while we go DO things, like open the front door for a guest, or clean up something we have dropped on the floor, or take something out of a hot oven, etc. I tell my students that we are not teaching obedience skills just in isolation–we are teaching these things so they can integrate the lessons into their daily lives and make each day a joyful and harmonious experience with their wonderful, TRAINED dog!
Beautiful Job!
Pingback: Very Excited to be Featured in the AKC CGC Blog Today! | Positive Canine Guidance
Thank you all for the positive feedback, and especially Dr Burch for this special post. I really appreciate it.