Some of you may have already seen this, but I just saw it and it is absolutely hilarious. I’m sure it makes those who live in the Bay Area proud…thank goodness I live in Germany now.

Make sure you watch the video first, then go to the second link.

** First go to and watch the news story…
News Story

Then go here:
Woo Woo

As mentioned in the previous post, today was the first day of obedience school for little Kymba (or should I say big since she is already 45lbs. at 4 1/2 months). I must admit I was pretty skeptical of the whole obedience school thing since I’ve already had 2 dogs that ended up being pretty well behaved. However, after attending the class I was fairly impressed with their thought process of teaching the dogs, plus it was good to see Kymba have to obey while other dogs were around…which is key here in Germany since dogs are everywhere. Anyways, here are the basics that they taught us:

# You need to use hand signals since that is the way that dogs communicate with each other, and it easier for them to understand what you want them to do rather than when you just talk. Not to say you shouldn’t tell them commands, but you should do both. The other bonus of this is if they are far away from you and can’t hear you but they can see you, then they will know that when you put your hand up you want them to come.
# The next thing they taught us is that you should always have a “release” command after they have done something, that way they know it is OK to continue playing or doing whatever. A good example is when you tell them to sit…if you don’t have a release command then they don’t know how to long to stay seated.
# They were planning on teaching Kymba how to sit and lay down, but since she already knew it we moved right on to getting her to walk besides us on the leash. Now this is something I would never have gotten Cinder or Timber to ever do. Those two dogs were all about sniffing everything in sight. Anyways, what they said to do is when the leash gets tight (ie. the dog is pulling too much), you should stop walking and slowly take step backwards until the dogs comes back to you…thus loosening up the leash again. Now this can be a big pain b/c it can literally take you 5 minutes to walk 30 feet, but they say to be consistent, otherwise the dog will know that he/she can break eventually break you…hence they will continue to pull. So for about a week, Barbie and I may be going on 20 minute walks with Kymba, but it we will have only gone 3 houses down. However, if she can learn this trick then I’ll be a happy camper since I hope that someday she’ll be able to run along side me when I jog or possibly bike around town. The other thing they mentioned was to never shorten the leash on them, b/c they need to know exactly how far they can go without the leash getting tight on them and you stopping. If you keep changing the distance then they will never learn.

Anyways, you may not agree with these theories, but I thought I’d share them since we are paying money for them and might as well let other people benefit from it. Consider it the Napster of the dog training world , and if you don’t know what Napster is then where have you been living the last couple of years?