Ragnar's First Class
Posted March 7, 2019.
Along with his human, Sam Oakey, IV and Sam’s Mom, Mitzi, Ragnar attended his first Canine Good Citizen class. Hope from High Hopes Dog Training
teaches this class at Green Ridge Recreation Center.
Ragnar’s first class went great! There are eight dogs in the class and Rags is definitely one of the best behaved. Six of the dogs are related (mother and five children) and then there’s a German Shepherd separate from them. Raggy, the shepherd, and the mother dog of the kids are all trained pretty well, but the five brothers and sisters were younger and definitely have a lot of practicing to do in the next six weeks. Hope, the trainer, met Ragnar the week before at my parents’ house for a private lesson so she used him to demonstrate several of the commands we worked on last week (sit, lay down, stay, and “break/release”) and he performed perfectly. My mom and I were even impressed, since this was in a room with seven other dogs and some of them were whining, moving around, wanting to play, etc. Ragnar made friends with Corinne, one of the girl dogs from the big family.
After class, one of Corinne’s brothers attacked Ragnar twice in a row when his owner brought him over to meet Rags. Rags did great though. He didn’t fight back or really even react at all other than moving away from the dog. The funniest thing that happened was when Hope was going through the commands with another dog, about 10 feet away, Ragnar was following along from where we were sitting (probably hoping for a treat!) He’d sit, lay, etc. when she instructed the other dog to do so. He was definitely getting into it and I think he enjoys the mental stimulation of learning. The picture of Ragnar by himself is in the lobby of Green Ridge before class. The collage photo is his class composite!