Training - Updated!

We have a lot of tales waiting to get into this blog, but the desires of our fans come first! You asked about training, so here goes.

First of all, to train others, you must first train yourself. To discipline others, you must have self discipline. To control the life of another, you must have self control. To be a successful trainer, these are the paradigms you live by. Do we live by them? Heck no! We want Pawty time! We say feed us something good and we expect to be obeyed!

So how did it happen? Well, here's the story. First, know your quarry. Our dad is intelligent and expects the same out of us. He named us by seeing what we were like. Rather than forcing his prejudices and desires on us, he looked carefully to see who we were and tried to maximize our potential. That includes genetic potential. Ever since we were old enough to eat food, he made sure there was lots of DHA in our diet. This maximizes brain development. He always had a ramp for us to maximize our joint development. He spent hours researching nutrition and obsessed over every microgram of calcium we ate. All this can be used against him. Of course you have to stay within your subject's capabilities. We knew there would always be kibble, we just wanted better toppings on it.

Study the above pictures carefully. Look at Princess. (Nanook and Pooka, look at her tongue!) See how skinny she is? Our dad knows there's a window of time in which growth and brain development occurs. Poor nutrition during that time means less than optimal capabilities the rest of our lives. Princess' ribs are showing. That means she's not getting enough calories. What can dad do to get her to eat? Hmmm.....

So she played the biggest role in this scam. But Isaac and Tank helped, too.

Isaac Here with an important addition. These kids think the world started when they became self-aware. Tank, did you ever stop to think who planted that notion of achieving your genetic potential? Before you were born, I played a trick that I knew would ensure great meals for all future generations of newfs. You all know my story, how I went from home to home and was confined in a crate for long hours every day. Well when I got here, after 2 months I grew 4 inches. I was 22 months at the time! That's what got our human dad started thinking that it was so important to take good care of his dogs early on. Let me tell you, growing 4 inches at 20 months was quite a feet! And quite a bit of legwork as well! Ha Ha, I crack myself up!

OK, well, thanks, dad, that was sure clever of you. Now, back to the pictures above. See how cute Tank is? Who could refuse that cuteness anything he wanted? Then the clincher was we all started to eat grass. We'd look into our dishes, poke in there with our noses, maybe gag down one nibble, then slo.o.o.o.o.ly walk outside and eat grass. When inside we'd eat hairballs and whatever little thing was lying on the floor, but not our food if it wasn't good enough. Time's running out, dad. Too bad I'll never be all that I could have been if you'd just fed me properly.

Then, of course, if he did make a good dinner we'd be all over it and when we were done we'd walk up one by one and give him a big lick thank you. Wow, dad, that was awesome! Remember that praise has to be the mainstay of training. We were subtle. Never anything so obvious as a sigh. a little guilt by eating grass, a lot of making him feel like the best dad in the world when he gave us a nice, cooked meal with meat. Then we escalated things a bit. At first, plain ground beef was amazing. Then to get a reward he had to flavor it, and cook it the way we liked it - seared on the outside, rare inside. Eventually he got so good at flavor we started to work on timing. If he took longer than a few minutes to make it, we walked away. It worked, too. (Dad's note - it did work. I couldn't speed up the time it took for their meat to cook, but I learned to speed the cooling. First I added less liquid during cooking. Then I took the pot off the burner when the pot was hot enough to finish the job on its own instead of leaving the pot on the heat until the meat was done. At the end I added ice to speed up the cooling and have the right amount of liquid so it would coat the kibble and not be chunks they could pick out.) Of course what we really wanted was for him to add the meat raw, but we have to accept the limited capabilities of our subject. Eventually we'd walk away from plain ground beef, but that may have done us more harm than good. That got his suspicions aroused. Not only that, but development is fast drawing to a close. So we may have a lot less gourmet dining in our near future. But it was fun while it lasted!