(This story is part of a continuing series, Learning Grace, about a girl and her dog. The first part begins here.)
The first time I poured food into a bowl and set it on the floor, Grace ate like the fat man in a hotdog-eating contest. To be fair, her only mealtime experience before me had been first scrambling for an available teat, and then shoving and shoveling her way through a mound of food alongside five hungry siblings. Judging from her girth it clearly hadn’t been a problem for her, but now that she was at my house she’d have to learn some ground rules.
So day two began with her first training session.
Fortunately for me, a food-motivated dog is an eager learner, and mine was voracious. Upon waking, I let her sample a few treats, then I held one above her nose and pushed it back over her head. She tracked it with her eyes and automatically rocked back into a sit. Once her butt hit the floor, I said sit so she could assign the action with the word. Until she knew what the word meant, saying it first was just human noise.
We did that a dozen times or so, took a break to run off some energy, and then tried again. And again. And again. After one of our breaks when she wasn’t particularly paying attention to me, I casually walked toward her and said, “Sit.” I could see her eyes light with recognition. She immediately dropped back into a sit, and I quickly gave her a reward before going bonkers with excitement. “You did it, Grace! You did it!” She bounced, matching my enthusiasm, and we celebrated with abandon. But was it a fluke? I wondered. To make sure, I became still and waited for her to calm herself. Then I said, “Grace, sit.” She snapped to attention, dropped her butt to the floor and looked up at me with those sweet, expectant eyes, the ones that suggested that I was the center of her universe. Me and the raw, grain-free, wild-caught salmon treats.
I was completely blown away. My baby dog was sitting on command in an hour! Yes, I know it’s the easiest trick in the book, but it was also the first step in our journey of communication. And both of us seemed so earnest in our desire to understand one another.