Good Citizen Bronze Award

Tommy had his exam today for the Good Citizen Bronze Award. It was a very nervous day for me, the other dog owners and Pam the dog trainer. We were given our numbers which we had to pin to on. This piece of paper flapping around really got Tommy excited, or was my nerves moving down the lead and he could sense it? Either way, play bowing, lead biting, jumping around and all the other ‘normal’ JRT behaviour were being shown! Luckily, the examiner was late so Tommy managed to calm down…just a bit!
It was a bit overcast (typically) this day, so I knew the down – stay for one minute would be the hardest, followed by the gate.
We all done our heelwork easily and the gate exercise didn’t cause a problem like it had the previous couple of weeks (walk towards the gate, dog to sit, open gate, dog to wait, you walk through gate, call dog and ask to sit and wait while you shut the gate). The walking round in a circle and into the middle caused a bit of a stir with a couple of dogs, but nothing of note really. Tommy’s recall at training has always been excellent (no idea why, it’s rubbish elsewhere) and today was no exception. We all returned to our mats for grooming (does your dog roll on its back? Try and keep him on his front!) and then collar, id tags and poo bag inspection (‘that’s a small bag’ the examiner said to me, ‘he does small poo’s’ was my response!).
Then the time was upon us, 1 minute down stay… Pam was so nervous she couldn’t look (bless her). 15 seconds gone and all was well. 30 seconds and Tommy looked quite chilled. 45 seconds and yes, he had a scratch, then he found a blade of grass and then I had to return to him to put him back in the stay. He had failed…
I felt a bit rubbish about it, but there were 4 other fails in the class, and considering he didn’t even know how to walk on lead let alone sit nine months ago, I thought he done quite well. Shame the sun wasn’t brighter, because then he can be hard to move let alone a one minute stay! We’ll try again next year, hopefully completing the silver on the same day.