No Cairn Terrier Left Behind

Eric's training is going pretty well. He heels and responds to "come!" on-leash, and occasionally, off-leash. I think he'll get it eventually. Other areas that I'm working on are:

A) Jumping up on people - I sympathize with the desire of someone Eric's size to act taller, but I'm trying to convince him otherwise. I do this conventionally, using the Voice-of-God ("No!) followed by the Voice-of-SpongeBob ("Good Boy!") when he behaves.

B) Lackadasical eating - Eric's style of nibbling at his food whenever the mood strikes him is ineffective when Findlay finds Eric's food dish unattended. Of the various strategies we have tried to get Eric to eat more enthusiastically, competition seems to be the best bet. He will defend his food from Findlay and the cats, to be sure, but he also perks up when a human shows interest (see photographic evidence).

C) Limited ability to reason verbally - I'm planning to teach Eric the names of three toys he likes - hamburger, ball and bowtie-ish squeaky thing (I may need a pithier term for the latter). I'll teach him to fetch them by name, then introduce a fourth toy, say, a salamander. I'll say "Fetch Salamander", and Eric will reason out that "Salamander" must be the toy that is neither the hamburger, ball nor bowtie (see footnote 1). Thus, he will learn to perform well on standardized academic tests. We may have to work on his dexterity with a #2 pencil, however (see footnote 2).


Footnote 1: This can work! See http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A31130-2004Jun10.html for proof (it's worth signing up for WaPo; it's free, no spam so far).

Footnote 2: In our country, the directions for standardized tests place such an emphasis on #2 pencils that one fears for one's academic future should one a different pencil grade (see http://www.pencilpages.com/articles/grades.htm ).