Daisy celebrates with her diploma from the class.

From the American Kennel Club website, the Canine Good Citizen (CGC) is:

a certification program that is designed to reward dogs who have good manners at home and in the community. The Canine Good Citizen Program is a two-part program that stresses responsible pet ownership for owners and basic good manners for dogs. All dogs who pass the 10-step CGC test may receive a certificate from the American Kennel Club.

I’m proud to announce that Daisy Spaith is the newest Canine Good Citizen! After five weeks of classes for the test at the local Humane Society, I figured Daisy’s chances of passing were about one in five. The test is pretty hard and she’s too friendly for test items like “sit until a human calls you” or “stay mellow when another dog is nearby.” So not only is passing a big deal, but doing it against the odds is even better.

My secret was that I wore her out today. We had about four miles of walks (two with a weight pack full) and maybe forty five minutes of fetch in a huge dog park. I also signed up to take the test last, since I wanted Daisy to be able to chill with the other dogs nearby, get used to the training facility again, and be mellow when she took it. Ironically the test she scared me the most on was when she refused to lay down. It took about five requests to finally get her to go down. I can usually take her from a running like crazy to a dead stop and lay down in about half a second, so if she’d failed on this one and not the really hard ones it would’ve been disappointing.

Of the four dogs that took the test tonight, three passed and the other guy should have but has been nervous the last few weeks due to one of his owners being out of town. I’ll give a ton of credit to our instructor, Ali Johnson, who held us to ridiculously high standards so that the actual test itself wasn’t so bad.

Daisy carrying her diploma and tennis ball she won. I didn’t stage this one.

Daisy loves people so much that I’m going to look into getting her into therapy dog work. She’s passed the first hurdle, but it gets harder from here on. We wouldn’t want her knocking someone over with a cane now, would we?