My Golden Retriever, Callie, is slowly getting rich — on money she finds on her morning doggie jog. I wrote, on March 24, that Callie found a five dollar bill. Well, she’s moving in the right direction; this time she found ten bucks!

Callie is making some progress with the “leave it” command. “Leave it” is a really good command, because, if you’re fast enough, you can tell your dog to “leave it” before it picks something up, like a piece of trash along the road.

Callie’s morning jog is about three miles long on a pleasant road near a golf club. It’s not like the road is littered with trash, but there are occasional tid-bits that are very attractive to a doggie — especially Callie, it seems. Sometimes, a doggie’s mouth is faster than a person’s eye! Once in a while, Callie stabs at a candy wrapper, or a grass divot, before we can say “leave it” or pull her away from the offending article.

When Callie’s mouth beats us to the punch, the next command is “give!” Yesterday, Callie beat Barbara to the punch. Barbara knew Callie had grabbed something, but she didn’t know what it was. So, bravely, she pried open Callie’s very strong Golden Retriever mouth, reached way into it, and pulled out a ten dollar bill.

I guess, if dogs can be trained to sniff out drugs and people, it should be possible to train them to sniff out money. Right? So how do we train Callie to go after the really big stuff, like one-hundred dollar bills? Is a Golden Retriever supposed to retrieve gold?

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 19th, 2008 at 6:52 pm and is filed under Callie, Relationships, Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.