Teacher's Pets

This week, Kristen takes Freddie to dog school in Pasadena.

This week was one of our last dog training sessions for our 8-month-old puppy Freddie. All summer, Freddie has worked with his trainer Brianna Simpson to learn important skills. Freddie has grown to love Brianna. Yes, it’s true that at the beginning, he barked at her for an hour while she fed him small pieces of ham non-stop. But now, he respects her in a way that he will never respect us. When he sees her, he wants to do a good job. And when he does a good job, it makes me and Jason look like we’ve done a good job. Brianna praises him, but somehow we get the rush of serotonin for his success. Are we stage parents? Maybe. All I know is that I now feel a rush of personal pride when I hear the phrase “Good boy.”

But the three of us–Jason, Freddie, and I–know the truth. The truth is that we’ve only accomplished the most important things. Freddie is house trained. He doesn’t destroy furniture. He walks confidently on a leash. He knows simple commands and has decent recall. Everything else? A game of chance.

On Monday, we met in a shady spot in Brookside Park in Pasadena. This was a group session with several clients of Brianna’s–all dogs with some form of reactivity. The goal was to have each of these dogs exist in each other’s presence without losing their shit. On our way over, I said a quiet prayer to myself: Please don’t let Freddie be the worst dog. 

He had every right to be. After two weeks of 95 degree temps, our practice walks look more like practice runs-into-the-yard and practice sits-on-the-couch-while-we-watch-The-Good-Wife. The only thing he’s learned recently is how to jump onto the kitchen table, a trick he surprised us with last week when we had a friend over and she got to watch me pry half a doughnut from Freddie’s mouth.  

Training, in general, is a new thing for me. We got our first dog, Hans, when we were in our early twenties. We did not invest in any sort of training. He grew up in spite of us, lived for 17 years, and was given anything he wanted (roast chicken, gravy, most of the bed). 

Freddie, on the other hand, is like the late-in-life child who gets to go to private school. We got him in April, thinking that if the writers went on strike and were afraid for our lives and our future, at least we’d have a puppy. Now, we’re four months in and we have a dog who assumes we’re home all the time and whose earliest attempts at socialization involved picket lines. He’s so different from Hans. Of course, he would be, but it still takes getting used to. Hans had high standards and was determined and could hold a grudge. Hans was all me.

Freddie is like a big football player who forgives easily and just wants to love. Freddie is all Jason.

Every morning, Freddie is so excited to see us that he gets in our faces and wiggles his whole body. It is both a joy and like having a stranger living in my home.

He’s come a long way with Brianna. Over time, she’s helped him be less afraid around other dogs and children. That’s not to say he’s not still a pain-in-the-butt. When our friends come over, he barks at them relentlessly while also demanding they give him attention. When we’re alone, he is Dr. Jekyll. When a small child tries to befriend him, he becomes Mr. Hyde. On a flight home to visit my mom, he handled the plane like he was George Clooney in Up in the Air. In the airport en route to the plane? He’s more like Con Air. 

As we left the house, Freddie got the zoomies just seeing his special “this is gonna be a walk walk” leash. He bounced off the walls when he realized he was going in the car with us. As we walked to the park, passing running children and off-leash dogs, I thought again, Please don’t let Freddie be the worst dog. 

And guess what! He wasn’t! He also wasn’t the best dog. (That was a dog whose parents are clearly still taking her out for long walks despite the heat.) But Freddie was easily in the running for #2. A Co-EP, if you will. Group training introduced a new element. Instead of getting stressed out by the other dogs, Freddie became competitive. As he watched Brianna train the other dogs, he started behaving better to impress her. He ignored errant barks. He pretended not to notice a soccer ball that whizzed right beside him. He calmly walked by dogs three times his size, keeping his eyes on us and Brianna. When another dog got stressed out, Freddie sat on his little raised cot and behaved like the kind of angel dog who would never steal a doughnut from a table. 

We had to pull him away at the end of class. As he luxuriated in Brianna’s praise, it was clear to me that Freddie wanted nothing more than to be the teacher’s pet. Finally, I thought, a little bit of me.