Wordless Wednesday: Name Game Challenge

Last week, Pamela at Something Wagging This Way Comes mentioned a fun photo challenge going on at the Raising a Super Dog blog. The blog follows the adventures of Euka II, a puppy in training for Canine Companions for Independence. The challenge was to take of a photo of your pup with his/her name spelled out in kibble.

Obviously for service dogs, this is an important lesson - that not everything on the ground is there for their own enjoyment. But I wondered, could Rita (definitely not service dog material due to her fears/issues) handle the challenge? We've been working on our down/stay, so I decided to try it. 

As you can see, success!

Now, in the interest of full disclosure, we also feed a bit of wet canned or homemade food mixed in with Rita's kibble, but I wasn't about to smear that on the floor...

"Maybe if I close my eyes this will be easier."

Also for additional full disclosure, the only reason she did this was because I had some "higher value" string cheese that I bribed her with. (I was even able to leave the room - I'd forgotten my camera, d'oh! - and she... well, she didn't stay and wait patiently, but she didn't eat the kibble either. She got up to follow me and cheese.)

"Or maybe I'll just look out the window."

"When is this going to be over, Momma??"

I didn't want y'all to think I'd trained her to be perfect, cuz that would be a total fabrication... so for fun I also tried spelling out her name in little tiny bits of string cheese. And this is how that went:

I could never get more than one or two pieces on the ground before she snagged them.

We're still working on the "leave it" command.

You can see a slide show of all the pups that rose to the kibble challenge here. Great photos!

How would your pup do in this challenge?
(If you feed raw or wet food, you're probably going to wanna pass on finding out!)

Happy slightly-less-wordy Wednesday.