Sitting

I poured my heart and soul into training Sharav, thousands and thousands of hours of training, and I really think that the training was what made him so well-adjusted and pleasant. He loved to be trained!

I did have to discard many early commands, and much of the first few months of our training, because I had confusingly started teaching him without differentiating between action commands, which are absolute (examples: sit down, go to bed), and position commands, which are relative (example: heel) – oops! He was also so trainable that I had to be really careful not to introduce any accidental commands that I didn’t actually want him to learn.

All of Sharav’s commands were exclusively in Hebrew, because we lived in Tel Aviv when I adopted him and I wanted passersby to understand what I was saying to him (certain sectors of Israeli society have a strong aversion to dogs, and it was important to me that they know I was not ordering him to attack). Of course, that backfired when we moved to America, but speaking to Sharav in public in Hebrew did have the nice advantage of attracting everyone with strong opinions about Israel.

People always asked me where I had taken Sharav to be trained, if I was a professional dog trainer, how many dogs I had trained, if I could train their dogs – but I don’t think anyone ever listened to any of the dog training advice that I offered.

Strangers always referred incorrectly to Sharav’s training in the past-perfect, as if it had begun at a specific time and ended at a later time, but I always treated it and spoke of it as present-imperfect. Training a dog is not an event that happens on four consecutive Sunday afternoons for three hours, after which the dog is “trained.” It’s a lifestyle, encompassing socialization and more, that a person and a dog have to choose together, and then live it together – even when the person isn’t around.