Jett Goes to Obedience School

Jett is an odd bird. We've had him for a year and a half now and I still feel like I know nothing about him.

He's Scout's complete opposite.  Like, you would find pictures of Jett and Scout next to the word antonym in the dictionary.

For example, Jett does not bring me toys.  He doesn't prefer for me to play with him.  Scout prefers me to play.

Jett prefers to have all the toys to himself and perceives me as a threat.

Jett is stubborn.  He's relentless. An alpha-male. He's Dwight Schrute, basically.

He's also lazy though.  He understands "too much work".  When fetching things, he lets Scout do the work and then takes the thing fetched from him when he gets back.  He knows.

Because I still don't know what makes Jett tick (aside from food), we took a trip to Obedience School for the last two weekends.

I can't really put into words how embarrassing it was to sign up my 1.5 year old dog for basic training classes.  Thank goodness that part was all online.

Before you get on me about not taking care of this a year ago...Jett is a (supposedly) well-bred hunting dog.  He has a job and a purpose. Usually, you train hunting dogs yourself because they are to be your partner. Or you send them off to camp-like programs to have them professionally trained. That costs thousands and takes months.  Eventually though, in the last few weeks, I told Scott I was taking Jett to obedience school and we made a deal that that was fine as long as it was $50 or less per class.  It was a how-much-are-we-willing-to-pay-for kind of situation.  For me, I'm willing to pay a lot.  Luckily, the Karma Dog Training School is very reasonably priced.

The thing is that Jett "generally" does what I want him to do. He "generally" listens to me.  "Generally", I feel that I have a handle on him.  I also "generally" don't trust him.

He likes to jump on people.  While Scott and I don't care, I find that people "generally" do care.  We always just blamed it on him "being a puppy".  Well, Scout outgrew this puppy stuff by 9 months old and Jett is twice that age now. I was insistent on that when I told Scott we needed to do something.  He's younger than Scout but he's not that young. There's a difference. While Jett is probably smarter than some humans, his stubbornness is getting in the way of intellectual growth.  If he was a kid, for example, he'd be the kid on Ridelin and probably with an individualized education plan of sorts. He'd be the kid who drove the teacher crazy.

I was skeptical that the Obedience School people could actually help us and it's pretty telling that Scott and I both laughed out loud when we read "will graduate after 8 weeks!" Let's not count our chickens before they're hatched.  If these people can really qualify Jett as a graduate after 8 weeks, I would gladly pay them double.