Augh!

I have let this blog go neglected WAY too long.

Indy went home several weeks ago. She took a ride down to North Carolina, where her adopter picked her up and then drove her home to Alabama.

Crookytail missed her for a while. Pongu, not at all. I'm hoping they'll get to visit over Christmas, since her new home is near my parents' house.

Since then we've been foster-free. It's nice to take a break. Dog Mob appreciates the respite too, it seems. They're more relaxed and they seem glad to have my (relatively) undivided attention. Both of them are making a good deal of progress toward their respective training goals.

In the meantime I've joined the Association of Pet Dog Trainers and have been working toward my CPDT-KA (Certified Professional Dog Trainer - Knowledge Assessed) certification. To sit for the exam, however, I need 300 hours of training experience. Only 75 hours can be time spent directly training shelter or rescue dogs; the other 225 must come from teaching people how to train dogs.

So I've been shamelessly hassling friends and acquaintances to let me use them as guinea pigs, and I've started branching out to adopters of Wags dogs as well. I think I'm getting to the point where I'm almost not totally useless... but it's easy to see why 300 hours is the minimum requirement considered necessary to not suck at this job.

I have 100 so far, counting my maximum 75 hours of actual dog training. 200 to go!