“Go Fetch Gramps, Timmy’s In The Well!”

It it just “tricks” or is it real skill?

We “dog-people” have known for awhile that television’s classic “Lassie” was a series of purebred collies (mostly male), trained to do all the tricks dramatized in the long-running series and its spin-offs from the 1950s to the 1970s.

We “Poodle-People” are used to dealing with a particular breed of dog that is so famous for its intelligence and desire to perform that many people on the street see a poodle and think “Circus Dog.” Performer. Actor. “Trick” dog.

I found a great web page this week entitled What is a Trick? written by standard poodle owner and dog trainer Charlene Dunlap. It examines the question of whether what poodles can be trained to do qualifies as actual learned skill, or just “tricks.”

She mentions skills such as climbing ladders, walking unstable surfaces, and crawling under obstacles to be within the skills taught to police dogs, yet for poodles they’re often considered “tricks.” Dunlap notes:

When Frisbee-catching with dogs became a popular sport, extremely athletic dogs began doing flips and amazing leaps as they caught the flying discs. In bygone days one would have seen such acrobatic stunts taught only in ‘trick dog’ acts. Now, these ‘stunts’ (tricks) are quite common in disc-dog training.

Best frisbee dog I ever met was a Border Collie named Angus. Who became known to all our local friends and family as “Embassy Dog” after my sister (married to a Foreign Service diplomat) retired him to our mountain acreage. But I had an even more obsessed fetcher-dog who would not just catch and return frisbees, but also golf balls chipped off the top of the driveway into the terraced mountainside below, retrieve any stick any time you cared to toss one, and any snowball in a blizzard off any precipice you cared to throw it off of. Her name was Kenya, and she was a poodle.

No “specialist” here, she’d fetch anything. When the Asplundh guys came with their chain saws and big mulchers to trim everything under the incoming electrical lines, we noticed they were tossing branches into the mulcher while making friends with a curious Kenya. In a panic my daughter ran out to give them a stern low-down – much as you appreciate that beautiful big poodle-dog, she WILL follow that branch right into the mulcher. Make sure she’s in the house before you make mulch.

Heck, I’m pretty sure that if we could engineer speech faculties into poodles, I could train mine to answer the phone and book gigs. Poodles are regularly trained to be guide dogs, police dogs (bomb and drug sniffing), gun dogs, war dogs (their teeth are every bit as sharp as a Shepherd’s and their hair is much more confusing) and “trick” dogs. Those “tricks” are skills. They’re perfectly capable of putting those skills to good use to save their master or obey his directive…

“Go get Gramps!” A poodle knows who Gramps is, and can fetch all day long. But don’t be too surprised if that poodle decides instead to leap through flames to deliver the rope and then pull Timmy from the well.

Links:

Canine Horizons: What is a Trick?

Poodles – Not Just Another Pretty Face

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