DOG OWNERS PURSUE OBEDIENCE FOR PETS

Editor's note: This is the first of two stories about dogs and their owners beginning obedience training. The second will appear after graduation day.

Precious the boxer has had four years to develop her bad manners. Ransom, the Labrador retriever, has a reputation for being spooky around other dogs. Smitty, a golden retriever, has started acting like a teen-ager, his owner complains.

But of the nine nervous dogs beginning obedience class Thursday, a pair of mixed-breed hounds named Tessa and Canoe appeared to be the prize problem children.

Their owners, JoAnna Meagle and her daughter, Annie Meagle, had trouble just controlling the spirited young dogs before the class started. Canoe slipped his collar and ran about the parking lot for a while.

But Mike Pind reassured everyone as the class began. "I've trained thousands of dogs," he said. "There is not one I haven't seen before."

Canoe and Tessa were adopted from an animal hospital last summer. Tessa had been hit by a car and abandoned. She digs up flowers, chews on an expensive Karastan rug and has been known to filch an unguarded pizza from the table.

Tessa, JoAnna says, "bites us in a friendly way."

Annie just wants them to obey on command and to be more polite around people. "At parties they go nuts," she said.

Pind decided to make an example of Tessa. Within five minutes she no longer would jump up on him, and she walked at his left heel and sat when Pind lifted her chain.

That doesn't mean JoAnna and Annie can make her do the same. They have to establish their own dominant relationship with their dogs.

"No" is the most overused word in most owners' vocabulary, Pind says, often repeated many times in increasing decibels before the animal gets the message.

"We all think dogs are deaf," he said.

Pind used forceful movements and gestures instead of words to get the dogs to obey him. He rewarded them not with treats but with affectionate scratches at the neck.

He also let the dogs know he is dominant by whapping them on the snout if they jumped up on him.

Dogs are just like children, he says. "Would you want them to be in control?"

Pind says he is really in the business of training owners, not dogs.

"All the bad habits, you all have taught them."

To be a good owner requires discipline.

"You have to work your dog once or twice a day," Pind said. "If not, you just wasted your money."

It is repetitious work.

"When you get bored, you're doing it right," he said.

Pind, who owns Pindwood Kennels, has been giving obedience classes at Sky View Animal Clinic for six years and has been training dogs for 27 years. He specializes in retrievers but claims almost any dog is trainable.

"These dogs are going to be easy," he said. "They're sweet dogs. It's getting the people to do it."

Tessa and Canoe are the first dogs the Meagles have owned. Pind wants them to drill Tessa and Canoe on heeling and sitting for an hour a day until the next lesson.

Annie, a ninth-grader at Central Junior High School, wonders where she'll find the time between school and the diving team.

"I can try," she said.

Her mother, a homemaker, sounds more committed.

Pind wondered if Tessa and Canoe could be separated for a week or so to make the training easier.

"Not unless somebody wants to take one," JoAnna said.

There were no takers.