Mr. N Earns His Novice Trick Dog Title in Fundraising Tournament

Mr. N waiting for his certificate paperwork to be filled out

Mr. N earned his Novice Trick Dog title recently! I blogged about it previously as a good option for reactive dogs to earn titles.

A flyball team was sponsoring a trick dog tournament as a fundraiser where they set up props and had a certified trick instructor supervising and witnessing. It took place in a warehouse so I thought the dogs would have a lot of space but that wasn’t the case. Mr. N had to do his tricks with  strange dogs five feet away from him on three sides and he was super distracted. He managed to pull it together long enough to earn his first trick dog title by doing tricks like high five, pray and play dead.

The dogs have to earn a certain amount of points for each title with advanced tricks counting for more points. For the lower titles, you just need a witness to sign off (there’s rumors that this is changing) but for the champion title, you need to send in a video. So you can do them all at home normally.

The novice tricks were not challenging for Mr. N but I was proud that he was able to do them in an extremely distracting environment for him. As a recovering reactive dog, he finds working around other dogs difficult. There was a time when he couldn’t have done it. Good boy!