How to Be Your Dog's Nemesis.

Things were going pretty well there for a while. Winston was happy and cute, and he would sit, or do a "down", or give you five, or even swat your kiss out of the air if you blew one to him. He barked sometimes, but if we ignored him, he would stop.

But apparently all that was a fraud. Turns out that during that time period, we naively assumed that just because we had a dog who did sort of what we wanted, we had a well-behaved dog. No sir! We had a dog who was taking advantage of our kindness. Just because he sat when we asked him to didn't mean he respected us.

Ugh. Winston and I have just started working with a professional trainer. We will call her Miss C. She tells me that he must go through doggie bootcamp -- three toys a day, earn his food, etc. -- before he will truly understand that he's not the boss of the family. So she puts a leash on him and works on sit-stays. Winston goes berserk. Completely out of his mind. Flips around at the end of the lead and tries to run to me and hide between my legs and the sofa. Because someone asked him to SIT.

Eventually he did sit-stay. But he wouldn't accept a treat from Miss C for having done so. And he managed to wriggle himself around so his sit-stay involved giving her a prime view of his back, which I'm pretty sure is the doggie way of giving a person the finger.

Also, he has "forgotten" what it is to do a Down. This is something he has done since four days after we got him. Since he was an INFANT. And now he stares at you blankly. I'm pretty sure that he feels like, if we're going to play mindgames with him, he's going to play them right back at us.

I must confess, I feel sort of weird about this whole thing. I love my dog. I want him to be well-behaved. But I don't understand why the whole process has to make him so completely miserable. Was he *that* manipulative before? I didn't feel horribly hoodwinked. And now I dread every new development in our day, because it's my chance to show him what a bastard I've suddenly become. He refused a treat from ME this morning. :-( And yet he still felt compelled to bark at the garbage trucks in the alley, to protect me from them.

It's not FAIR, I don't want my dog to hate me. I hate doggie boot camp. I want doggie spoil camp back.