The First Major Hang-Up.

Prior to investing in my dog-training course, I took a mental inventory of any dogs that might be available for me to work with. I am holding off on purchasing a dog of my own until I have the money to properly take care of it. My parents' dog is getting very old, and I am sad to say that I can't even guaranty he'll still be with us by the end of the year. My good friend PJ is the only friend of mine who is a dog-owner, but unfortunately he lives about an hour and a half away. PJ's dog being my best option, I asked for permission to practice with his dog Maverick, and I can make the lengthy drive on a day that I may have free.

Upon receiving the paperwork for my coursework, I noticed that I should have paid better attention. Turns out, the last couple months of my dog-training certification require a mentorship. The mentorship portion of the course requires me to bring a dog along that I can practice with, and the mentor that will be chosen for me is going to be near MY home. Think about this for a moment.

That means on every day that I would need to bring the dog somewhere, I would have to drive to PJ's house, pick up his dog, drive back to my mentor, drive back up to PJ's to drop his dog off, and then come back home. This equates to an approximate of six hours of driving per day. Keeping the dog in my apartment overnight would cause undue stress to the dog by being kept in an environment he's not use to, and would make training difficult. I've asked my program advisor if it would be possible for them to choose my mentor based on being near PJ's home instead of my own, but she didn't really give me a clear answer.

Over this last weekend, my parents went to my cousin's college graduation party. His younger brother, evidently, is the owner of a 2 year old Beagle who is "sort-of" trained, and they offered to let me use him for this mentorship part. I will probably pursue this option, but I do have a couple of hang-ups with it.

First of all, the owner of the dog, my pre-teen cousin Michael, isn't somebody that I've had a tremendous amount of respect for. Michael, when he was a kid, was the type of kid whom you would consider a bully. He suffers from an extreme lack of discipline. Michael would pick on weaker kids, start fights, and get into tons of trouble at school. Evidently, when most adults, even school officials, tried to get him to behave, he threatened them with calling child protective services and would have lied about them hitting him. The last few family get-togethers have been peaceful, but for several years prior to that, he would spend every Christmas and Easter punching me repeatedly, trying to instigate fights.

Again, I think he's gotten all that kind of behavior out of his system now. He's been doing better in school and he's been a lot quieter the last couple times I've seen him. It's still a worry in my head though.