Strolling toward ambidextrousness

Long ago, all but lost in the mists of memory, Steve and I took our first dog, Astra, to our first obedience classes. There it was seared into our minds that the proper position for a dog to walk was on the left side, with the leash end held in the handler's right hand. We always walked Astra in that position, as we walked Tess, and Tootsie, and Pearl. When we got our first CCI pup (Tucker, in early 2005) and started to train him in walking, the command was different: "Let's go!" instead of "Heel." But neither Steve nor I remember being instructed that the dog should walk anywhere other than on the left. 

A pup or two later, I recall another puppy raiser remarking one day in class that CCI wanted us to train the dogs to assume both positions. But I didn't take her seriously, and we don't remember our teacher, Mike Fowler, ever hammering on this point. Since then, however, it's finally begun to sink in: they're serious about this. Old dogs that we are, we have to learn this new trick.
 
Becca Gordon, the local puppy program coordinator, expounded on why in a recent post in the CCI blog:

Many of our graduates have one side that's better able to handle a dog than the other, or are using one hand to drive a power chair so require the dog to be on the other side," she wrote.  "Because we never know which side a graduate will be more comfortable having a dog on, in Professional Training we work every single command, every single day, on both the left and the right.  So, as a trainer, if you get a "one-sided dog", you then have to spend a large amount of your training time just trying to get them comfortable on their "weak" side.

She described how frustrating this could be to the professional trainers:

You start out with the puppy in a nice Let's Go position on your right, and they immediately begin trying to duck behind you to get back to the left. You encourage them back to the right, and half a second later they're ducking behind you again. And again. And again.

Chastened, Steve and I resolved that we would somehow make Dionne be as comfortable on our right as on our left. So as we've begun walking her, we've made an effort not to correct her if she switched between them, as she seemed to enjoy doing. But then a doubt began to niggle: should she be making that choice? That didn't seem right. 

I brought up the question last night in our puppy class, and Bob's reaction was unequivocal: it was BAD to let the puppy direct its own positioning. We had to be the bosses. If we started on one side and she began to cross to the other, behind us, a swift pop on her leash would be appropriate. 

I took her out for a test spin this afternoon, and it proved surprisingly easy to implement this philosophy. I don't know if that was a fluke, or whether it's simply not that hard to do.  

 

GOOD Let's go! 

GOOD Let's go! 

DON'T!!!!!