A man's best friend...dog training.

It's a good thing Schipperke's are easily trained, otherwise we'd all be in a lot of trouble.  Schipperke's are very smart and very willing to learn.  I bet you could get them to learn anything as long as there was a little morsel of food involved, that and lots of love.  The first week we had him home we taught Baxter to sit and down on command by using hand signals.  We only ran into problems when Baxter learned to "shake hands", he would mistake the down hand signal for the "shake hands" signal.  We simply stopped having him shake hands and concentrated our training on downs.  All that is taken care of, now we're working on his "stand for examination".  It's coming along okay.

Ok...  I've been really bad lately.  I took a break from dog training and haven't been back yet.  I have an idea now to attempt to show him conformation.   Although he doesn't look like most Schipperkes I've seen.  He looks exactly like the old pictures of Schipperkes, but he looks nothing like the little Pomeranian fluffy Schips that I've seen lately.  I would like to find out if he is conformation quality, but I'm unsure of where to start.  So, I guess I'll just have to bite the bullet and take him to a show and see how he does.  The one thing I hate about showing conformation is running around the ring.  I always feel like such an idiot.   At least one thing, he's a little dog and I won't have to run fast like I did while showing Rottweilers or my horse for that matter.  So, we'll see how it goes.  I think I'll be enrolling him back into school and take some conformation classes.   Hey!  Maybe you'll even see some win pictures on his page!  Wow.   That would be cool.  We'll see how it goes...