Today, the time had come for Ringo’s ‘MH’ test, which is an evaluation of his mentality. In general, it is done between 12 and 18 months of age, but we felt Ringo was too immature this autumn and then it took until now before the local boxer club arranged another one. Given that he has shown a fear of fireworks as well as reacted to gun shots, I was very nervous about taking the test (the last part of the test is four gun shots). In fact, I almost changed my mind about doing it today, as late as when we were out there and ready to start. But we decided to go ahead anyway, and given the end result I am very glad that we did it. Instead of scraping by on the shots, Ringo passed with the best possible score. Whew!

Now, mind you, I am pretty certain it had a lot to do with him being dead tired at that stage, because he had been so keyed up earlier and managed to get himself quite worn out from lots of pulling and from his usual sensitivity to warmth. However, even taking that into account, his reaction was miles better than I had expected. He also surprised us (less positively so) by not doing so great when it came to gripping things and when it came to curiosity. At home, he’s ferocious when it comes to grabbing and holding onto things, and tug of war his a favourite game. He also tends to be pretty curious. But today, he was actually quite reserved. I think he becomes a bit more passive when he has a lot to process, basically. It seems to be either going totally bonkers because his brain overheats, or becoming very pensive.

He also showed some very interesting reactions to people. If the helpers initiated contact with him, he went wild with joy, jumping up in their faces. If they did nothing, he just sniffed them and ignored them. To some degree, I think this is because of his age; he’s started to learn that if someone doesn’t show interest in him, he’s supposed to ignore them. In any case, we were thrilled with him passing with such a good result on the shooting, and it was interesting to see how he reacted to the other parts of the test.

Today was the first lesson of Ringo’s new course: tracking. Since the next obedience course isn’t scheduled until April (which is just as well, because he needs a lot of training before then), we decided to indulge his interest in tracking in order to give him something to spend some of all his energy on. So, now I am sitting here with really sore hands, because he was (as usual) absolutely wild when getting to meet with other dogs and do super-fun things like follow a track made by dragging a deer hoof over the ground.

Since he saw us put the track down, it was a little hard to get him to track with his nose down all the time, and he also went waaaaay too fast (when competing, the dog isn’t allowed to pull on the leash, so we have some work left), but he more or less got the idea and happily grabbed and carried the hoof. We sure can’t complain about his interesting in grabbing things.

After we had finished up, we passed by where they do agility training, and tried out one of the obstacles (a big, inverted V) with him. First two tries, he ran to the top and then jumped off because he didn’t see he could go down the other side. Third time, he did it properly and really fast. He sure isn’t afraid of heights. In fact, a teensy bit more caution would probably not be a bad thing. But oh no, he’s a boxer through and through.

Today was the second lesson of Ringo’s obedience course. This is stage two of basic obedience and after my dad had him for all of stage one (which he did this spring), I had said I’d do at least some of stage two. Last week, I had too much work to go along, but today I decided I could take the time out. It proved to be an ... interesting experience.