Woof! Lately, I’ve noticed my two-legged pack family is getting much easier to train. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes they don’t pay attention, and then I have a hard time teaching them anything! But most of the time, they do pretty well. Here’s an example.

Each year when it starts getting warm outside and the animals that fly start talking more, my two-legged pack-dad always gets a huge pile of black dirt (that smells like wood) brought to our yard. (It looks like a pile of something that I might leave in the yard – but 1,000 times bigger). I can’t decide if it’s dirt or wood, so I just call it “dirtwood.”

When the big pile of dirtwood comes, my pack-dad gets out a big long stick that has long sharp teeth on the end. He takes that big “toothstick” and he jams it into the big black dirtwood pile. When he lifts up, a bunch of the black dirtwood is on the toothstick! He then drops the big pile into a box on wheels that is connected to another box on wheels that he rides on.

He drives the ride-on box – with the other box full of dirtwood connected – to another area in our yard and dumps out all the black dirtwood. He usually puts it right around trees and stuff. (I have no idea why he does this. Two-leggers do a lot of strange things.)

So, this year I thought I would teach my two-legged pack-dad a new game. When he rode the ride-on box up the driveway to the big pile of dirtwood, I followed him with my tennis ball in my mouth. As soon as he started to put big piles of dirtwood into the box on wheels, I dropped my tennis ball in the box with the dirtwood. He kept using the toothstick to put more dirtwood on top and sometimes my ball would completely disappear.

When he drove to the other place in the yard to dump the dirtwood, I would follow him. After he dumped the dirtwood, I got to paw through it until I found my ball! Woof! Can you imagine how much fun that is? Oh my woof! When I found it, I would follow him up to the big pile and we would do it all over again. Heaven!

My pack-dad must’ve thought it was fun as well. He played the game with me all day long until the big pile of dirtwood was all gone. See, if you just spend some quality time with these two-leggers, you really can teach them some new tricks.

Jim McCoy