Someone Will Be Getting Some Remedial Training on "Drop It"

Isaac was a real butt at the dog park today. He embarrassed me. There were a couple other dogs, including his friend Josie, playing fetch at the lake. They were nice enough to share their balls with Isaac. Only Isaac would fetch the ball and then refuse to give it to a person to throw it again. He wanted to play tug with the ball, which does not work very well. He knows the commands "give" and "drop it" and simply refused. Usually if I refuse to play tug when he does this, he quickly loses interest or his attention is caught by something else and he drops the toy. But not today. He kept bumping the ball against my legs and hips, trying to get my attention.

As if that was not bad enough, one of the dogs had this fabric toy that floats that you can fetch and Isaac talked his friend Quinn into playing tug with that. Well, you can guess what happened. It started to rip. Quinn's dad told him to drop it and he did. But not my dog. Instead, he kept shaking it in Quinn's face, trying to get him to tug some more. And then he put the toy on the ground, stood on it, and pulled on one end with his teeth, ripping it good.

I apologized and asked the owner of the toy if I could replace it for him. He said that was OK but I don't feel OK about it. I came home and found it on Amazon and ordered one, along with some balls to take to the lake with us. The toy Isaac ripped belongs to a black lab named Iris and we see her at the dog park almost every morning, so we will give her the toy when we see her again.

Things like this are why I do not tell most people at the dog park that my dog is a service dog.