Free Bad Dog by Martin Kihn

sane.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Test
    I N A LETTER introducing the Canine Good Citizen test to dog clubs in 1989, the AKC’s then VP of Obedience, James Dearinger, explained: “This program was designed as a response to the anti-canine sentiment that has painfully been gaining momentum these past few years.”
    CGC was the first AKC-sponsored certification program to open its paws to non-purebred dogs—what the AKC calls mixed breeds rather than mutts. The test, Dearinger explained, focuses entirely on good dog manners and responsible pet ownership.
    An early video promoting the test described its goal succinctly: “A dog that makes its owner happy and doesn’t make anyone else unhappy.”
    A test to encourage pet training, as opposed to competitive obedience, was discussed within the AKC as early as the 1970s, and outside the AKC, members of the American Temperament Test Society were advocating a pass/fail test for puppy temperament. Breeders feared that cities would pass laws restricting ownership because of a few highly publicized incidents. The late Herm David, a columnist for
Dog World
magazine, wrote articles about the challenge of dogs living in urban environments and outlined a “good citizen” program in the early 1980s.
    The original elements of what became the AKC’s CGCtest were developed by a committee that included James Dearinger, Bob Self of
Front & Finish
magazine, and AKC Field Rep Wally Kodis. A pilot was run in 1989 with the Upper Suncoast Dog Training Club in Clearwater, Florida, and early tests were conducted with the Tallahassee Police Department K-9 Unit, a purebred rottweiler club, and the mixed-breed Ochlockonee River Kennel Club. The K-9 dogs passed easily, the well-trained rottweilers all passed, and one-third of the mixed-breed club failed.
    As a result of the pilots, some changes were made to the program.
    The first three elements were rearranged to a more natural sequence of accepting a stranger, sitting for petting, and sitting still for an exam instead of the original, inverted order.
    Strangely, the original test did not include a recall, or come exercise. The reason, says AKC Field Rep Mary Burch, who runs the CGC program today, was that it was considered too basic.
    However, she told me, “The club received hundreds of requests from instructors to add a recall, mainly because you really can’t begin to train a dog until he comes to you to have a collar put on for training.”
    Originally, the test included an eccentric item called “Praise and interaction,” in which the owner was supposed to play with her dog and then suddenly get it under control, praising its calmness. However, according to Burch, “The more we looked at it, we realized we set the stage for owners to think they should only praise the dog in that test item.” There was also the more tactical problem that some breeds, like Labs, couldn’t calm down, while others, like basset hounds, “just stared at the evaluators like they were morons.”
    The most troublesome item, the one that caused most of the Ochlockonee mixed-breeds to fail, was the final one, then called “Dog left alone.” The dog was tied to a post for five minutes while the owner waited out of sight. To pass, the dog was not allowed to whine, bark, growl, or otherwise display excessive signs of anxiety or agitation.
    This is a difficult item to train and for many dogs to pass.
    Susan Conant, who took the test in the early days with one of her malamutes, told me: “Dog left alone was horrible! My Kobuk flunked it. He was tied at the end of a long corridor. He entertained himself by giving a loud concert of northern breed vocalizations. The evaluator let the howling and yipping and woofing go on for the full five minutes.” (Kobuk later passed.)
    Single-handedly responsible for a majority of the early failures, this item was shortened to three minutes, changed from a tie-out to leaving the dog with “a friendly stranger,” and renamed, less