Training Your Human: Playing Fetch

By now, my faithful followers know two things about me: I am a retrieving fool and I love-love-love my tennis balls. If it were up to me, I'd play fetch for hours at a time. For some reason, my Family is not as enthusiastic about fetch. They'll throw the ball maybe ten times and think that's the end of it. So I've had to resort to training them to get them to continue playing...humans can be so lazy! In case your human needs some guidance too, here are my tried-and-true tips:

1. When they're vegging on the sofa in front of the idiot-tube, plop down nearby, head-on-paws, and give a couple nice, loud sighs to get their attention:

2. If they ignore you, mosey on over, place your head on the sofa and give them your most pitiful, oh-woe-is-me expression. Extra points for adding a good whine or two.

3. If they still ignore you (amazing how slow humans can be, huh?), make a big show out of finding your ball. The more ruckus you make in the process, the better.

4. They still haven't gotten the hint? Time to bring out the big guns: deposit said ball repeatedly on one of their body parts. Extremely effective if ball is covered in saliva.

That should do it! It works on my Family every time.

Oh, and don't forget, if they throw the ball where you can't reach it (my human has the worst aim ever), employ the pitiful look-whine combo to ensure they'll go get it. Remember how well this worked when my ball rolled under the stove?

Good luck training your human! Remember, they have very short attention spans (poor things), so keep your training sessions short but frequent. They'll get it eventually.