Why I would not make a good professional trainer

As I've written about before, Max learned to do the retrieve. In conjunction with my interpretation of "Nothing In Life Is Free" (where Max has to perform a trick or forage for her food -- work for it), I'll often make her do a flying retrieve before she gets some of my yogurt in the morning.

I'll place her somewhere, give her the bead, and she has to fly to the cup and deposit the bead. The next step is to get her to fly to a bead, pick it up, and deposit it in the cup, but neither one of us is motivated enough to do that yet.

In any case, yet again this morning, she deposited the bead into my food instead of the cup that was right next to the food!I think she does this intentionally because my reaction to her is reinforcing. I think she is so clever and funny! We all had a good laugh, but she did need to place it in the cup before she got her spoonful of yogurt.