Prince was a German Shorthaired pointer that came into my life when I was 13 years old. He was an unbelievably opinionated, determined, bright, energetic, puppy. We hated each other on first sight.

He was a bottle-fed runt of a twelve-puppy litter and was taken away from his mother to live with a human family within minutes after his birth.

As I walked past the house where he was living on my way to school, this little brown blur would run out and bite my Achilles tendon. If I reached down to try and stop him, he bit my hands with those newly developed, extra sharp needles for teeth. In an attempt to get him off my route to school, I agreed to help his owners find a permanent home for him. I asked my father if he knew anyone that wanted a puppy. He shocked me with saying "Sure I know a great home for him --- Ours".

So Prince came to live with me when he was about five weeks old. While I didn’t want the job of controlling this little monster who moved in, I had to find a way to teach him to behave because no one else was going to do it. My father left a few days after bringing the pup into our house for a fifteen-month tour of duty in Alaska. My mother's idea of teaching was to yell at him or beat him until he cried. My younger brother only saw him as an object to be tormented or teased. I had no choice but to try and teach him myself.

I didn't know any rules for dog training. I just started teaching him the way I wanted to be treated. I used no punishment when he didn't do something right, but instead used praise and encouragement when he did it correctly. With this approach he stopped fighting (and biting) me and slowly started to become manageable. And, an amazing thing started to happen. We started to like each other.

Many people claimed he was stubborn, but I learned he just need to be shown what I wanted him to do. When I finally figured out how to show him what I wanted, he did it with great enthusiasm. Prince taught me that if a student doesn't understand it is not the student's fault --- it is the instructor's fault for not explaining and motivating. He made sure I learned to be a good teacher and always put myself in the student’s position. He showed me how punishment (even yelling) never works. When I tried it he would just sit there and look at me as if to say "I am not moving until you get control of yourself and show me what you want".

I found that if I used games to teach we both had fun and he learned what I wanted. He would come racing to me if I called him when we played hide-and-go-seek. Or, he would carry my tennis racket to the tennis court if I used it to hit some balls to him. When I entered college I learned a name for what Prince was teaching me --- Operant Conditioning. Then I became an elementary school teacher and I used exactly the same positive reinforcement approach that I had learned from Prince to teach my students.

One of my best memories was during my second year of teaching when Prince came to my 4th grade classroom for the day. He was 15 years old at the time, but he totally enjoyed himself. He greeted and played with all 30 kids. They all loved him. He alerted me to all the desks with contraband food hidden in them. But even the kids he ratted on adored him. That day in the classroom it seemed like he was my old dearly loved professor checking to see how his student (me) learned her lessons.

No one could have asked for a better teacher. I only regret that he never had a chance to experience the wonderful clicker.

Peggy Larson Tillman