Here's my sheltie Taz's appearance on Pet Star performing his routine of tricks while blindfolded, the first dog to my knowledge to ever do such a thing. I would never have thought a dog would anything like this, particularly since most dogs refuse to move when they have their eyes covered. But once I found out he was willing to do simple tricks like waving with the blindfold on, we just started working out harder and harder skills and he just totally amazed me with his uncanny ability to figure things out as we went along, and most importantly...still having fun while doing it! He is quite a show-off and clearly enjoys the attention he gets when doing tricks like this.

This is all trained using positive reinforcement, clicker and very very gradually working up from individual tricks and short amounts of time with the blindfold on to this long routine where it is on the whole time (what you see here is very edited down, it was actually over 10 minutes long). At any time he could remove the blindfold and in fact, later I taught him to remove it at the end himself just to show that it was indeed completely voluntary on his part. His rubbing his face was also something that I had encouraged and rewarded him for doing as it just was so funny and cute.

I do have to laugh a bit at Mario holding him all through the judge's intro and comments. Taz is not particularly fond of being held at all but is too polite to object to it, but they actually had to tape that twice so both Taz and Mario were obviously getting very tired and quite happy when he finally put him down!