The ball flew through the air, landed on the ground and rolled three feet before it stopped. The female black Lab just stood beside me, she didn’t move a muscle, she just stood and looked blankly at the now still ball. There seemed to be no fiber in her entire being that had a clue as to why I’d thrown that ball or that I might be expecting anything from her.

At 10 months old this sweet purebred girl with beautiful brown eyes and a funny ridge of hair on her nose didn’t know a thing. No commands, like come or sit, didn’t know how to get into a car, was afraid of people food, didn’t even know her own name! And now, I believed, didn’t even have any natural retrieving desire.

Not that it was her fault, she’d been owned by a long haul truck driver who was home only a few days a month and since his wife didn’t want the pup in her house, the poor dog had grown up alone in the back yard. I never knew the extent of what did or did not happen to her during that time, but I do know that when she was taken from him, the truck driver had plans to “put a bullet in her head” because she didn’t know the things he expected of her.  

The year I met Stormn' was 1997 and I’d been training dogs for 25 years and thought I’d turn her around in no time, so I put a choke chain on her and started to train. At the first correction she collapsed like a house of cards.  She lay quivering in abject terror and I knew that I was in trouble. In the past I had trained many dogs for obedience, hunting retrievers and even a drug dog once, and had been paid for it; I was a professional. But this was different, she was to be my dog and in the short two weeks I’d had her, I’d fallen deeply in love. There was no doubt that I’d be keeping her. I had to find a new way.

That ‘new way’ came in the guise of a year old German Shepherd named Lars. At a seminar I attended in September of 1996 I saw a video of Lars learning how to retrieve. A wonderful dog trainer named Patty Russo was Lars’ teacher. Although Patty was using her voice, she was using a method I came to know as Clicker training.

This simple but deceptively powerful way of teaching soon had Stormn' showing just how smart she was.

She became my best friend and partner in my training business helping me to gain many clients: especially those with out of control labs! 

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Oh, and for retrieving? I’ll let you judge.

In two sessions, she learned how to retrieve some of the hardest items for a dog to learn.

The first session on teaching her to fetch my large bunch of keys - took just FIVE minutes, yes, just five minutes.

The second session where I taught her how to pick up coins, anything from a half dollar down to a dime, took just THREE minutes.

And I never had to ‘teach’ her again.

In fact I couldn’t use her as a demo dog for teaching the retrieve because she learned each thing I could think of in about a minute and always did it from then on - including when I decided to teach her to pick up a glass bottle!

Tragically, in January 2002, she was accidentally let out of our yard while I wasn’t home and while looking for me she traveled nearly a mile away to the main road and was hit and killed by a car.