Obedience
All dogs should have acceptable social manners and will benefit from basic obedience training. If you really enjoy training and find your Havanese to be especially responsive, then you may wish to pursue Obedience at a Competitive level. This requires a commitment to many hours of detailed work and repetition.
You and your dog must learn to work as a team while executing a variety of precision exercises in distracting surroundings. You can continue in obedience for many years and earn titles at the Novice, Open and Utility levels, an Obedience Championship and other advanced titles.
Mitzi
Mitzi made history as the first Canadian-bred Havanese with a Candian Kennel Club obedience title when she earned her Companion Dog title (CD), and continued the tradition as the first Havanese to have earned a CKC Open obedience title (CDX). Getting our CDX was neither fast nor easy. It was a reflection of years of training and practice with many pitfalls along the way. If you want to compete in obedience with a Havanese you must have an abundance of patience liberally laced with a good sense of humour to tide you through the inevitable embarrassing moments. An attractive little furball animatedly bouncing around the ring attracts attention. Onlookers always loved watching Mitzi no matter how badly she performed. That is both good and bad. There are more people to cheer on your efforts, but also more to see the fumbles.
On the way to success we failed every single exercise at least once. Mitzi could be very creative in her responses with that clownish Havanese personality surfacing at the most inopportune times. Cute dance spins and flips on turns, beautiful precision heeling ---on the wrong side!--- returning the dumbbell to the judge, re-jumping the broad jump on the finish, forgetting the dumbbell on the retrieve, hopping back and forth over the high jump (so much fun), running up to the judge and putting her paws up to say hello, and much more.
If your goal is effortless precision and high scores, this may not be the right breed for you, but if you want obedience to be fun then by all means try it with your Havanese. After struggling in Open, the Utility level just came together very naturally for Mitzi; she saw it as a string of delightful games she got to play in the ring. She passed her three Utility legs in just 4 tries, earning her Utility Dog title (UD) and then the coveted title of Obedience Trial Champion (OTCh), the first Havanese to do so in Canada.
