Teenage trainer takes dog Tess to TV with tricks
Spaniel could pick up the phone and fetch a tissue
Tess the dog could roll over, sure. But her roster of tricks was a lot longer than that.
In the year and a half that she'd owned Tess, 17-year-old Tracy Korolyk (whose name is misspelled in the clip above) had also trained her to balance a treat on her nose and wait for the command before snapping it into her mouth in a split second.
Training is everything
"I think any dog can be trained, but I think it's the trainer that has more to do with it than the dog," said Korolyk.
Tess, a back-and-white springer spaniel from Winnipeg, would pick up the phone receiver and vault over a box on command.
What was Korolyk's secret?
"Lots of praise," she told reporter Sandra Lewis. "Praise is the main thing ... if she doesn't listen, I don't get mad at her but if she does really good she gets lots of praise."
Tess had become something of a local celebrity for her tricks, and that got her picture in a pet magazine (the photo depicted her posing with a copy of the magazine).
An irresistible invitation
But then came a call from New York, and an invitation to appear on Late Night with David Letterman in an ongoing segment called Stupid Pet Tricks.
For that appearance, Tess's gambit would be to fetch a tissue when Korolyk sneezed — a trick she easily performed for the CBC's camera on Nov. 11, 1985.
But according to the Winnipeg Free Press, Tess got the dog equivalent of stage fright in the Late Night studio.
"When the big moment came," said the story, "Tess got rattled. Maybe it was the lights, or the crowd, or the band. All Tess wanted to do was sit down and look the other way."