The way Piston carries himself oozes confidence and nobility - except for when greeting his pack and family or playing the role of people greeter extraordinaire. Then you will see the sweet, happy, goofy expression of a dog with a heart of gold. Piston exudes so much of what a Shiloh is meant to be - super confident, sweetly submissive, friendly and gentle to all, protective when warranted, so smart and always forgiving and tolerant.

Piston is one of those “bombproof” dogs - nothing phases him and he can be trusted in any scenario to assess the situation and react appropriately. He believes every new experience is a fun adventure just waiting to be investigated - doesn’t matter if it’s new people, places or things, he’s up for anything! And he does it with such confidence and sociability that he makes friends every where he goes. He often doesn’t stick around too long, since there is always something new to see or smell but he always makes sure to greet everybody with a big body wag and a smile.

It is really easy to forget that Piston does not speak english. He’s learned so many commands from our trick training, including more complex words like “again” which to repeat what he just did, and he doesn’t forget them either. Some tricks we haven’t performed in years, but if I can remember the command he remembers the action. But more impressive than the understanding of just commands is how easily he picks up on natural language… “c’mon over here” or “go lay down on your bed” are understood and followed.

Although, there are times where he doesn’t use all of that smarts for good! Piston has an independent streak that is at least a mile wide. He loves to do his own thing, go his own way and just follow his own whims. Exploring and sniffing have always been his primary drives, so it was difficult to motivate him and get him thinking what we wanted was best. He would gladly pass up food, treats, toys for the chance to follow his nose somewhere new, he was more of a lone wolf type.

Of course, as he matured he became much more attached to his pack and can be quite the softy leaning in for some rubs and pats. But, every now and again, he’ll still sometimes try to play the “dumb card” - after receiving an instruction he’ll look at us with such confusion and tilt his head like we’ve just uttered a command he’s never heard. He’ll pretend like he is really trying to understand that strange word (like “down”) but he just doesn’t know it. All the while hoping you’ll forget you asked him and move on to something else. He has a number of avoidance techniques that he’ll pull out to keep us on our toes - but when it really matters, Piston always comes through.

Piston is pretty close to what we are striving to reproduce in our breeding program - the only thing we’d change is we’d like a little less independence. If we could, we’d change his mile wide independent streak to more of a half mile or quarter mile ;) But of course we’d gladly take another dog just like him!