“Good girl to sit!” “Good girl to come!” “Good girl to tinkle outside!” “What a good girl! Yes, you are!”

That’s me talking or, rather, cooing, clucking, and sometimes shrieking to our golden retriever, Willa. Willa is 10 months old, breathtakingly gorgeous, and nothing short of a total terror. To say that she has a mind of her own is like saying Rosie O’Donnell is more or less opinionated. She is our third golden (golden-retriever owners refer to their dogs as “goldens”), and although both of her predecessors were greathearted, neither was known for being particularly well behaved. In fact, Molly, whose paws Willa hopes to fill, never did stop jumping up on people, grabbing hors d’oeuvres out of guests’ hands, stealing whole chickens off the kitchen counter, or pulling my arm out of its socket when she was on the leash.

“This one will be different,” I said when we picked up the seven-week-old dumpling Willa from the breeder. “Yeah, right,” said our older daughter, Kate. Although Kate lives on her own now, she was already anticipating bringing friends to our apartment and having them knocked to the ground by what would undoubtedly be, judging from Willa’s giant puppy feet, a very, very large golden.

“Well, I have a book that tells you how to train a golden-retriever puppy,” I said, “and the key thing is positive reinforcement.” Kate looked even more dubious. I continued, “It says that you have to keep catching her doing something right — not something wrong — and praising her. You’re supposed to start each sentence with ‘good girl’ for whatever good thing she does and make a big fuss over her.” “Hey, go ahead and try it,” Kate said. “You sure don’t have anything to lose.”