Stagecoach Days

Stagecoach Days is the prototypical Tuffy movie. It is a B-western with a weak plot and weak acting but lots of horses, guns, and desperados. The studios churned out many such pictures on low budgets. Typically, these movies were shot in a week or two.

Tuffy had a particularly good role in this film. He was the sidekick of the star, Jack Luden, and thus was on screen for a lot of minutes. (Luden was an heir to the Luden cough drop formula but wanted to be a motion picture star.) Among Tuffy's stunts in this picture:

• While seated at the dinner table, refuse pieces of meat unless first placed on a fork
• After dinner, carry his plate to the sink and drop it in
• Retrieve first a pipe, then tobacco, for "Breezy Larkin" (Jack Luden)
• Retrieve a rope from inside the house
• Follow along as Breezy rides his horse at a gallop
• Tie the bad guys to a tree (take a rope in the teeth and walk in circles arouind the tree while Breezy holds a gun on them)
• "Play" the piano
• Enable Breezy's escape from bad guys by jumping them from atop a stagecoach

All of the above stunts required no "extra" training. All logically flowed from the basic training that Tuffy had received since a puppy. The prinicples of the training are set forth in the training manual that is on this Web site. For example, refusing meat follows from the very first commands taught to a puppy: "don't touch it," "you can have it." In order to train the dog to eat from a fork, always give the command "you can have it" when offering the food from a fork. In that way, the dog associates the fork with the affirmative command.