"Riddle Me This!"

Whew. A toughie. When I first saw it, I had no idea where to go. Then I saw that someone else had already solved it! Good grief! I tried all kinds of classic moves - first letter of every word, embedded messages, seeing if right or left was within the text. No luck. I noticed that the poem didn't always rhyme. I tried mixing up the lines to make it rhyme, seeing if it would make more sense that way. As I wrote the lines out, I noticed the first letters were close to spelling something out. I put them back it the right order and saw they spelled "Try again." I read the story to see if he's tried one path before talking to his dog. Nope, he hadn't. So I "tried again." I checked the first letters of the second line, and of the last words in each line. And then I checked the last letter of each line and there it was - "the right" So the right path was the correct fork to take.

But one thing still puzzles me:
How did you get your dog to talk?