how to create mask around subject

I have a picture of my Dog that I took in front of out old house. It has cars and other junk in the background.

Is there any way I can create a mask around my Dog so that I can cut out that portion and paste it onto a better background ?

Coming from a background in Micrografx Picture Publisher (which is no longer made) in that program all I had to do was:

1)define a basic mask
2)click on the edit mask tool

Then all the individual points would be available and I could do whatever I wanted.

But I can't see any easy way to do this in photoshop
Any Help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks

In Ps you don't have "individual points" of a mask, but there are several ways to acomplish what you want:
- Use the lasso tool to get a rough mask then switch to quick mask and paint to fine tune the selection.
or:
- Use the Extract filter

Good luck