Teeter Totter

Well, it's been an interesting week. I haven't been able to continue the 2X2s because I had to run to Dallas for 5 days, and then had a week swamped with tests and homework at school. Monday night Landon and Deets had their regular classes. Landon and I have been working on distance work, because I have an awful habit of taking my dogs to every obstacle. We're getting a lot better about it and Landon is, in result, getting much faster. He's also slowly conquering his fear of the teeter totter, which we now call "See" (short for see-saw) and will do it now without bailing off the side, but he still does it very slowly.

Deets and Mimzy both need to learn to do the teeter totter. Deets has got it down, now, after clicker trianing him to do it. I started a few weeks ago by playing the "teeter totter game" with him, in which I hold down the "up" side of the teeter and wait for him to touch it with his paw. When he did, I clicked and gave a treat. Slowly I required him to do more and threw a bigger learning curve at him, so instead of one pay I wanted two on the board. When he was coming at the board with both paws quickly and without hesitation, I raised the end of the board up by about an inch, and had him slam it down and clicked. By this point, instead of clicking as soon as his paws touched the board, I clicked when the board hit the ground. Slowly I raised the board higher and higher with every try, so that, after two 10 minute sessions in a week span Deets was jumping up with his front feet and making the board slam from its full height.

I then started to vary my position around the board, making Deets run up and slam the board from coming around my side, or from ten feet away instead of right next to me. He LOVED the game, and picked up on it really quickly. Soon, I asked him to actually walk up the board and perform the teeter like it should be, and he did it without hesitation of fear. By the third time he did it this way, he understood that the whole point of the game was to make the teeter totter slam as hard as he could make it. I continued to click when the board hit the ground, so that the reinforcer is not the clicker itself, but the sound of the bang on the teeter totter. Deets learned to do the teeter without issue with less than 30 minutes of total training. By his third session working he is able to perform it in sequences with jumps.

Mimzy, however, does not like the teeter totter game. I just started to play with her yesterday and she quickly learned to put her paws on the board while it doesn't move and enjoys the game... but as soon as I let it up an inch off the ground and it moved under her paws she became very fearful and ran around me in circles and barked and got very frustrated. Instead of continuing the game, I decided to teach her to play on the wobble board with me, so we took the clicker and learned to get on the wobble board. She's still pretty frightening, so this will be a much slower process with her.


Landon's weaves are really coming along. He can do a set of 6 perfectly every time, but with the set of 12 he likes to pop out at the 3rd or 2nd to last poles. I've split the two sets of 6 so they are about 4 feet apart and I stop and treat him between each set and then have him continue. Slowly I'm bringing the sets together. Yesterday at practice he performed the whole 12 together two or three times with no mistakes. We've got to get on this because his first standard USDAA run is on April 11th.