Fun with Dogs!

I just read this sentence in a post from the Clicker Solutions Yahoo group:  Sometimes with fearful dogs you wind up with a new starting point.

I have been rather halfheartedly attempting to get Jellybean (my own fearful dog) to use a balance ball for quite a while now, even before I saw Kay Laurence’s super cool session at Clicker Expo in March where I learned the new (to me) $5 word proprioception ;-)  I was just thinking of the balance ball for Jellybean as yet another hind end awareness exercise and I was certainly thrilled on Friday when Jellybean finally got up ON the ball

But, I did not expect the changes I have seen in Jellybean this weekend!  I am not saying that any of these changes are necessarily because of the balance ball work but who knows?

I have always wanted tug as a real reinforcer for Jellybean.  Granted, not enough to do what Susan Garrett says will get that for me but it is a nagging thought oh, it would be so nice if Jellybean loved to tug.  Yesterday, I met a lovely woman at the park to play some frisbee and I handed my new friend a stack of discs so she could work on the mechanics of throwing without her fabulous dog.  Jellybean and Brit were in wire crates next to my chair in the shade.  M threw all the discs and was about to go gather them back up and I said, why not send your dog to get them?  M didn’t think E would do so so I handed her E’s lead and let Jellybean out of her crate and asked her to fetch all the discs up for me.  I swear that dog loves any task where she is genuinely being helpful.  As I began to take the fourth or fifth disc from Jellybean she didn’t release it and began tugging for all she was worth!  On a hard, plastic Fastback dog disc!!!!  All this time I have been offering Jellybean soft things on which to tug!  Generally I don’t demand that Jellybean deliver objects to hand when we are just playing fetch, I am fine with her dropping them by my feet since 9 times out of 10 I’m using a chuckit so I don’t WANT to take the ball from the dogs’ mouths so I don’t worry about whether or not Jellybean hands me the frisbee but when we were fetching up a half dozen in a row, Jellybean determined that it was more efficient to hand them to me and oh yeah, that tugging is FUN!  I let her drag me across the field then said, “out” (Jellybean already knows the cue ‘out’ to give me an object and ‘drop’ to simply drop an object on the ground/floor) and stopped offering any real resistance.  The second Jellybean let go of the disc, I immediately turned and waggled it saying, “get it!” (also a cue Jellybean has for running to and grabbing an object) as reinforcement for having dropped it.

To B Continued or ‘Jellybean Plays In The Hose’