Nikon and Pan are both making great progress! Tuesday was only Nikon’s ninth flyball lesson. He is now consistently catching the ball running the entire sequence. He ran against a super-fast Border Collie and it actually made him faster, being able to race even if he won’t win.
Pan is somewhat of a flyball prodigy considering his size/breed. Here he is running against a dog that’s been doing flyball for over a year (this was Pan’s eighth lesson, starting October 2011) and if it weren’t for my reaction being slow to release him, he’d be consistently as fast if not faster. I’m actually planning to use his box turn to train his Schutzhund retrieve.
“The kid apparently was in the hospital and could not even turn her head. So the parents bought her a dog and brought it to the hospital and for two years this dog helped her learn how to move again. And as you can see the bond between them is AMAZING!”
We are on a break from Schutzhund training with our club and no longer tracking because of hunting season, so I decided to pursue flyball as our winter activity. Three reasons: 1) it’s indoors, 2) it’s only 10 minutes away! and, 3) the dogs LOVE it! I know you are probably thinking “flyball with a GSD?!” Believe me, I think the same thing every day, but we haven’t been kicked out yet!
We went to a trial visit in Feb. At that time, we worked on restrained recalls down the lane with the jumps, and then added in a large fake dog at the end to immediately start conditioning the dog to move over and “yield the lane” on the way back (because flyball is a relay so unless you are the last dog, you have to move over!).
Now the team trains each week at a new dog training/boarding facility in town and we’ve been keeping at it. I decided to make a “push board” so I could train the swimmer’s turn at home. The swimmer’s turn is really important in flyball, but even more so with such large dogs because without it, the dogs often want to slam into the box straight on and this is very stressful on their shoulders. A swimmer’s turn means the dog jumps onto the box and is already turning when they hit the box with all fours and then push back off with all fours. It’s much safer for their bodies and fast too. Many people don’t use a push board but literally have their dogs flip off a wall. Nikon can actually do this, but again with such a large breed of dog it’s really not the best way to condition this behavior so I designed my own push board that has a rubberized surface and just uses old couch cushions to form the angle and absorb the impact.
Here is Nikon getting acclimated to the board. Note the extreme use of props, including my own body, to initially shape the behavior.
Here is Nikon a few days ago showing off his turn (with the retrieve). Note that all the props but the jump have been removed.
Here is Pan showing the same progress with his turn.
We had training again Tues. night and both dogs went from doing recalls down the lane to doing their box turns! Unfortunately no video since my video/photo friends are in Texas for a Schutzhund trial. Nikon needs to work on catch the ball (the real box pops the ball up, rather than him taking it off the board) and Pan needs to work on carrying the ball *all* the way back to me. We’re getting a real box at home soon, a friend of mine has offered to let me use hers as soon as we can get it. Our trainer said we can start entering singles tournaments but so far the tournaments are too far away. It’s still a lot of fun and great exercises even if we never compete!
These are two of the best dogs on our team. The Border Collie is TEN years old!
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