This weekend my club had a rally-o show. Able went along to watch, and enjoyed meeting some more people and dogs. He was fairly well-behaved on the whole – and I was so impressed when he Sat and lay Down because he heard another competitor giving cues to her dog!
After the show on Saturday we went to Knottingley for a walk. There was a cricket match in progress and Able completely lost the plot once we got close enough to the cricket oval to see the action. When he’s spooked by something he likes to let everybody know with some Extremely Loud alarm barking.
As I’ve already written, it’s important to keep socialisation up throughout the first year. That doesn’t mean forcing the puppy to interact with things that frighten him, though. It just means going out and seeing lots of different things, and giving him time to get used to something at his own pace.
So we sat down on a log at a not-quite-alarm-barky distance, and we watched the cricket horror movie while Rik hunted sheep poo in the long grass. There was a lot of snorting and Wuffing at first, but after twenty minutes cricket was fairly boring. He could even take his eyes off it sometimes to look at me and play a game of tug. I would have liked to stay a bit longer, but alas cricket was over. We met a couple of the cricket players – who turned out to be normal people and not ogres – and went home.
We didn’t quite watch enough cricket for Able to get bored of it, so I’d really like to get him out to watch some more soon. Unfortunately at this time of year I suspect there won’t be a lot of opportunity, so it may have to wait until the spring.
A Pivoting Breakthrough
A few weeks ago I started a new body awareness exercise with Able – teaching him to stand with his front paws on one low platform (shoebox sized but sturdier) and his back paws on another one. He cottoned onto the concept fairly easily, but he couldn’t get himself onto the platforms very efficiently from some angles.
If he was coming into the side, he would put his front feet on the front box, turn, hop his front feet over to the rear box, turn around again, and bring his front feet to the front box – all while the rear legs trailed along behind and hopefully finished up on the rear box. What I wanted to see was Able putting his front feet onto the front box and then pivoting his rear feet around onto the rear box, but he didn’t yet have enough skill at moving his rear end independently like this.
Able had already learned how to put his front paws onto a platform (I used a lunchbox and later an upside-down salad bowl) and pivot his rear legs away from me when I step into his personal space. He didn’t seem to understand that he could do this to get his rear feet onto something, though.
I struggled with this for a couple of weeks. If I put one object down on the floor, Able was happy to pivot. When I put a second object down, I could get him to pivot away from it, but he would not pivot towards it at all.
We finally had our breakthrough this week. I was doing some pivoting work with just one platform, and he suddenly stopped pivoting and refused to go any further. Why? Because we had got a bit too close to Rik’s bed, and that was enough of an obstacle to set off Able’s mental block about pivoting onto things.
I tried a couple of times without any luck, and then for the next attempt I accidentally set him up with his rear end on Rik’s bed. This is quite a low bed but it does have a raised edge around the side. There was a biiig pause when I tried to get him to move – and then he discovered that he can actually pivot his rear legs over a low barrier.
Able and I worked with the dog bed for the rest of the session, and then last night I pulled his platforms out again to see if he could put two and two together. First I took the lid off one and we had a go at pivoting into a box with high edges. He figured that out, and then when I put the lid back on he was able to pivot his rear paws onto the platform on his first try!
This is the first time I’ve done so much work on body awareness with a young puppy and it’s cool to see Able discovering new things that he can do with his legs. I hope it will pay off with quicker progress down the road when it’s time to introduce “real agility” – and in the meantime it’s something fun that we are both enjoying.