Saturday, November 10, 2007

Team practice sans team

Today's team practice was cancelled, but since I was in that end of town anyway for the agility trial I figured I'd stop in for a quick practice. For the first time ever, he was doing independent full runs with the ball in the (unsprung) hole! The bad news is, he clocks in at about 7 seconds, losing tons of time with his "how not to do a boxturn" boxturn. Hopefully he'll soon figure out how to pick up the ball and do the turn in one fluid motion.

4 comments:

La complice de Jasmine / Jasmine's Partner In Crime said...

Okay, how did you convince him to do his boxturn in the right direction, "with" the ball.

Muttsandaklutz said...

From my (very limited) flyball experience, teaching the dog to pick up the ball while maintaining the turn is the hardest part. So don't worry, it may take some time, but she *will* get it!

Ping-ponging between ball and no ball helped my dogs a lot.

Anonymous said...

There's a good article on Flybaldog Tag about teaching box turns with the ball. Here is the link:
http://flyball-dog-tag.blogspot.com/2008/02/using-target-and-clicker-to-teach.html

Muttsandaklutz said...

Cool, I'll check it out. Always interesting to hear about different ways of teaching things. Thanks for visiting.