Berit, Chris, Dave and myself went down to Petersfield to see what the ‘new technique’ for teaching the box involved, as well as any other tips and advice on flyball.
It turned out to be a very informative day. Emphasise was on teaching a new dog the box using the clicker and touch stick. It looks and sounds good, but depends on how much time we are prepared to spend on our dogs before they are ready to compete e.g. it takes months and months of training. It sounds ideal if you have a young pup with plenty of time before it is allowed to compete.
Molly and Falcon ‘learnt’ how to use the touch stick, and the next stage, touching/jumping up a wall. Molly looked to really enjoy this, and was really concentrating on what she had to do (with out the noise!). This is then transferred to touching the box with ALL 4 FEET! Interestingly, the starters DO NOT use a tennis ball (only a secondary motivator) until they are putting the whole run together fast and competently! Something to think about! It makes so much more sense when you can see what they achieve.
We were given a few ideas on improving the boxwork for our dogs, and although Spencer hits it hard, Anton said he wasn’t too bad! And Breeze was apparently a ‘problem’ dog, but she behaved, so much so we ended up doing the tunnel up to the box. She only went wrong once, and completed the run properly when she was ignored. Lets hope she can keep it up!!
Having updated on training ideas, I think we should be looking at sorting out the problems we have, and helping each other over-come them. We have worked hard on our passes as a team recently, I think it time to go ‘back to basics’!