freaked at the teeter
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| nothing different happened? |
Bellalover wrote: But now I am worried. I entered her in this trial and all of a sudden she for the first time ever she is afraid of the teeter! What's up with that?
OK, this part is to be expected. Murphy's Dog Show Entry Law states that the moment you send in an entry, depending on the venue: 1) your show dog's hair will all inexplicably fall out OR 2) your intact agility/obedience bitch will come into season (OR "give birth" to a litter of socks -- don't ask) OR 3) (the one you just experienced) the dog you were feeling so confident and good about suddenly develops a bizarre issue from out of the blue The likelihood of this happening increases many times over if 1) this is the dog's first trial or her first trial in a long time 2) it is an exceptionally important trial (name your reason) and, finally, be forewarned that: 3) the likelihood of having some bizarre training issue pop up right before a trial is directly linked to the size of the check you just wrote to enter said trial. I don't know WHY this happens, but I've seen it happen too many times for it to be a fluke. SO, a couple of things I've learned: 1) make sure your response to any set back is proportionate to how you would normally react if you didn't have anything on the line and that it's not fueled by the fact that you have three days to get her over this peculiarity and not only is this the only trial for the next three months, your Mom is flying in from Maine to see her granddog run I.e. keep things in perspective and don't over react. 2) if you don't make too big a deal out of it, it may very well diminish on its own. The second part actually reflects a derivative of Murphy's Law, known as Sybil's Law. Sybil's Law states that a green agility OES will inexplicably, yet consistently, develop some peculiar behavioral quirk that varies almost week to week. After weeks or more typically months of doing something extraordinarily well (and, yes, Kerry, she does have a short list of such behaviors  ) she would suddenly refuse to do it at all or behave like she had never heard of such an outrageous thing. Every so often we'd figure it out, but other times even our instructor would be stumped and we learned to just shrug it off and not push it too hard and let her work through it until she got rid of whatever buzzing she had going on in her hairy bonnet.
She started out with a beautifully fast dogwalk and then one day in class this fall she suddently started refusing to do it at all. I was floored. And worried. Had she somehow hurt herself and I had missed it? 
In the midst of this I took her to an agility run-thru somewhere else where she had never seen the equipment before and THAT dogwalk, having never been on it before, she ran across without hesitation. Four times. Whether I wanted her to or not. 
She's consistently performed better on any dogwalk but the one at class, which is a perfectly fine dogwalk, ever since and I've simply stopped worrying about it. Now, I did notice that her feet were kind of hairy around the time she started refusing it, so I gave her toes a trim and shaved between her pads in case it felt slippery to her. That did help a little so maybe that's a clue, but, ultimately, best advice is: breathe deeply, don't push her too hard and don't assume the worst. It's REALLY unlikely that a dog with a solid, joyful teeter is going to take one bad - in her mind, at least - experience and turn it into a lifelong phobia. Kristine |
| Thanks, Kristine. I still have no idea where it came from, but, I decided not to worry about it. My agility buddy and I are meeting on Monday to work with the teeter. I decided we will enter the trial with a positve attitude and if she and I do well, then good. If not, it's ok, too. We'll have fun hanging out for the two days. We'll get experience. If she refuses the teeter, then she does. It's our first trial. Rookie ring time.
I will expect she will love it as always before so she won't feel my vibes. A woman in my agility class has a standard teeter with nowhere to put it in a month's time....duh....I have a big back yard, a couple jumps, a tire jump, a table and weaves....turns out she only lives about 3 miles from me. We're working it out to move her teeter to my house so we can both practice here. Things work out, don't they? |
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