Posted: Thu Jul 14, 2011 9:42 am Post subject: There's hope for Tiber!!!!!
Some of you may be aware from Facebook that Tiber isnt that keen on the canvas dummies. Tennis balls - yes - he will retrieve them til the cows come home, but canvas dummies are seen as something that should be sniffed at - at best.
Until last night (hopefully....) After a pretty rubbish performance at the Lab Club of Scotland training last week, we were retrieving tennis balls. Stuart, our trainer suggested I get a canvas dummy, take out the saw dust insides and then put tennis balls inside and sow it up again. So I duely did this (spent my friday night sowing it - i used to be out clubbing on a friday...) and then on sunday and tuesday played with Tiber and this new special tennis ball-dummy-hybrid and made it the most exciting thing ever (couldnt do the weekend as we were away at a wedding and monday night is flyball).
On Tuesday evening, I took Tiber for our normal evening walk and then finished up doing some retrieves with the special dummy. He was bringing it back to me really well – we weredoing lefts, rights and even ‘go back’. I was pleased with his performance so not wanting to over do it, we called it a night and headed home.
Yesterday, we rocked up at training again – with our special dummy and gave it to Stuart to throw for Tiber when it was our turn. So, after much clambering through some very long grass we got to a decent bit of ground to do some training. The first couple of dogs went and then I saw Stuart take out Tiber’s special dummy (it was obviously his as it has his name on it and it is lumpy with the 4 tennis balls inside it!). So the dummy was thrown, the shot was fired, Tiber marked it, waited for my command, I gave him the ‘back’ command and he shot off to where the dummy landed. All I could see was this bum in the air and a tail wagging frantically until suddenly Tiber’s head appeared and he was running towards me with the dummy in his mouth (not in the middle – but hey – who am I to criticise!) I was whistling and encouraging him to come back and then, as he approached me, I start saying ‘bring it’ so he proudly came towards me with his head high to give me the dummy! With the dummy in one hand I praised Tiber as if he has just brought me a bar of gold. Stuart was very pleased, so he decided to give me another dummy – this one a real one! So I set Tiber up, he marked the dummy and I sent him for it and lo-and-behold – he brought it back to me! No spitting it out, not stopping for a sniff, no peeing or pooing – was this the same dog as last week!?
The evening went on and we did a number of retrieves – all with proper dummies – even did a blind (this is very new to us). It was a fantastic night – and great to see Tiber heading in the right direction… just hope he keeps it up…
I’m going to continue with the special dummy but re-introduce the normal one aswell to keep him aware of these too. It was sooo good to see him bringing it back to me and we both really enjoyed it too. I was one very proud mummy last night – he got lots of praise after each dummy
Sorry to bore you all, but this was a huge break through for us last night and no one at work appreciates quite how big a step this was for us!! (and hopefully we wont go back too many steps next week!)
You should be proud of your boy Annie, between you and the trainer you`ve been able to overcome his aversion to a dummy, no doubt you`ll have other glitches in the future but if you read the write ups of those that trial/work regularly you`ll see they have problems too sometimes.
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