Flying Poodles

Training Movement with the Rocker Board

We went back to the beginning with Dancer today and started with a rocker board. I did some clicker shaping until she was willing to put one paw on it; she was so careful, she’d lift her paw and gently rest it on the board, VERY careful not to move it all. Then I upped the criteria, and soon she put TWO paws on it. After that I started some shameless luring, and after a while she was sitting on the board and I could ask her to shift her weight forward and back, which caused some gentle rocking on the board. She got a huge jackpot–everything in my pockets–for that, and then we quit and I leaned the rocker board up against the side wall of the arena. She really does NOT like things that move; this whole process took at least 45 minutes, which is as long as it took her to learn to weave six poles!