Flying Poodles

Learning to Learn (and Teeter Training)

I have used clicker training with Dancer since she was a tiny puppy, and Vikki (Dancer’s breeder) did some clicker training even before that. When I get out the clicker and a handful of treats, Dancer looks around to see what’s new–or what I’m looking at–and then starts trying things.

Yesterday she “graduated” from my teeter board (which I will continue to use) to the big teeter out at the arena. We set it on the lowest setting, and I walked over and stared at it, with Dancer at my side. She sniffed it. Click and a treat. (I had organic chicken garlic sausage.) She sniffed it again. No click, because I was upping my criteria. She put a paw on it. Click/treat. We did that a few times, and then I skipped one. She looked annoyed with me, but tried the other paw. C/T.

I upped my criteria again; the teeter had to move when she put her paw on it. In about five minutes, she was willing to step up on it with all four paws. That got a jackpot–five or six treats, fed one at a time, while I told her how impressed I was–and we went off to do something else. (Something else was practicing serpentines, and she did them beautifully.)

After a bit–I ran the entire twenty obstacle course with her (yes, I was breathing hard at the end, why do you ask?) and then practiced a bit with Elly, too–I came back to the teeter and we ran once again through the entire sequence of expected performance, from one paw to all four. This time, I wanted her to walk the length of the teeter and tip it. It didn’t take long to get there–maybe another five minutes–and then I tried having her do the tunnel before the teeter and then the teeter. She did it, and she did it fast enough to earn another jackpot, so we quit doing teeters and went and did some tunnels and jumps.

I really like the clicker as a means of communicating with the dogs. They know by now that if I get the clicker out, it means they get lots of treats–they just have to figure out how to turn me into a treat dispenser; that’s their perspective on the clicker. From my perspective, they have to learn what I want them to learn; I just have to figure out what the steps are.

It’s the figuring out what the steps are that is hard. Someone said recently that you can think of it like a movie. In a movie, if someone is going to do something, first thing, they look at it. Then, they walk towards it… and so on.

In clicker training, you reward each step, then work toward the next step, constantly chaining the behaviors together. So in training Dancer’s teeter, the first step is to look at it, then sniff it, then put one paw on it, then put a paw on it and move it, then both paws, then all four paws, then walk on it, then walk on it and tip it, then run on it and tip it, then I raise the height and repeat the sequence.

It would be easier if Dancer didn’t find the teeter so very scary. I wouldn’t need to do so many very small steps with such high value rewards.

But many many dogs find the teeter very scary. It’s the only agility obstacle that moves. And it moves somewhat unpredictably, from a dogs point of view; every teeter has a slightly different tipping point.

There are multiple schools of thought on training a great teeter. Most of them involve the dog running to the end and standing there (or crouching) as the teeter tips through a distance of about four feet. There are even a few border collies that slide into position. Elly was trained in the run-to-the-end style but it didn’t take her long at all to decide that she wanted to tip it herself at the fulcrum. I have no problem with that; it seems to me that we’re equal partners in this endeavor, and the least I can do is respect her decisions. It looks like Dancer also prefers to tip it herself with a weight shift. She prefers to use her left paw, too.