The need for speed

Now that Devon has mastered the teeter, we’re starting to work on building speed. I think this will come with confidence in “playing the game,” and I had planned to wait a little longer before pressing her for speed. However, after discussing it with a couple of trainers and thinking about it more, I decided to play with encouraging speed at this point, and I’m pleased with the results.

First, I took a toy and played the “ready, ready, GO!” game and raced her to it. Then I went to the weaves with the same energy and the same toy and said, “ready, ready, GO WEAVE!” Now, these were 12 poles with wires only on 2 and 4 and open 2 inches. She just nailed the poles and at more speed than I’ve seen her have. You better bet I rewarded that! We repeated this four times with me in various positions before I saw her speed slightly diminish as she got tired. At that point I moved onto something else.

For speed down the contacts, I put her on a 24 inch table next to the A frame and used the same toy target and again did my “ready, ready HIT/STAY!” Unfortunately this game with a toy means grab the toy and take off on a victory lap with it, so we got no two on two off. When I tried to make her stop with the toy, she clearly got confused. Since I wanted to keep the speed and association I got at the weaves, I decided we’d change the target reward.

The next day I put good human food in a plastic disposable container with a lid. I rewarded her from this small container so she knew what kind of yummies were in it. Then I put it out as a target and said, “Ready, ready, HIT/STAY” and she flew down the A frame and nailed the contact. She does like to pick the container up in her mouth, which is fine with me. She’ll even take a jump with it in her mouth before I reward her for it.

I’m really encouraged by the speed I’m getting with just minimal work on rewarding for it. The weave speed even translated to her 6 poles straight up. Interestingly I did a ring rental at a new place (for her) yesterday, and she still kept the speed with 12 straight up poles even if she only did about 8 of them. I rewarded her for the effort and the speed she gave me, but I won’t try 12 poles straight up again for a while!

Also during the ring rental, we worked full contact performance with the speed reward at the bottom. I got drive all the way down the A frame, but she wasn’t able to hit a two on two off with that speed. She did give me a four on the floor stop just at the base of the A frame. I think I’m going to go ahead and reward that, since she’s purposefully driving down through the contact zone and stopping. It’s a lot better performance than her halting/sliding down the A frame to make the contact!

I was also pleased with her drive on the dogwalk, considering this particular dogwalk has a lot of bounce on the ups and downs. Between her being fine on the dogwalk and sequencing a brand new teeter (again without doing it in isolation first), I was thrilled with her work so far this week!