Friday, October 19, 2007

Uma's teeter

I missed a few practice sessions with Uma because of her pad injury, but she's back to normal now. I'd been working on her independent teeter performance ever since August, when I noticed that she would wait for me at pivot point. I went back to plexi-targetting, then removed the plexi and proofed her performance by varying my position. The one thing I still need work on is the strong stop when there is HUGE speed. She will miss the position (barely, but still) if I am way ahead of her and she's coming at the teeter with increased speed (off a tunnel). Here's what it looks like at this point. I like it.



And Eden....
Well, like you guys said in the comments to my previous post, it is not particularly productive to obsess over the nature vs nurture thing, but I honestly cannot help doing it. Especially, since I own two littermates, who are as different from each other as can be in temperament, I just find myself looking for these little suggestions of what's to come. And definitely I'm negative about this - I obsess about the behaviors which may possibly turn into something bad a lot more easily than about those which might turn into something good.
It also seems that I tend to forget certain experiences very easily. I almost panicked a couple of days ago when Eden spooked on hearing dogs barking at the agility place. I complained to everybody I met that I'd broken my puppy and was doing a lousy job. And then Wanda, Jinx's owner, reminded me how all three of our pups (Uma, Malcolm, Jinx) panicked when they heard an airplane flying high high above their heads when they were about 3 months old. And this stage passed, they surely wouldn't sppok at this now.

2 comments:

Amy Siegel said...

Wanna talk about things to obsess about....this weekend at the motel we stayed at, we had to walk across a carpeted hallway to a tiled hallway, back to carpet and Bodhi freaked. He wouldn't walk on the tile. My house has lots of wood and tile floors and he's never had a problem with it. And then, he can't walk across this floor. I carried him the 1st time, but then I put him on a 26 foot Flexi so that after he planted himself on the carpet 3 feet from the tile floor, I could continue walking, out of site and then he managed to get himself across the time (slinking along the wall). And I did that every time we went in and out over the 3 days of our stay and by the last morning, he was walking out ahead of us, still a little nervous, but taking the lead.

These things go by. The dogs will get over it and if we obsess about it, I think we can make it worse.

/amy

PS - nice teeter

Uma said...

Yep, they will get over it. Eventually. When Uma and Mal were puppies there was a little metal bridge across a very small creek that we had to walk across on our daily walks. I'd cross it, the other dogs would cross it and Uma would stand on one side of the bridge, looking like a beat up little shelter puppy and point blank refuse to do it. After I walked away far enough, she's slink along the side of the bridge, just like Bodhi on the tile floor. And guess what? When I went on this same walk after a year of living somewhere else, she galloped onto the bridge and didn't mind it one bit. The old phobia was gone and I didn't do anything to cure it. It just went away on its own.