Well, a couple of weeks ago Lucy, Lisa and I went on the Focus and Rehabilitation day at Learning About Dogs. It was great and we got chance to do some practice with 'Sheep Balls' and Dash worked on a Treiball as the larger versions are called.
This training enables a dog to focus and work on their natural behaviours, essentially allowing a herding dog to herd. if these behaviours are practiced it is Kay's belief that a dogs stress levels are lowered and they are more able to cope with modern day living (cars / bikes etc). So far I have very much found this to be 100% correct.
Once focus is built within the game a cue can be added and used to counter condition in environments where you need your dog to remain focussed on something.
We will do some teaching sessions on this in the Summer for our dogs in a class tailored to this exercise.
Sheep Ball Video - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_G4u3ApWTzg
Treiball Practice Video - http://cleverdogs.de/videos/
We also about tug games- We tug to play but to play safely there has to be rules. Play is a powerful teaching tool so we should be careful what we teach with it!
Kay Stocks some brilliant Tug Toys from Tug-e-nuff - http://www.tug-e-nuff.co.uk/
Can't reccommend any of the Learning About Dogs Courses highly enough!
Great post Emma! The teaching sessions for sheepballs games sound really good. Still getting to grips with trying to capture some of the instinctive behaviours from Dash. I've found that for instance he will happily flank to my right but takes more encouragement to flank to the left. Currently still only performing right flanking behaviour to a visual cue (my feet)- as yet to add verbal. Had a few light bulb moments but still very much a work in progess. His main instinct appears to be to eye the ball to death!
ReplyDeleteThe LAD course was great!