I am watching a new DVD-it is
Wendy Pape's Teeter From Start to Finish
First off we have a pretty good teeter performance, my dogs love the movement and have always been pretty good. After the car accident Breeze has been more freaky and something about the teeter is scaring her for the first time, so I started retraining the teeter bit by bit to get her confident and not worried again. When I was first watching the video, Wendy is not training the teeter how I trained the teeter so I was not sure I liked the video, but the more I watched... there are some things I found very helpful. One thing Wendy does is to teach all the elements of a fast, safe teeter seperately. So you work on the approach and teaching the dog to load properly on a plank on the ground. Goodness we are doing a lot of plank work lately, and the plank has moved into being one of the most valuable pieces of equipment that I own! LOL. Then she teaches the bang noise and being comfy with that, she teaches the movement seperately, then HEIGHT, which is something I had not really trained for before, of course the end behavior is taught and then putting the whole thing together. She also has a chapter at the end on how to train really large dogs. Wendy also addresses the different positions and why you would chose different positions for which dogs.
The one thing that I realize is that I had been having an issues with Chloe she was starting to load on the teeter from the side more and more, so Wendys method of training that is a pretty easy fix, and I had noticed my border collies were stopping more and more right at the tip point and they had never been afraid and I just noticed a little slowing and was not sure what that is about, but now I am thinking it is because I had never really taught and desensitized for the height of the obstacle. That is the one thing that I do not think is addressed quite as well the way I origionally taught the teeter. So I took the dogs out this morning and sure enough Breeze was scared of the heigh, Liz was a little uncomfortable, not bad but a little worried and Cherry could care less about the height-good ol' Cherry.
The other thing I really appreciated that Wendy really addressed was the placement of rewards-she uses duct tape at the end of the teeter so the dog can not see it as they load, and then have to have their head down and straight, and she uses some spray cheese on the tape. Now how clever and easy is that??? I think that is the other thing I have not been as careful at making sure to reward with the head straight ahead and low.