Teeter update and plan

I had a private lesson with Susanne Cohen just to work on the teeter (although she also had us do a few short jumping sequences to break up the lesson and give Dragon a break). I told her in detail what we've done so far. Discussing everything and then demonstrating it all was helpful -- it solidified in my brain that there's a very specific element of the teeter that Dragon is having trouble with. It's the movment of the board under his feet as he's walking/running across it. He can deal with riding it while he's stationary; our extensive wobble board practice laid a great foundation for that. He can run across straight planks and sloped planks no problem. He doesn't like the bang but it's not the sound that's making him slow down at the pivot point. It's the movement as he's moving.

(By the way, since we're taking a break from practicing the teeter in class, I'm using that time to just counder-condition the noise.)

My current plan of action is to use restrained recalls back and forth along a stationary teeter to get him once again running from end to end without worry. (We did a session of this already, and doing it as a restrained recall makes it more fun/exciting for him.) Then I am going to do the same thing I did on the wobble board -- add movement manually, so that I can carefully control the timing and intensity. I'm going to do it first when he's moving toward me, so that he can see that my arm is moving and that I'm controlling the teeter. At first the movement is going to be as much like a little vibration as I can make it. We'll work from there.

I'm feeling hopeful about this plan because it's working on just the element that is currently causing a problem. (And separately we're working on the banging noises.)

I'm also going to incorporate Silvia Trkman's method of having the dog run across a full height teeter that is held stationary by the owner, and then manually lowered. This will enable him to gain confidence running up the steep ramp, and get a careful, controlled feeling of the full-height fall. I don't want his first experiences with those two elements to be at the same time as we're working on raising the height of the teeter and increasing its fall. The traditional method -- get the dog running across the teeter at a low height and raise it over time -- changes too many variables at once and was not a good fit for Trauma Dog.