Sheri says:

HELLO! I’m excited to be here with 9 month old borderwhippet Stark. I’ve been enjoying your tug class and taking it all in!
Just a bit of history on my dog and I: I started working on play as soon as Stark came home at 7 weeks and at first I didn’t get play at all- he loved to sniff! I was distraught and worked with an online instructor to help me out. We built interest in play slowly and it became solid in the house then finally in my yard. Then I moved on to other places. For his first 2 in person puppy classes he would not play inside the building at all although he’d interact in training and take treats. Finally in our last “life skills” class that ended just as COVID started he played with me during play breaks! I almost cried!

Last week my first on-person “pre-agility” class started – there are only 2 other dogs because classes are kept at half of normal size so we have lots of space between people. He is still very happy to play (in fact once he wanted his toy even though I was offering food) BUT I’m getting some newer excessive thrashing behavior as a party for one.

This thrashing is worse with longer toys and when it first really came up about 6 weeks ago I kind of ignored it by changing to dog discs. We will play agility and disc so I went to working on my retrieve to hand, toy switching, and outing a toy at a distance on verbal cue with a disc because he has no interest in thrashing those.

Stark’s favorite part of toy play is the chase. I can reward a nice return toy to hand with another chase. He is not possessive (other than time shaking the toy) and I’ve had to work hard to get him to come all the way into my hand for the return because he prefers to drop early. I, unfortunately, conditioned that a bit by playing the two toy game where an offered drop made me produce a second toy to throw or bite then had to change criteria.

So for the first minute of the clip I show offering a bite “strike” then trying to get him to have a tighter grip and more weight shift back. I felt he wasn’t loving my 2 hand presentation so I tried to switch to one hand but he slipped to the handle and then we soon had thrashing. The toy has 2 handles and a Smooth buffalo hide middle which is just a bit slippery. I tried to pet him to get weight shift (like Sarah’s demos) and also offer some re-bites. With tugs that I don’t throw with speed for a fast chase I feel the rebite has less value and I’m not sure he considers it rewarding. He seems more into re-biting discs and even balls on a string- he shoves them back at me faster and more readily for more play.

In the second minute, I offer him some retrieves to chase the toy which pumped him up a bit and I got a bit better tug play. I played with more body touching, tugging from the side of my body, and some additional re-bites. The shaking came in but not as bad.

At 2 min I switch to ball on a string which we’ve really worked on targeting the ball and not the rope (I’m proud he’s doing that pretty well) but again there is not a lot of weight shift back and some thrashing although less than with the previous tug toy.

This session was too long – 5 minutes of play and I promise my clips will be shorter in the future but I was trying to show a lot of things we’ve been working on and what we looked like as a team at the moment.

I’m wanting to soon use play as a reward for “work” but I need to be VERY CAREFUL not to add too much pressure – we’ve worked sooo hard to get this far and I’m a person inclined to ask for too much too soon. I’d like your help and thoughts about the thrashing- it is obviously very self rewarding. I can eliminate some thrashing by the toy I offer but even the string on toys like ball on a string or a 6”tug with a loop handle is all he needs to do that behavior.

When I can offer more retrieves in wide open spaces he thrashes less because of the reward of the chase, but in agility classes and at trials I know it would be ideal to have fun with a toy w/o throwing it or having only a small space.

I’m super excited to get your feedback and thank you for the great class.

https://youtu.be/rprO8QOtHqQ