Gracie Meets Tippy Board

Whew. We are all back at home after a long weekend. Gracie's class was canceled tonight because of rain (monstrous thunderstorms, actually, but we need the rain so no complaints here). And Mimi's class is canceled in the morning. Instead of working with them inside tonight, I felt a little lazy after a busy day at work so I finished putting away my flyball and travel gear then made a round of nice dinners for everyone. I'll fall into bed early and try to catch up on my sleep.

Fortunately I anticipated this and made a video last weekend of Gracie's introduction to the tippy board.

For those of you who don't do agility, the tippy board is an extraordinarily simple, versatile piece of training equipment. I cut four 1"x1" slats and nailed them in a box shape in the middle of an approximately 28"x28" piece of scrap plywood. I want the board to be big enough for the dog to get all four feet on. So the plywood has to be relatively strong, although I think I used 1/4"--I do have small dogs after all. The box on the bottom is just large enough to fit a regulation softball into--this is what make the tippy board tippy. Best of all, since I want the thing to move and pivot, it doesn't matter if the box isn't perfectly centered on the board! I painted the top of the plywood with paint mixed with clean sand, then painted it again with plain paint. This gives the top of the tippy board the same look and feel as most of the contact obstacles a dog will see in agility.

You can use a tippy board to teach balance, rear end awareness, even for physical therapy after surgery or injury. It is most often used to introduce the dog to the concept of getting on and off a moving board, that is, it is like the teeter obstacle in agility. I always train the tippy board on a hard surface (porch, garage, or in this case, my newly decarpeted front room--I'm planning a tiling project this winter) so that just like many teeters, it makes a loud bang when the dog gets on it quickly.

When I was training Mimi, I could send her to the tippy board from more than 20 feet away, and she would run at top speed, throw herself on it to make the loudest sound possible, then fling herself off and run back to me at top speed. I never trained her on a teeter at a lowered height or put stuff under the teeter to check its fall. She went straight from exhuberant tippy board to exhuberant full-height teeter. Since she loved the tippy board game so much, I gave it a command "hit it!" which is now her command for the teeter.

Nature versus nurture. Will Gracie learn the teeter the same way and as quickly? I absolutely love watching her try to figure out what I want her to do. I'm staring at the board, thinking about my criteria and waiting for her to touch it, clicker in one hand and turkey hot dog bits in the other. She offers me a few of the old tried-and-trues at first: sits, downs. You can see in the video that I do lure her onto the board. But I did three sessions on the tippy board with her, separating each with a few minutes of a completely different exercise. Each time she gets more confident. You can see the wheels in her little brain whirring faster and faster--along with her tail!