Story is learning to skateboard
I’ve been bad about posting video clips over here- they all go on the Instagram and Tiktok – but I’ve started uploading them to youtube as well. 🙂
Check out Story’s first session learning to skateboard.
You can’t hear it with the music (I will admit I’m covering up Jack’s really irritating whining in the background- he loves to train (okay, he loves to eat food and training = GOOD FOODZ) and was willing to hold a downstay and get treated intermittently, he also made this high pitched noise that made me want to cover my ears. ) but this is just one little clicker training session that lasted about 8-9 minutes- I sped up some of the reptitive chunks and cut out a lot of the unsuccessful trials. (Story experimented for a little while with trying to get under the blanket, another trick we’ve been working on.) The blanket is under the skateboard to keep it from rolling quite so easily as it does on the hard flooring.
My first criteria was ‘look at the skateboard’ and that took about .5 seconds as Story’s definitely gotten the concept of “Ah, a novel item, I know there will be food for interacting with it” down. Paw touches and climbing on things are strong default behaviors for her, so it didn’t take long at all for her to graduate to putting one and then two front feet on it.
After she was consistantly putting her feet onto it, I began letting the skateboard move a little bit- the blanket and my feet kept it from moving much, but rocking if she stepped on the tail or rolling a couple inches when she stepped on were fair game. Initially, when it moved, she’d step right back off, but I clicked for staying on through the motion, and treated in place (sometimes while the movement was going on.) The last step for this session was to be comfortable with the board moving and her staying on it while it did- the very last rep, she took thre steps to stay with the board as it rolled away from where she was standing! Good girl, Story!
I haven’t taught a dog to ride a skateboard before (I’ve taught a couple to ‘surf’ on body boards in the lake and at the beach), but it’s a similar concept to that and to a thing we teach for agility, that the dog is in control of the motion- vital for dogs to understand before they can safely do the teeter at full speed. So here I blocked the skateboard with the blanket (so it could move but not too much) and flattened the blanket out more as Story got more comfortable with motion. As she started realizing she could move WITH the board, I stopped blocking it at all (no wrinkles) but kept the blanket down to keep the speed controlled.
Pushing a skateboard like this is a kind of unusual motion and it needs quite a bit of core strength, especially to do it faster. I want Story to be successful at this, so we won’t do long sessions or any real speed until she’s got control of moving the board (stepping on, letting it go forward, stepping with her back feet to keep up, and stopping again by slowing her motion, not by running into things) and we won’t move onto a harder surface until then. We’ll play with this again later this week but not too soon- I want to work on some other behaivors as well, because increasing Story’s ‘vocabulary’ of things she can do to interact with the world is our goal right now. 🙂