Adventures with Duct Tape

I washed a piece of duct tape the other day. I was taking the laundry out of the drier, when a little ball of squished together silver tape fell onto the floor. It took me a minute to figure out where the heck this duct tape came from. Was it my last adventure with fixing ducts? Nope ... I'm sure I have done laundry since then. Maybe it was from my last attempt to salvage my favorite pair of shoes?

Then it dawned on me. Flyball.

Now, you may be asking, what the heck does duct tape have to do with flyball ... and even if there is some distant relationship, how does that then result in duct tape ending up in my laundry.

Let me back up a wee bit to help explain. My lovely little Romeo dog is a keener. Really, he is. But we've been having a slight issue with convincing him that the fun game we play is the SAME THING when 4 jumps are involved, instead of just 3. He thinks the rules change when jump 4 is included. This can't possibly be the same game ... flyball is "jump jump jump ball" NOT "jump jump jump JUMP ball" ... right? Many ideas have been suggested to help him get over this hurdle (no pun intended ... or is there?). We've tried racing him to the box. We've tried letting another dog go and steal his ball when he refuses a run. We've tried back-chaining excessively. We've tried having someone else release him and have me standing up at the box to call him. Nothing ever works for very long.

My latest attempt at getting him to complete a full run was to work on some target training. Romeo is VERY target oriented, so many little tricks have been taught with a target. And my target of choice is a little square of duct tape (see, this is all related somehow!). Shake a paw was shaped using duct tape, a trick we call "put your head down" was shaped with duct tape. So in my time of need, I pulled out my trusty roll of shiny goodness, slapped a piece on the wall at the end of the hallway, and started working on send outs. We worked this at home a lot, moving the duct tape from the wall to the couch to the floor to the fridge door, anywhere where duct tape would stick (and it sticks everywhere!) to work on send outs. Then finally, we brought the duct tape to flyball practice. I slapped a piece on the box and he looked at me as if to say "Oh THAT is what you wanted me to do? Well jeez! Why didn't you say so earlier?"

HAZAA!

I left that practice elated, with a very tired pooch sleeping in the back seat, after having many many full successful speedy runs. I was a genius ... a freakin' genius!

Two days later our team held a demo for a group of youngsters on the grounds of a hockey arena just outside of town. It was a nice evening, a little chilly and quite a few bugs, but nothing we aren't used to from June in Saskatchewan. Our team all got to work setting up jumps, measuring out the lanes, hauling those beastly heavy boxes, even marking distances in the run back.

Fearless Leader gives a little intro and we're off running! Romeo gets called in after a couple of races and we settle into our new position, me kneeling on the ground at just around the 5.5 foot mark. The race hasn't started yet, but I whisper our "are ya ready?" words to Romeo. With more force than I could imagine a wee little fluff could have, he wriggles out of my hands, leaps forward and nose dives into the ground about half a foot in front of where I was kneeling.

Huh?

Why a nose dive? And why half a foot infront of where we were? Crazy dog needs his brain checked!

No, you see, he did everything I had asked him to do. When our team was setting up, one keen member decided to mark the run back distances, starting at 5 feet, with little squares of duct tape! So upon the "ready" command, Romeo found the closest piece of duct tape, ran there as fast as he could and came back for his reward.

And that, my friends, is when I promptly ripped up the duct tape, squished it into a ball, and stuck it in my pants pocket.

Romeo ran very well the rest of the night, ignoring all other traces of duct tape. But needless to say, we are not training with duct tape at flyball any more. I just have to hope that the one practice was enough to make a lasting impact in his mind, as I don't imagine KAOS would appreciate me ripping up all their distance markers at their tournament in a few weeks!