Perrin’s discs came today! Whoohoo! Naturally I couldn’t wait to try them out. Unfortunately I don’t have any video of it because I forgot my camera at the office today.
Perrin doesn’t like fetch, and has little toy drive in general, so I was really just going to go out and start practicing some throws while he ran around and sniffed things to his heart’s content. Which he did! But after, he started coming to me and showing some interest in the discs, so I tossed a few (terrible) vault throws and he was trying to catch them! I worked on him just taking the disc from my hand and tugging it and he loved that! I can work with this! We still won’t be working on any jumping stuff due to his hips, but I will see if we can build a little bit of the flat work.
There were some unexpected discoveries with the discs though. They are so hard to hold onto when Perrin is tugging with them! I bought a couple of soflite’s because I thought part of Perrin’s dislike of discs was due to how hard they are. I think this was partially true, but even beyond that, they were much easier to tug with because they bend. Also, discs get really slobbery! That definitely doesn’t help with the grip when tugging. Perrin tugs hard (which is kind of funny. I spent a lot of time encoraging his tug, and now he tugs so hard that I can hardly keep on my feet. Be careful what you wish for!), so that is going to be tricky.
I was super surprised by how soft Perrin’s bite is. The soflite disks are made of a very soft material, and the Hero disc I got is not one of the durable ones, but none of them had any teeth marks in them at all after we were done. Even after Perrin tried to snack on one. Hopefully that means we will go through fewer discs! Our only large source of destruction will be from Perrin pouncing on downed discs (because he thinks they are foot targets that I want him to stand on) and deforming the tops .
I am excited to work with Perrin more on this, and to start improving my throws!
Adventures in Dog Training 