DS380: Push it! Treibball Foundations and Problem Solving

Once we’ve introduced the concept of pushing an object with our nose to find cookies, this is a fairly easy concept for us to transfer to other objects.

Today we’re going to begin to introduce this concept with a ball.

Equipment:

1 ball

Channels (or something to use as channels - can be almost anything! Be creative....)

How to Teach Your Dog to Push the Ball

To begin to teach our dog to push, we’re basically going to make it as easy for them to do the right thing as possible.

So we’ll set up our ball in a “channel” so that there’s no way your dog can push the ball in the wrong direction, and lay out a row of cookies behind the ball, so as your dog pushes the ball they reveal cookies to eat! And to get to the cookies, they have to push the ball.

Here is Levi’s very first try at this game - again, he’s a little unsure, so you can see how I “help” him a bit, when he gets stuck during his first try at this new thing. But he picks it up pretty quick! This video shows both his first and his second try at this new game. 

You’ll notice that my channel is narrow enough that even if he wanted to, he couldn’t get around the ball to get the cookies behind it. As he progresses, I’ll place my cookies a little further apart, and then eventually fade them entirely. 

Here’s another team working on this — this is Alycia and Coulee again! You can see she’s using fewer cookies than I needed with Levi; they’re set so that he can do a good push and then discover a cookie… really nicely spaced for his skill level. And Alycia has gotten pretty creative with her channel too!

And then finally, here’s Amanda and Pogo - Pogo here is at the point where he’ll push the cookie the entire channel and then gets his cookie at the end. She’s using a crate and an xpen as her channels here!