Empowering Shyla to Deal with Tricky Surfaces

In recent weeks, I've shown you some videos of the "empowerment" training that I'm going with Shyla. They've involved having her walk on odd feeling and sounding stuff and also having her root through a pile of pans to find treats.

This week, we started working on having Shyla walk on tippy surfaces. If Shyla has a "superpower", it is her agile ability to negotiate difficult surfaces like climbing big boulders, standing in exposed spots, and even going across teeter-totters.

In this photo, she is standing atop a very high boulder so that I could take her photo against the sunset sky. She climbs on boulders like this without the slightest hesitation. Yet, she does it carefully, in manner that makes even this nervous human comfortable with her doing it! By contrast, I don't think that R would want to go up there, and I wouldn't want him to either!

In contrast to Shyla's comfort with tough surfaces, she doesn't like unexpected sounds. Part of the empowerment course is getting her used to producing harsh metallic sounds as she negotiates a tippy surface.

In this video, you'll see a few of the steps that we've taken so far with "tippy surfaces". We started with a very short and low plank resting on a small fulcrum. We progressed to having a cookie sheet under one end of the plank, and finally to having a cookie sheet under one end of a teeter totter that was set very low to the ground.

Enjoy the very short video!