Proper Flyball

Beanie’s been doing quite well at our own cut-down “DIY” version of flyball. Intrigued by the idea of seeing whether she can handle the real thing, Susan started Googling to see if there’s a flyball club nearby. There is – the Lomond Flyball Club – and we got an invitation to their beginner’s class this morning.

The club is run by Sarah. Her day job is working with police horses, so it’s no surprise that her class was extremely well paced and structured. It started much like a typical obedience class, with the dogs on lead walking to heel round the hall. After a couple of minutes, a single small jump was placed on the circuit. Once the dogs got used to hopping over this another jump was added, then another, until by the end of the warmup the dogs were ready for action and had already got used to the jumps. Now it was time to familiarize them with the other essential piece of flyball equipment – the ball release box. Here’s a clip of Beanie and some of the other beginners getting to grips with this strange new device!

There are apparently two styles of flyball. One style employs a box that launches the ball into the air when the dog hits a pressure sensitive board, while the other uses a kind of curved springboard that simply releases the ball as the dog makes contact and helps the dog to turn on his/her way back to the handler. As you can see the Lomond club uses the springboard style box, and this is apparently better for the dog as injuries can occur if the dog has to jump and twist to catch a ball in flight.

The next stage involved one-way recalls over the jumps. This was old-hat to Beanie, so she did pretty well.

Once the dogs had the hang of that, the difficulty level was raised a couple of notches. Now they had to run over the jumps, pick up a ball lying on the floor and return over the jumps to their handler.

Given that the ball in question was just a common tennis ball (i.e. it didn’t have half a cocktail sausage stuffed inside it), Beanie didn’t feel any particular need to hurry back with it to Susan, but she did come back after a bit of nosing around.

Now it was time to put it all together: over just two jumps, hit the springboard, grab the ball and return via the jumps. Here’s how it should be done, courtesy of one of the more experienced class members:

And here’s Beanie’s attempt:

OK, if you’re eagle-eyed you might spot some minor technical differences between Beanie’s run and that of the Poodle. Like the way she was more interested in the hole the ball came out of than the ball itself. That, and the fact that she dodged the jumps on the way back and didn’t actually return with the ball. But hey, everybody’s got to start somewhere.

The class finished with a couple of circuits through the full set up – four jumps instead of two. Again, Beanie didn’t do it perfectly, but she showed improvement. She was watching the other dogs very intently between rounds – you could almost hear the cogs turning in her head as she tried to work out what it was all about. I’m hopeful that she’ll do a lot better next week.

Attempt #1

Attempt #2

Afterward we got a cuppa and a chat with the other class members, and hung around just long enough to see dogs from the later advanced class in action. Admittedly they were nearly all Collies, but that doesn’t mean there couldn’t be a little Beagle in there later in the year! Susan was invited to handle one of Sarah’s advanced dogs which was great fun for her and a good learning opportunity.

The ball pickup in slow motion

One full run, as it should be done

Once we got back home, we unleashed a very bored little Biggles from his crate and took him for a walk in the park. It was now almost a full week since his op and he was desperate for a run around, so when we bumped into a friendly little Spaniel boy I let him off lead. He had a fantastic time and led the chases from beginning to end. OK, his play pal wasn’t exactly a speed demon, but still it was a nice little confidence builder for our boy!