Mystery Solved! 12-11-08

Post date: Dec 12, 2008 6:05:27 AM

I've been obsessing over why Trevor refused the teeter at Rancho Murieta last weekend, after having had a perfect weekend the week before. Tonight in class I got my answer.

I got to class early to set up for Angela's MACH party. While I waited for everyone, I practiced with Trevor. We did several circuits on all the contacts, and he was perfectly fine and happy.

Trevor's class started. More contact exercises. Everything was going great. Until all of a sudden he was supposed to go on the dogwalk he had been on 15 times already, and he freaked. Why? The answer was sitting 5 feet away. Moe had set up a small camp chair by the side of the dogwalk. He was terrified of it.

When he's on the contacts, he wants to feel completely safe, and seeing alien things in the environment makes him lose his nerve.

I took him over to the chair, and we played "look at that!" Finally, I was able to get him to do a normal dogwalk again.

This convinced me that the teeter refusals at the trial were due not to the teeter itself, but to the table beyond the teeter. It was obvious to me even at the trial that the table made him uncomfortable. Every time he got on it he sniffed and tried to look underneath it. But what made it different? I went back and looked at all of Trevor's Std videos, going back to his USDAA trials this summer.

What made the table this weekend different was that the spare legs for other height classes were piled under it. Surely Trevor had seen that before, hadn't he? Nope. Going back through his videos revealed that in fact this was the first time he had been on a Std course where the extra legs were piled under the table.

It reminded me all over again how sensitive he is to new things in the environment. I need to get more creative about giving him different pictures in practice to desensitize him and build his confidence.

Here is Trevor at Rancho Murieta (12-5-08), trying to look at the legs under the table right after he refused to get on the teeter: