The Birthday Box Trick

It's been a while since I taught Dog Mob a new trick.

We've been working mostly on Rally stuff, because Pongu's still struggling to integrate the Level 3 exercises into his repertoire (he's doing very well in practice, but still falls apart easily in the trial environment, and is/has been temporarily regressing on the lower levels while he stresses over the Level 3 work), and I wanted to focus on shoring those up before our next trial. So that's where most of our effort has been going.

Also, until a couple of days ago, I didn't have any good ideas for a trick I really wanted to do.

But then!, inspiration struck, and we did the Birthday Box Trick as a quick little interlude.

This took three days to train. Pongu grasped the concept immediately, since he already understood receptacle drops from the Easter Egg trick, but he needed a few sessions to develop the mechanical skill of picking the box lid up by its ribbon and dropping it on the box. This was by far the most difficult part of the trick and the one that we spent the most time practicing.

But once we had that, we had the trick. So: three days and done.