Dog Swordfighting - Lesson 7 - Attack!
- Christopher Tiller
- May 15
- 3 min read
We've finally nailed down our cue. Time to do what we came here to do! Finally, FINALLY Missile is going to attack with the sword.
How we're going to do it
This should actually be pretty straightforward. If you remember the example I initially based this whole thing on, we can break it down:
First, she holds up the sword *
Then she leaps and does this cool midair spin-thing
Then all kinds of slashes and explosions and cool stuff happens
I can't really do explosions without putting myself on some sort of list, and I'm not sure if leaping and then spinning in midair is even physically possible?
Barring those though, we just have to hold and spin. That's totally doable!
With all that in mind, the skill map looks something like this:
Basically, if we can combine the existing sword trick with a spin, we have our slash!
Knocking out 'spin'
Just a short piece on spin and how to teach it. All it requires is that your dog, well, spin in a circle. (Also known as chasing their tail)
It looks something like this:
You can do it on both the right and left side. There's tons of ways to accomplish it, but the method I used was:
First, use a food lure in a circle.
Then, fade the lure with a hand follow.
Then after getting some practice in, eventually replace the hand follow with your actual cue.
That's it! As I said, there's tons of ways to do this and in my opinion as long as both you and your dog are having fun, it doesn't really matter.
We now have everything we need!
Slash!
Let's do it!
First, grab the toy
Then, spin with the toy - "left" **
Make it Harder!
Now, grab the toy with our "sword" trick from the previous blog post and then spin left.
And for good measure, let's also do it on the right side!
We've got it! Some quick notes
I have to keep track of which cue I can actually use depending on how he's holding it
He's still figuring out how to combine these skills. Sometimes I've had to fall back to the hand signal for the spins. This will fade away as he regains proficiency.
This is freakin' awesome
Wrap up
That's it for now! We're finally getting to the cool stuff, so we're going to be practicing this a ton and strengthening it. Up next we'll start introducing the actual "fight" part of swordfighting, so stay tuned! As always, if you want to join in on the fun, I want to see what you're up to! If you're working on your own variant of this I'd love to see your progress in the comments!
If you want to follow along and get up to speed with this step-by-step, join us over on DogKatas!
We'll see you next week, and as always, happy training!
* Technically being a legendary, Zacian is genderless. Checking pokedex entries the implication seems to be that Zacian is female and Zamazenta is male. It doesn't really matter, so I'll just assume it's female to keep it easy.
** for Missile's spins I use "left" (counterclockwise) and "right" (clockwise) for my cues. Use whatever makes you happy. I can't tell you how to live your life.