Adrenaline

So here’s something that got brought up last lesson that I thought was worth a mention:

Rippa runs about 6 miles a day with Yishai and more than that playing with Fury. Sometimes she goes on 10+ mile mountain bikes. The dog is in shape.

So how come this last lesson, she just wanted to lay down and pant?

ADRENALINE.

By now, when we get in the car and head in a particular direction, Rippa knows what is up. The nerves start to jangle . . . we arrive, they’re dancing, and when we get in with the sheep: OMG it’s a FRICKIN party!

Fury gets it really bad when we work pens – she literally shivvers with excitement.

Don’t discount the power of adrenaline on your stockdog. Until it become old hat chores, they are gonna be so amped that they can be out of control, or, like Rippa, just over doing it and getting tired in ten minutes.

She’ll get over it.

Walking Backward

So lots of videos of me walking backward, right? What’s the point?

Stage 1:

Walking backward allows me to see exactly what’s happening while I lead Rippa by leading the sheep. She is looking at the sheep (and that’s why the stick needs to be a strong visual, she’s not looking at me) and I should ONLY be looking at the sheep. I watch where they walk and walk away from that spot to teach my dog to turn them back in the direction I want to go. My job is to hold the sheep on my end. This is actually kind of hard with heavy sheep. Soon you’ll see what it looks like with light sheep.

Stage 2:

This is what I had to do last lesson, but it’s not really a stage: walking backward and following Rippa – she leads the sheep and I go where I need to be to let Rippa put them where she wants to (essentially the reverse). It keeps worried dogs interested. I never had to do this with other dogs I’ve trained, even less keen ones. It’s new. I actually think this would be a good teaching aid – Kathy is always asking where the dog should be of me, and I know, but newbs wouldn’t, and if you put a good, seasoned dog on the sheep, that would teach people right quick.

Stage 3:

Walking backward and leading. By now the dog has learned how to stay an appropriate distance away and that the object is to keep the sheep between person and dog. You walk backward to ensure the dog doesn’t learn any bad habits.

Stage 4:

Turning around and walking. Trusting the dog to do its job. It also tends to relax the dog because it’s not thinking too hard about what you’re doing in response to what you’re doing.

Side note: This steps before the last are pointless if you’re working a LOT of livestock. This is sort of a fine-tuning trialing thing we got going here. Aussies want to work tight and they’ll do just fine on a big flock of sheep or herd of cattle, the instinct is already there. We’re just teaching dogs to do fine work with small numbers of sheep. Ranchers don’t need to work too hard at this if they work huge heads only.

Rippa in the Duck Pen (video)

Rippa in the Duck Pen for the first time.

So as reported, Rippa has been in the duck pen twice since this video was shot, but I thought that better late than never on the posting.

So here’s eight minutes of me and the dog . . . WITH ANNOTATION GOODNESS!

Rippa is a little worried

So no videos for this week’s lesson (I do need to look at the other week’s and get that up), but let’s do a little summation of puppy-issues.

Well, one, Rippa bear is much different to work than Fury. She definitely gives me more time to think, but she takes Fury’s stubborn streak into the duck pen with her. Fury, in agility, will run fast and hard, but if I make a mistake, she is like, “Nah, I do it right, or not at all.”

Now, Fury is crisp when she works. Very precise with her body and her movements, and so I am not surprised by her shutting down if I make a mistake that throws off her flow.

But Rippa is a clod. She paws your face, slumps over in whatever position’s available, and is generally not so body sensitive. The other night, Yishai was motioning her to get into his lap and she jumped up and she basically punched herself in the face with his fist accidentally. He was like, “I am SO SORRY!” And she could have cared less.

But when Rippa works the sheep right now, if it isn’t going the way she wants it to, she checks out. Not like uninterested, sniffy, spacy, just kind of turns off. She downs really nice for me in the pen.

Kathy seems to think this has to do with our relationship. She prescribes no obedience drills (“use bait” for training) and just being nicer to her. I AM nice to her. As I type this, she is asleep on my left arm. She keeps saying perhaps she’ll work nicer for Yishai as she’s his dog. Given that Yishai and I, while not married yet, are attached at the hip, she’s very much even steven on whose dog she is. He’s nicer to her, yes (he’s just generally sweeter than me in general), but he also doesn’t get the respect she affords me because I handle her better.

Anyway, what I honestly think it is, is that what’s going on with the Fury is what’s going on with the Rippa. She’s not totally sure what she’s doing is right, so if I put too much pressure on her, she goes, “Okay then, YOU do it” and lays down. I am teaching Rippy to call off of the sheep and come to me and even getting her up to follow me, she sort of cringes. I honestly think it looks like she’s scared to be wrong.

Which is funny, because I don’t see Rippa as worried about ANYTHING. More time will tell.

So what did we do to counter this? The first session (Kathy does two sessions with you, not longer than twenty minutes each), we saw her shutting down and wondered what to do. Kathy took the wheel and Rippa worked a little better, stopped running and wearing as much, but she still faded out and came over to me, and tried to get over to Yishai and Fury. So we called it quits after I had her do an outrun and then a fetch and let her have a break.

So I played with her and then we were back in.

So here’s what I did. We got in there, and I kind of squatted, walking backwards (and HOOO boy, was that a workout) to hold the sheep and keep them balanced on me (they are very heavy and have no problem making me their flock) and then watched Rippa and wherever Rippa was trying to go, I helped her by going opposite that so Rippa go her way. Usually, you drive and the dog follows, but our roles were reversed. I watched what she did and moved where I should be to make that happen. It was pretty interesting to do.  It kept Rippa engaged enough that when she got too tight and I pushed her out, she wouldn’t get mad.

Problem with this is that I am crap-tastic about planning for hitting the fence and we’d only get twenty feet before I’d hit a fence, so I think next time we go, it’s time for the arena (normal trialing arena).  She’s in enough control it won’t be a disaster but Kathy was quick to tell me we were doing that for me, not Rippa, so I could work on handling her without mucking it up every time. So that should be interesting.

The other thing I am really not used to, is that when Rippa does outruns between me and the sheep, she’ll pick a side but not follow through with it – so at the last minute, she changes directions and then it looks bad because I don’t have the wherewithal to follow through. Kathy says to just learn to be ready for it – she sees the head turn and acts accordingly, nothing wrong with that . . . and I’m not asking her for flanks yet, we’re literally just teaching her to GET OUT. We kind of want her on lighter sheep now, but she needs to get OUT. So . . . that’s where we’re at.

Yishai and I were kind of downtrodden about Rippa shutting down like that. Kathy reminded me that Fury was so much sharper, nothing stops her. But as she followed us out of the working area with her dog, Deni, she said, “Hey, Deni was a dog like that – she could have shut down if not managed right. She wanted to work a certain way – close – still does.” So, while I’ve been feeling like I have the world’s perfect dog, it’s a little bummer to see a setback, but we’ll work through it.

But I am NOT mean to Rippa!

Lesson day 4–Into the Duck Pen

 

So no video in this post as I don’t have the wire available to upload it, but that’s okay. We’re going to have another lesson tomorrow and I’ll probably have a nice, succinct video to show you all.

We started Rippa in the round pen first to see if she still had good control over herself and if my handling was okay. She was a righteous obnoxo puppy outside the pen – she was “whistling” (what Yishai likes to call whining) the whole way to Kathy’s so I think she knows what’s up now when we drive that direction .  We wandered over to the duck pen, where a cattleman’s BC was in there with Kathy getting a lesson and Rippa was like, “Screw leash rules! I want ze sheepsies!”

So I had Yishai take her and run her around a bit, but she just kept being annoying, so I worked on her leash work – heeling, down, etc. All slow and pokey. This is one bit about Rippa I don’t love. Fury is very crisp on her commands, she says, “Your way, right away.” Rippa is more like, “This is good enough, now that over there, can I eat it?”

So Kathy suggested that since it had been a bit since she’d been worked (about a month?) we should start her in the round pen. So we went back over to puppy kindergarten and I put her on a down.  She surprised me with how remarkably responsible she was IN the pen with the sheep. She had exactly what she wanted, but she was a Good Dog.

We did good things in the round pen, and then it was off to the duck pen after a break.

The duck pen, for reference, is simply a larger rectangle to work in. The round pen is probably fifty feet in diameter. The duck pen is specifically built to ASCA standards for duck runs in trials.

The challenge here is what Rippa will do with the space. She won’t be so tight, so she has room to get out, and it’s my job in here to teach her that – to a point where she has total control over the sheep, so that in the bigger arena, she won’t lose them and get bad habits.

Our goals here are to continue to learn how to balance to the sheep, and just what the rules are. She is overrunning a bit, but in the video, I’ll explain why I am being told by Kathy not to correct it.

Kathy also added two new things for Rippa to work on – both are to prepare her to learn how to outrun without me in between her and the sheep.

One – when I work with her “with me” command (which is a loose sort of heel command), I need to make her always go to my outside leg, so that she will eventually see me as a post to run around and then out from. If you teach your dog to run around you and always around you, not straight from you, their perception of that nice arc at the top is reinforced.

Two – calling her off the sheep. Rippa is, as I love how Kathy calls her, a baby dog. Asking her to come when the sheep temptation is so strong is asking a lot, so you will see me occasionally drop her and then call her to me a short, short distance away. She is facing the sheep and she is learning to ignore her impulses and do what I say. When she comes to me, I praise her and release. It’s my natural inclination to drill her with this, but Kathy wisely says that it is better for her to have a little pressure with ONE successful call off and then just give her the sheep.

What I find righteously interesting is that Kathy sees Rippa as a bit sensitive. She moves off the stick pretty well, but if I tap her with it, her feelings are hurt. She says I need to be careful to teach her how to stay out without shutting her down. This is Rippa, the bombproof, NOTHING BOTHERS ME, excuse me while I step on your face dog. They certainly can be different at work than in real life.

Kristin takes the wheel.

So this time, I got to handle Rippa on my own while Kathy ran commentary/instructions to me. In the previous entry, I explained what the goals were, so let’s look at the tape, shall we?



First off, maybe this is old hat, but I LOVE LOVE LOVE that Rippa’s stay and down are so solid. No long line for her, not even on day one. She’ll hold it while I turn my back and walk off to the sheep, waits for me to turn around and then goes. LOVE THAT.
You’ll notice how Rippa takes off lickety split and hits the fence and speeds up – no space to collect them, but also, probably, look where my stick is – right at her butt, pushing her to go fast, not out. Oops.
See how I go through the sheep, extend my arm, and also hop out at her to physically get into her space. At this stage, just like with any training, she needs to learn that if she doesn’t do what’s right, I will back it up until she does. You can’t be lazy with commands or just the stick, you get out there, and you tell her “out.” And when she gets out, you back off and let her relax and have the sheep (which her instincts make her feel good about) and tell her “gooooood” so she gets that what’s happening now is indeed what you want.
At 17:24, you can see her body language change and slow down, and so do I, so I back up and let her move the sheep on her own toward me. But then right away, she comes back in and I see it and I jump out of the sheep and she goes, “ohhhh.” See, daisy pattern like in the post before this one.
At 25, she gives me the space, but then isn’t reading the sheep totally, or is she? You want her to go behind the sheep opposite me, but she isn’t – she’s walking parallel to them. Why?

If you answered “because the fence and people are keeping them moving with their pressure,” you win a gold star. She knows. I am tapping the stick on the ground to get her to get back behind them, but then she moves when she needs to to keep them from going to my left – between fence and me and we’re back again with me pushing her out because of the fence.
At 34, she’s not getting back again – why? I think she’s being wrong, but that’s because I’m not watching the sheep. Are you? See the black sheep on the left, how she’s not tucked in, in front of me. Rippa needs to be where she is to get her to do that. It’s not as simple as the dog in back and people in front.
At 1:06, this is when you know I’ve been doing it a while – look at what I do with the stick. Kathy has me holding the stick down like that so the sheep see it and take some pressure off of me. When I lift it up, see how they go into me? She points this out and at the end of all our lessons, this is her big message. I like to think I’m doing okay on handling if the stick in relation to the sheep is the big take-home from the day.
At 1:20, this is how you know Rippa’s not ready to progress . . . she’s stalling out in the wrong spot because she’s figured out the sheep don’t go anywhere, but she’s not actually working them. I have to really get on her with the stick to get her to go back the other way. When she does, Rippa learns that stalling out and ignoring my stick won’t work. She’s gotta try something else . . . and we’re off again.
1:54, I down her. I would like to see an instant drop, but she is 10 months old and this is SO awesome. Then we cut to the second lesson. You’ll see the fog has rolled in. Kathy’s ranch is seriously one mile from the ocean. You get funny weather.
If you watch my body language, you’ll see me a lot calmer. I lean back more, am not quite as skippy – that’s because I need to purge my tendency to be HIGH ANXIETY with my dog partner and just enjoy it and be calm and relaxed, like Rippa needs to be.
At 2:00, I am backing up and watch those sheep. YOu can’t hear it, but about a second later, I tell Rippa “back.” Right where she’s in line with the white fence in the big arena. Pause it. Look at my sheep. She is heading counter-clockwise (we’ll get to directions later, but Rippa doesn’t know them nor need to, so neither do you, yet), why? Do you see that blasted black sheep who is threatening to squeeze past me? Rippa does. Her instincts say to go to that sheep and turn her in. But I tell her “back” and she does and Kathy says, “I don’t think so . . . she needed to get that one more sheep.”
Why is this important? Rippa is learning to have “short flanks” (a flank is that arc) if I do that too much. She stops watching the sheeps’ eyes and just goes back and forth. It’s rough trying to fix that. That’s why giving commands this early on is rough. Just look at your sheep, Kristin, and if they are in a nice little formation in front of you, Rippa is fine.
If I tell her to get back prematurely, she may always do that, get lazy, and lose sheep in that direction. No good! Bad bad bad. At this stage, Kathy tells me she would rather her overrun and come around me rather than get kicked back and let the sheep get out of her control.
Again, the point here is to show Rippa how to control her sheep ON HER OWN. As Kathy says, the ideal stockdog is one in which you sit down in an easy chair with a mai tai and tell them to get out and shout a couple commands about the direction to take them and that’s IT. They can’t do that if they rely on you to tell them.
This is hard for dog people. We like dogs partly because when you say “sit” they “sit!” Glee! I have a game with Fury in which I give her commands if she loses a ball in a field, and she usually approximately follows the commands, but often she goes, “Screw this, I can find it on my own.” I like that. That’s a good stockdog.
2:43, there’s Rippa slowing down and using the fence to help the sheep stay. She’s learning about this balance to the handler thing. :)
By 3:29, Rippa and I are doing okay. I even walk into the sheep and Rippa holds it together. Lots of mellow walking, not a lot of direction. Me likey so much.
At 3:47, Kathy reminds me to quit walking faster to give the sheep space. My job is to teach Rippa to give the sheep space by pushing her out. (BTW, at the end of this lesson, I was super sweaty . . .)
At 4:04, I told Rippa “out” because the sheep were too close, and she offered a down, so I told her “down.” “PICK A COMMAND,” says Kathy (hence my body language of, “oh, ha ha, yes.”). I want to show you how I am getting her started on the sheep – we’ll talk about the send later when we start teaching the stuff where I’m not between her and the sheep. But right now, you have your dog on a down, and when YOU are ready, you hold the stick down low in front of her eyes – that way if she’s inclined to run straight at the sheep, well . .. “boink, stick in eye.” So they usually pick one way and move off. You follow them, stick at shoulder again (push forward and out) to remind them to work the flight zone when they pick the sheep off the top of the circle. (See, that’s the “top” we taked about.) Gotta keep the stick low and them feeling the pressure, and consistently, so the dog learns the body English for this so later when you can’t apply stick pressure, they just get around cleanly on their own.
Now, again, you can’t hear anything at the video, but at this point in the lesson, I am not giving Rippa a lot of direction, she’s just doing her thing, reading her sheep and keeping them where they need to be. My trap is shut.
And then we end the lesson.
At this point, Rippa is ready to move into the duck pen. If Kathy decides not to move me into the bigger area, it’s because of my flawed handing. In the round pen, I’m doing a good job of handling, but I also have a tighter space to work on and less factors out of my control (like the sheep going other places or the dog getting out of control). I personally feel pretty good, but again, we’ll leave that to our experts. And report back later.
We’ll have another lesson next week.

Objectives for these early lessons . . .

So had our third day of lessons on Friday, this time under Kathy Warren who immediately put me on to handle her. (Before, I let Trish handle her and came in for a few minutes in the second lesson.)

Here’s something really cool/interesting about all this for me: I was sitting there with Yishai before the lesson and realized that I’d known most of the people there for most of Fury’s life, which is almost eight years now. I’ve been doing this on and off for that long. And for that long, I went from a promising, powerful dog to pretty bad handling breaking a good dog, to getting close enough to fixing it to trial her, to not getting close enough and just getting frustrated.

With the stick in hand and Rippa on the opposite side of the sheep, the eight years I’ve put into this I finally felt. I knew which way to go, I knew when to watch the sheep, I knew how to fix her and when. Where to put the stick . . . and while I definitely do NOT regret my path with the Fury because she’s been a great teacher, I am TOTALLY stoked to start over again and do it right. Fury was patient enough to let me get to this point and not shut down on me through all the bad handling (as were all the folks that helped me learn) and while I have plenty to learn, if you are reading this for some instruction help, I gotta tell you . . . it’s really not an intellectual grasp that’s gonna work –it’s time and getting on a different dog after you’ve put your time in. I knew this intellectually, too, but now I KNOW this. I have felt it.

I am really glad I started out on a high-octane dog, though. Some have said I should have started with something with less talent and drive, but if I could learn on the Fury, well . . . at least so far I feel like WTChing Rippa is going to be a piece of cake just because of how it FEELS to be handling her.

Our Objectives

There are sort of two objectives to the lessons at this stage, at least how I perceive it: (1) Teach Rippa how to balance and call off the sheep and (2) Get me to handle her properly.

Let me get to point 2, which I’ll show you in the video in the next installment . . . Fury has learned through my bad handling to just run through the stick. We’ve tried everything from spray collars to whips to whatever to get her to stop trying to outrun it, but she does it anyway. She comes in fast and hard on her sheep if I am in the picture fetching. If I am not in the picture, she calms down, but basically she looks at me and gets super wired. And guess what? Then I get super wired and we basically fight each other the whole lesson. I deal with it by moving faster, and being young and athletic, this means backing up at a trot or just getting in her face super fast. And since the Fury is super fast, well . . . HIGH ANXIETY.

So it’s pretty much a habit for me to walk into a stock arena with a dog and be ready for HIGH ANXIETY. You can see the difference in the two lessons we have in the video – my body language is anxious, and after the lesson, Kathy calls me on it so I spend our downtime sort of meditating and focusing on being easy and sending love to my Rippa instead of HIGH ANXIETY.

I also have to work on reading my sheep – it is so easy as a stock handler to watch the dog and forget the wooly creatures bumping your feet, but if you do that, you’re bad. If you correct your dog or don’t let her do her job, you teach her nothing. Again, with Fury she came in so fast and hard, I rarely got time to do that. With Rippa, who is easy and relaxed, I have time.

Also, you as a handler usually lean one way or another when you back up, so your dog learns to work with that. You kind of drift left, and the sheep point that way so your dog works harder opposite you on your right. You gotta fix that so the dog doesn’t worry about you and spends her time worrying about the sheep.

I told myself that at $50/day for what amounts to 12 minutes of actual lessons, I better fix it now, so lesson number two is better because I am going to take it serious and do this right!

So that is that.

Now here’s the part you care about because you are not suffering from leans and high anxiety.

What Rippa is learning is how the sheep work with her pressure. Lesson one is simple – whichever way Rippa puts pressure on the sheep, it goes in the opposite direction:

Notice the arrows are coming off the sheep’s EYE. That’s what we mean when we say a dog has “eye.” It means the dog is concentrating on the stock animal’s eyes. If it looks at its butt, well, the dynamics are thrown off. I cite this entry: http://rippaherds.blogspot.com/2010/10/rippas-first-formal-stock-lessons.html – see the graphic with the placement of the handler’s stick on the dog. Same thing works for sheep. So in the video, you will see me having to use the stick occasionally to teach Rippa that her decision was wrong and get her moving the sheep rightly.

She also needs to learn (like we all do) that the handler plays a role, too . . . the sheep, in a pure world, would move in the direction in the drawing if there is no handler, but the sheep will feel pressure from both the dog and the handler in different amounts. Some sheep are so tame they’ll follow you. Cattle fresh off the hills are terrified of people more than dogs, so they’ll need way more space for a handler than a dog. 

Rippa is also learning about balance – which is how close or not to get to the sheep – and how that affect their movement. See this diagram:

She started out running in circles around the sheep, but when she got too close in, I was in the middle, pushing her out, making her run in a daisy shape (1). As she learns to stop coming in with my help and from what happens with the sheep, she’ll start staying out on her own (2). This is important to learn early and well or driving (dog pushing the sheep from behind) becomes difficult.  As she learns that, she is learning that circling isn’t really the good thing, it’s keeping the sheep with me, so she learns with my help and from the sheep, that she can flip back to keep the sheep moving forward  but not past me (3) instead of running around them. As she figures this out, and gets more space, Rippa is also learning that if the sheep aren’t squirrelly, moving back and forth, she can just follow them (4)  instead of wearing (moving back and forth behind them). She won’t really get that until we’re out of the round pen because right now she can’t learn to properly fetch simply because they’re not much space.

People are in a hurry to get to steps 3 and 4, but the dog learns this progression well and with your help early, and you fix a lot of problems later on.

You’ll see her stop moving altogether when we get tight against the fence: the sheep are all going where she wants them, it’s under control, so now what? Nothing. Good job.  You will see me dance around her – sometimes we get lazy and try to let the stick do the work, but it doesn’t work, you need to get between her and the sheep and push her out until she stays out where she needs to. If she is overly excited, you may have to do this a while.

So right now, we are really only working on 1 & 2, although you see her offer 3 & 4 on her own a lot more now. Why?

Let’s talk about the “top.” (As in the top of the circle from your vantage point – the “bottom” would be behind you or maybe your butt.)  As in the diagram above, we want nice, round circles when the dog is working like this. Not the daisy thing. In the video, you will see that when Rippa can’t make her circle because the fence is putting too much pressure on her and I am not far enough away to give the sheep space, she speeds up and then the sheep speed up. Fair enough – my fault as I need to turn sooner. But if a dog is working out in the open and not working outside that flight zone that’s pretty much a circle (as we saw in the article I cited above), then the sheep get squirrely and won’t come to the handler as we want them to. See the diagram to the left. The above drawing shows how the dog is keeping the circular path on the top, but then cuts into the circle (we actually call it “corners” of the arc) and that pushes the sheep  - who are also dealing with the pressure of the handler – out to the handler’s left. If the dog turns back with a nice tight corner, turning her shoulder away, the sheep don’t get extra pressure and the sheep push forward to the handler.

You get a dog cheating this, you got problems later on because soon Rippa will be on her own to manage the sheep without me close with the stick and if she doesn’t figure out that this sort of thing happens, she will not have control of her sheep.

Notice how I keep talking about how the DOG needs to learn things about the handling. If you’re not used to it, it sounds ridiculous that a dog is going to figure this out. They’re that smart, and have that good of instinct that they will. I ruined Fury because I didn’t let her think. I taught her commands and didn’t worry about how my handling was affecting her learning and now she just thinks sheep are the crazy, along with her owner. You can handle a dog with commands only so much. Smart dogs with a lot of instincts can either become destructive (biting, killing, whatever) or shut down and stop working for you. Fury does the latter sometimes, she’ll just go on “auto pilot” and stop thinking or learning and just enjoy moving sheep – but that just gives me HIGH ANXIETY and we don’t want that. Neither do you.

Barking

I feel like I should start off with a photo for you:

This is a photo of Rippa (who I think is just hanging out by the truck because her mom is) and Fury waiting to go to stock lessons. Fury ALWAYS does this. She will run out and plant herself as flat as she can get right behind the tire of the truck to be sure I don’t leave without her.  It’s daaaaaaaaaamn cute. But of course, Fury is nothing if not cute.

So to clarify one thing I said in the last email about barking – someone asked when I said I was worried that Rippa would be a barker what that meant.

First off, being a barker isn’t really a bad thing, it’s mostly just annoying to Aussie people. Some dogs bark because they are talking, some bark because they aren’t focused enough, and some bark for extra power (Fury, for example, barks on cattle before she bites when she is working them and trying to get them to turn because she’s little and needs to be as powerful as possible).  There are some breeds (New Zealand Huntaways come to mind) that are selected for barking – the dogs will cast off into the brush to find the livestock and then bark while fetching them so that the handler on horseback or ATC can find them and help direct.

Aussies, however, for the most part were bred to work in open fields with very few obstacles hurting line of sight. The hills in the videos you see of us training are a good example of that  - most Aussie stockdogs were developed in the southwest with those conditions. Border Collies, for example, were bred in land that looks like this:

(That’s why Aussies have docked tails and BCs don’t, or at least one reason I usually offer. The fields are short, green, and not full of brush to snag tails.) They don’t need to bark because if you’re looking for stock, the BC is going to cast off and have no trouble bringing them back. Aussies, for the most part, work in this environment, too.

(I keep saying “for the most part.” Obviously a line depends on the needs of the breeder/handler and they weren’t worried about breed standards when this breed was developing. Some still aren’t. Some are, but it’s open to interpretation. Within stockdog lines, you find different working styles and emphasis for this reason.)

Anyway, so Rippa and Fury weren’t bred to bark. If they do, it’s not for a utilitarian purpose (aside from added power, but the dogs’ presence really can be enough). That’s why I said I was worried she would.

Rippa’s First Formal Stock Lessons

 

So, when I started Rippa’s mom, Fury, I basically had “an idea” in my head about what that looked like. I didn’t know crap about what that actually was. It took years to start seeing things and understanding them and thus here I am now, not having started my dog under the right tutelage, I lucked my way through a cattle title but poor little Fury dog just can’t seem to give me the space she once did. I’d have to start all over with her . . . and even then, bad habits are going to be the default.

So, we start fresh. Rippa will be 10 months old in another week. I wanted to wait on stockdog lessons until she was more confident. She gets defensive with her hackles up around big dogs and big stuff, and around 8 months it stopped being an issue. It took me another month to get a spot in lessons since I am uber busy these days and always travelling.

Anyway, a couple things I wondered about. Rippa loves to “work” her mother – she comes in real close to her and heels her and pokes her side and barks a ton. She doesn’t ever flank her wide and I was wondering if Rippa would be yappy on livestock and too close. Nope, not the case.

So, without further ado, I share the little edit I made of two of her lessons this weekend. She had four total, I handled her once, and we’ll talk about that, but here we go:

So, has we have talked about a little, Aussies are heading dogs for the most part, meaning the instinct tells them to watch livestock heads (also yours, Aussies have no problem with eye contact with you) and turn them. That’s the most basic instinct you’re starting with. They also are bred to work really big flocks of sheep or herds of cattle or what have you, so they have some go-juice to them – if you’ve ever seen a big mass of gregarious animals, they have to move slow, it’s a big group, and the extra push is important. Slower moving stockdogs are easier to handle on little batches of stock like you do at trials, but these dogs’ purpose isn’t really that, and thus I like to see go juice, even if it makes it take longer to train them.

A puppy with the confidence and instinct and drive that Rippa has is going to immediately go to her stock and want to move them, and most often they will want to circle the outside of them because they just naturally feel a pull to tuck the group in tighter. There are, of course, dogs that enjoy splitting sheep, and that’s trainable to fix, but it’s not part of instinct one likes to see.

So what are your goals in the first lessons?

1. Flight zone – allow the puppy to find out how things work when she moves close and far from the livestock, and teach her that staying out means less work and happy handlers.

Here’s a little graphic that illustrates flight zone, both for people and dogs:

So, the red space is your flight zone, or “personal bubble.” If a dog is especially powerful or fast, this circle may be a lot bigger. If it’s slow and gentle, it might be a lot smaller. Same for the handler – if the handler is familiar to the sheep, they’re more comfortable coming in close. If not, way out.  See how the sheep are squeezed in between the two space bubbles (flight zones) to stay comfortable? If the dog backs off, they’ll like group up more, if she keeps going right, the two flight zone bubbles will touch and the sheep will pop up and left. If she flips around and goes left, the leader sheep will probably go down and right a bit, and have a little more grouping and room to move.

You may notice that Trish (our handler) is tapping the sheep, too. She’s reminding the sheep to keep space off her.  Some sheep are worked by dogs to the point they learn to glue to the handler – Kathy Warren works hard to keep her sheep respectful of people so that the people can learn their flight zone, too. This is why Trish is actually working Rippa – I’m not so good with my flight zone and handling right now – it’s better to teach her good habits now than be affected by my bad ones right off the start.

2. Move off the stick – The stick isn’t used to point, but to block. Softer dogs, you’ll use a hand or something, but it’s the opposite. The stick pushes the dog off the sheep – the dog should be going opposite where you point, ideally. The position of the stick is important. It’s like a lunch whip for horses. You aim it at the dog’s shoulder – this keeps them going, but pushes them out. If you aim it at the face/eye/ear, the dog will stop and turn around, you’ve stopped momentum. If you aim at the hip, it pushes the dog in the same direction to go faster and maybe inward.

Here’s a graphic that shows what I mean:

3. Balance – The puppy is hopefully eventually tired of being kicked out around the circle, and will eventually figure out that all that wear (half-circles back and forth) doesn’t always need to happen and she can work that flight zone and stay out of it with a lot less effort.

So what are we seeing in Rippa’s first video? First, I turned off the sound because it contains a lot of useless jabbering and noise, so that’s why the music.

The start – that first few moments is really Rippa’s first time in the ring. You let her off, she sniffs a bit and then sees sheep and goes straight to them.

Aha! But she DOESN’T. What does she do? She goes around Trish in a circular pattern to give the sheep and Trish their flightzone. This has not been taught. She does does it. That’s awesome.

She gets a little “wahoo” when she finds out she can move the sheep (and if you remember the first video, she was a lot more cautious – this shows her new, mature confidence).

Trish, in the mean time, is watching the dog here to keep her out of the flight zone. These sheep are “beginner sheep” and that means they have almost no flightzone to the human handler (ie, they trust her very much) so she can stand in the middle of them and they won’t run. In fact, they’ll often follow her if there’s no dog to affect them. So we only have to worry about Rippa-bear. She uses the stick, down and low, at her shoulder, to push her out in kind of a daisy pattern. Circle, when she gets a little tight, push visually with the stick, and then out she goes again.

I was really thinking Rippa wouldn’t respect the stick, but she did and it was awesome. When I handled her, driving her around with it was SO easy compared to Fury.

At around 19 seconds, you’ll see Rippa flips back, notice where Trish’ stick is – at her nose! But how does she flip back? She turns her shoulder away – that’s called squaring up. I’ll give you a diagram of that one day.

Around 31 seconds, Trish flips her stick up to see what Rippa will do, and Rips gives some space to Trish while she watches what the sheep do.  They pass her on Trish’s right and she gets around to put them back at Trish.

At 1:02, Trish finally tries fetching the sheep back. Rippa is far enough away that she’s out of the sheep’s flight zone and consistently there, so we move forward a little more in our training – we walk straight back and give Rippa the opportunity to really direct the sheep. Her job is to keep them in front of Trish in a group. She instinctually feels it. So Trish gets out of the flight zone and gives Rippa control of that, too.

At 1:05, Rippa overruns, but you can see her looking directly at the sheep to get more space out of them.  She might be tempted to run at them and turn them around, so Trish pushes her back out again for another go.

After all this, four minutes in, Rippa gets that she is supposed to keep space between her and the sheep. It’s that simple.  Trish is able to walk backward, and Rippa watches them and instead of just running in circles, banks a little right to follow them because they just don’t need circling. When Trish and the sheep run into the fence, rather than circling, Rippa slows down and then stops to see what next to do.

This is an instinct to hold the sheep on the fence. Keep them from splitting up. Dogs love it. Trish turns around and helps Rippa make the right choice for which direction to go in with the stick. When she gets distracted and comes in too close, Trish pushes her back out and she goes, “Oh!”

At 1:48, you can see Rippa’s learned how to make choices on the turns from that because Trish hasn’t signaled what to do very strongly with the stick, and after following the sheep, she turns left to get out of their flightzone, on her own. This is pretty cool to see.

At 1:59, Trish asks her to halt and she does. She was really supposed to lie down, and she’s asking if she should reinforce the down (no, because Rippa is not used to her, take what you can get) and then I accidentally release her by telling Kathy, who is describing what to do next, “okay” which releases Rippa.

But notice how controlled she is when she goes. And again with a nice round outrun, not buzzing the sheep. She is interested in controlling them, not chasing them.

At 2:36, they get up on the fence again and rather than moving, Rippa stays put because she knows Trish will get the sheep out of her flight zone, and then help her turn.

At 2:52, Trish pushes her back with the stick kinda hard, and she flips away to get out of the flightzone with some real commitment. I’m sorry, allow me to gush, but can you see this dog learning? This is only a six-minute lesson!

After two more lessons, Rippa is a little more confident than before and moving pretty fast, but still showing us lots of good things. At 3:04, she is wearing, going back and forth to watch heads, and making the decisions of when to move in each direction on her own, no help from the stick.  Trish is using the stick to visually remind the sheep to give her some space so Rippa can work.  (Sheep not comfortable would not need this or be in this position. You need to start with friendly sheep or they will just bounce all over the round pen and give your dog a heart attack trying to control them – another way I broke Fury in the beginning.)

At 3:23, Rippa has stopped wearing and is now rating – following them while leaning this way and that to turn the heads away from her and keep them forward. She naturally balances (finds the space between flight zone and sheep) by slowing down and stopping while Trish does her thing, again, with no real assistance from Trish. The sheep stay way out from her, so instead of falling in behind them, she actually moves parallel to them (we’ll be teaching that much later on) and that keeps them straight with Trish, we, the audience are probably putting some pressure on them with our presence in their flight zone  that allows this thing to happen.   She waits for the sheep to get out of her flight zone, and then falls in behind again.

She finishes up with a little wahoo, giving way to a nice, controlled sequence and voila!

Kathy kept commenting how cute she was and that we’ve done really well with her. Yishai asked Trish what she thought of his dog and she said, “Put it this way, when you decide you can’t handle her, I want to be first in line for her.” While I was handling her, she told me I was gonna have lots of fun with her and AMEN to that.

(For those of you joining us not from other blogs, Yishai is my boyfriend, and Rippa is technically his, though we co-own her. I’ll be training/handling her and then if he decides he likes it, he can learn to handle – I’ve had him on Fury, but he doesn’t really get it and thinks maybe agility is more his thing. And yes, Ripple E Bear will do agility, too.)

Some Stockdoggy Terms

I thought since I will be dropping a specialized vocabulary like stink bombs, I should first start out with some basic terminology  . . .

First, the great herding vs working debate. The PC and proper cowboy way of saying your dog is herding sheep is to say your dog is "working" sheep. You are "working your dog" on sheep or cows or pigs or whatever. (Yes, you can work dogs on pigs - ASCA even had a title for it once.) So while the URL of this blog is "RippaHerds" I only did that because it would be easy to remember. These are stockdogs, not herding dogs. That's just the parlance where I come from.

Some terms:

Head - meaning a single animal, but also, well, the head of the animal. Heading dogs work livestock by watching their heads, and very often their eyes. That's why they are called "heading dogs." Heading dogs run circles around livestock because they are always chasing the head, which is always turning away from them.

Heel - Just like heading dogs, there are "heeling dogs" that work the heels of the livestock. Dogs like this are typically things like your Corgi, which is built low to the ground to work heels in stockyards (they fit under the bars of the pens in chutes and keep the cattle moving). The tend to follow stock, rather than run circles around it. Dogs of all breeds can do both heading and heeling, but one comes more naturally usually.

Fetch - This is what your heading dog will learn first to do - because that's what comes naturally to it. They will go out, seek out livestock, bunch it, and then bring it to their handler in a . . . you guessed it, fetch.

Drive - This is what your heeling dog learns first - follow the stock and keep them moving. Our Aussies learn this after they master the fetch.

Flight zone - This is the space around the handler and the dog that the sheep avoid staying in for any length of time. Imagine a Hula Hoop around you and your dog. The sheep are usually calm or not moving at all until the Hula Hoop touches them (their personal space bubble). If it touches them lightly and calmly, they move lightly and calmly. If it touches them fast and heavy, they move . . . you guessed it, fast and heavy. Flight zone is rough to learn for people - we are used to working with just our dogs, and not with another sentient being in the mix. You may work your dog's flight zone, but you fail on working your own. That's how I broke my first stockdog, Rippa's mom.

That should get you started, I think.

Rippa and her first intro

So Rippa was exposed formally to sheep when she was about four months old, which is pretty young. The point was actually to get video of another puppy I was looking to place for someone, but we put her on the sheep there anyway. Here is the video:



Now, I have been working dogs on stock for about seven years on and off. Sometimes really consistently, others not. I can tell you this - I broke my first dog, Rippa's mother, who used to be really cute and natural, but I taught her to work against me instead of with me (more on this later), and we don't want to do that to Rippa. What you're looking at is the handling of someone who has no idea what to do to start a tiny puppy on sheep. I was just trying to get her to show some interest and see what else she would do.

With that said, at this point, even if my handling needs plenty of work, I can *see* things now, and I was pretty happy about Miss Rippa. Ecstatic. This video was shot on my birthday and it was one of the best presents I could have asked for, that feeling I had all day.

I like how she was looking at them, even if it wasn't "boing!" because she's a baby, and "boing!" is pretty dangerous at this stage. You can see her getting braver and braver and then . . . bam! I like how her first instinct with them is to go up to them to a point - a little natural caution there, but also awareness of sheepy space.

When I finally split the sheep to get her really going, she immediately picks a group and runs between them and the fence (a brave thing for a puppy to do - imagine you're that size doing that) and runs out wide around them to bring them back. Natural fetch, and nice space. I will explain terms later.

I like how she turns away from the sheep squarely, rather than into them, giving them space and her control. You can see her moving them and thinking about what happens when she does what - she splits two off and  then goes to fix them. She holds them on the fence - she thinks, she learns. And she's only four months old!

And when she gets them all split up and tries to fix it and can't, she chills.

Yup, I was really happy with this puppy. But then we "put her up" for a while to grow up and have fun non-livestock-type adventures.

Introduction

Hello, world, my name is Kristin and I like dogs. Maybe kinda a lot. And not just for petting and cuddling with, but to train with and really work with them. I've competed with my dogs in everything from conformation (show dog pretty stuff) to obedience to agility to herding. This blog will follow the newest acquisition to the family, Tara's Lil Rippa, who is a breeding from my first litter after about 17 years in the breed and a long apprenticeship under many of the breed's respected breeders and mentors. My goal with Rippa was to produce a beautiful, sound little dog with a nice temperament that would be capable of being my boyfriend's best friend and a bang up cowdog. No, we don't have cows, but the point here is potential. I actually live in a small town in a rented house and am an English professor, small climbing gym owner, and event manager. No livestock around for miles and miles. This is mainly a hobby for me, but at the same time, there are those who exist to preserve something we like for those who do need it, and trust me, there are plenty.

So, how do I train? Off stock, mostly positive. I have a couple things I have picked up from various sources, books, seminars, others . . . but I don't do clicker training - and I don't usually use food. The dogs I have are motivated by play-training, which is largely what I do. It makes competing ultra fun because we're both having fun in whatever ring we're in. Heeling is AWESOME because it's a game. This sort of works for most dogs, but the particular dogs I have are high drive, super biddable, and eager to learn so that's all I need and it's why I have what I have.

Everyone has a mentor, and I'm fortunate that mine happens to be one of the best stockdog trainers (especially for Aussies) in the world - Kathy Warren of Windsong Aussies and the Flying E ranch.  And more fortunate that I'm a 35 minute drive from her. If only I had endless financial and time resources, I'd be able to take better advantage of it, but that's part of what I am doing this for - to get down what I'm learning somewhere so that when I don't have that resource because she retires or I move or something, I have a foundation to work off of. I've been training the Fury on her (Rippa's mom) for about six years, but prior to that I worked her by myself on a ranch I was employed by to handle dogs. My own inventions just didn't work and it ruined my otherwise talented dog and at this point we'd have to start from scratch and then some and it just isn't worth the resources to me when we can start fresh with the Rippa bear.

I am doing this mostly to serve as a log of my training from ground zero to whereever we end up. The blog should contain some training theory, musings, and maybe some rantings, I don't know. Hopefully it's fun if you choose to read it. :)