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.)
