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.