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.