A perfect day.

Another good day with the Rippa bear and Fury. Fury just got to be dog-pillow and eat hot dogs, but Rips was very good to me on stock. She moves just slow enough to help me see things. I think I should take back that videoing everything isn’t helpful.

These blog things are really good for me to do – close reading the videos is helping  a lot. I went from running Rippa into the fences and kind of panicking on her dive-ins when I get her going on her outrun to having not quite the same problems today.

I read my sheep and my dog well enough to not have any major “Ahh!” moments on the fence, which allowed me to more strongly teach Rippa about the flight zone. It’s fun watching her recognize the “out” command and not force me to dive in and get her.

Before I started, after watching the little video I made showing you how I am managing the outrun, what I think is happening is that Rippa thinks I’m blocking her because she’ll stop a lot of times when I think with Fury, Fury would ignore that.  So I stood there, and rather than have my stick out, pointing at her, ready to move it out (and make it look like I was blocking her when I was trying to push her out), was I held the stick by the middle so it was less visual cue when I start moving to push her out with my body. It seems to work pretty good. I am sure I still look like a running fool because I am out of breath after a lesson. (Not usual for me, I am in good shape.)

All in all, I am really pleased with her. One more lesson tomorrow. And then, if the weather holds up (it’s supposed to rain all week next week), three more days of lessons. Should get a lot together.

One thing I need to work on is her stop – she really hates having to lie down when she’s working. She’s fine to set up,  in fact, when I ask her to move “with me” or drop her away from sheep, she is super fast, but if she’s working, she wants to come into me. Kathy says to teach her to halt out away from me and toss a treat at her to catch. I laughed, Rippa is retarded at catching. It’s not like I haven’t tried. She just lets it hit her in the head.  But I will work on making her “wait” more solid because she’s not downing.

Couple thoughts occurred to me today about stuff:

1. I really think I may come back to being active trialing in all venues because this is so positive. I think I got really burned out.

2. Me holding the stick a certain way, and all this “yes, good, good” marking is kind of new. I think it’s a sign that I am slowly taking ownership of the training, when before I used to wait for Kathy to tell me what to do.  I think it’s a sign of impending mastery and I like it.

3. I watched Trish Alexander work Duke today after two years of not. We used to travel to trials a bit when he was working on his WTCh. He looks amazing. It was cool to see what years of training on Rippa will likely yield.  Kathy always said the ideally trained stockdog is one that allows you to sit in an easy chair with your lemonade and shout commands while the dog handles it. I watched Duke drive the sheep in an open field in a square around Trish, I watched him run totally out of the flightzone and then flip in nice and square at the top to drive them down to 6 o’clock . . . it was very cool. Natural instinct at the beginner stage is cool, too, but there’s always improvement to be made.