Rippa Returns

You thought I forgot about you, didn’t you? I didn’t. I still love you. It’s just that it’s been the rainy season and the fields got wet so lessons got canceled. And also, I have the craziest work load, so I cancel lessons, and then I’d venture to say that more committed people get my slots when it’s time to choose who comes for the weekend.

But we got in this weekend, and in next. I’m not going to shoot every single work, it gets kind of repetitive. I did tape my second work today, but I did it by setting it down. I mostly wanted to hear what was said and digest it. My camera man is out of the country for two weeks, so footage is what it is.

So RippyBear hasn’t been on stock for more than two months and I was expecting a wild child. I feel like her responsiveness to commands is a little less than I’d like it to be, so I had a feeling this would all end badly. But I was very wrong. Aside from a couple things we’ll discuss, Rips was very good and responsive to things, and I really enjoyed myself. Also, dude, either I’m out of shape, or for some reason I am working a lot harder with her than I have lately with the Fury (who is now retired, so by lately, I mean, the last few years).

The Objective

At fourteen months, Rippa’s been on stock as many times as I’ve posted here. Maybe six lessons? So what are you trying to get right now? Two things:

1. Teach your dog about flight zones.  Learn how to balance, don’t make me have to physically enforce them. When the dog figures it out, then the rest will come. But don’t worry about “the fetch” – you’re just doodling to teach the dog where she needs to be to move the sheep. Kathy was like, “If you don’t watch the top and keep her out, all you do is teach her to bring them in hard and mash them past you.” And boy, that’s true. That’s what Fury thinks this game is about.

2. Keep her working. Rippa is not quite as committed to stuff as Fury has been. I can’t remember if I wrote about this or not, but my particular training method involves corrections and “make it a party.” Fury gets by real good on just corrections. Rippa blows off corrections and motivates wherever the party’s at. If you correct her too much, she is like, “Well screw this, then.” So what I have to do is change my tack a bit. I talk more to her, marking the good stuff with “good” (this is why I am happy I use verbal cues with trick training instead of a clicker) and when she’s bad I use the stick and take the sheep away, or I make what trainer (not actor) Leslie Neilsen dubs the “Jewish Seagull” – a nasal “ahh.”

The Issues

So, Rippa is thinking real hard about things and tires out more than she would on a jolly little mountain bike ride like she enjoys quite often. Kathy kept telling me to stop telling her what to do and just let her feel it out. Adrenaline + hard thinking = stress to any creature, and she’s definitely doing that. When I do get her going nicely, you can see her posture change. She likes it. I like it. When things get hairy, ears go back and she gets faster, just like her mom.

I have a bad handling side, but happily, after about six years of formal stockdog handling training, I don’t have a lot of the problems newbs have, like walking into heads, not being able to read sheep, knowing how to use the stick. I definitely make mistakes, but I finally see it. I wish I could communicate a good way of feeling it, but I think it just comes with time. I am pretty sure I have heard it said that it takes about six years of handling to figure it out.

Rippa’s getting used to the stick. It’s in her face and she’s learning how to tolerate it. That’s not cool in my world because if she stops moving off of it, then we have to start getting the big guns out. So if I point it at her and she doesn’t move off, I have to PUSH INTO her myself with the same consistency that I use my commands (ie, one time, no response, correct or fix, no nagging).

Since we haven’t taught Rippa  how to do a formal outrun yet, I stand between her and the sheep and tell her to get out and am physically the force that pushes her out. Which is all well and good, until she doesn’t commit to a side, comes into me and then switches, leaving me in the lurch. I gotta work hard at that moment both to protect the sheep (not that she’s a muncher, but man, those are moving stuffies!) and to make sure that Rippa repeatedly feels what the “good” behavior feels like instead of other bad habits.

So what do we do about this outrun problem? Let’s draw a diagram.

Here’s what Rippa sees when I say, “Get out!”

So, if you’re a shepherd dog and your instinct is to go to the heads and turn them, which way do you go around me? If you said, “left,” you need to learn your stock commands. If you said, “Go by,” then BINGO!

So what I do is I stay put and put my stock stick out to give her some push around them instead of let them come straight at her. And when she gets to a certain point the sheep do this:

What’s this? Check the heads out. They flipped to run the other way. And here I am, my back to the sheep, looking at my dog going what I think is “go by” and she sees the heads turn and so she goes, AHH! and in midstream, starts going “way to” or “right.” And then my handling falls apart because *I* committed while she didn’t.

So what I gotta do is, instead of using the stick to keep the dog out, I use body pressure and use the stick to enforce which way she is NOT supposed to go. Here’s a quick clip of that.

You can hear me going, “Good, good” to mark that I like her outrun.

Okay, now onto the rest of the lesson. In the video you’ll see a decent outrun, but you’ll also see how easily she flips instead of committing to one side and my crappy reaction to it because I am on autopilot because I trust her.

So now you get the whole video, which is a whopping 2 min long. It will show you about what I’ve been talking about, but like I said, not much worth taping yet because for a while it will just be more of the same until Rippa gets the habit and I get used to handling her. I kind of have a goal to get there by the end of the weekend, but since I can’t explain things to her, and she can’t explain stuff to me, not counting on it.

SHEEEEEEEEP!

Boy howdy, do I love my Rippa puppy. And, if you are a member of ASCA, you can see a nice picture of her daddy in the current Aussie Times as #2 advanced cattle dog. Remember that old kiddy taunt? First is the worst, second is the best? Totally applies.