I was recently asked this question in light of the fact that here I am, telling you theories of stockdog training, when the only stockdog titles my own dog has is a STDc (started, cattle) and I’ve put a duck leg on a dog, a started sheep title on a dog, and a ranch trial title on a dog. That’s it. Kind of weird, right?
Let me tell you that writing this was kind of painful. Not because I’m embarrassed about it, nor because I realized something I hadn’t, but because I had to watch that damned video that’s linked here of what I did to Fury for two solid years.
But, well, there are things to be learned here.
When I first got into this, I heard the old adage, “You will ruin your first stockdog” and I was like, “Nah! How could I?”
Well, I did.
See, my training philosophy is very independent. I don’t belong to clubs, I don’t take classes. I train, and then I go trial. I’m a pretty good trainer, if I may, because I have been doing it for a long time, and I used to go to seminars all the time. So when it came to livestock working, I though I would approach it the same way.
So I went to Kathy when Fury was about . . . oh, a year.
And, as you can see from this photo of her first time out, she had some go juice. You can see Kathy smiling pretty big there, too, because she liked how she was starting out, too. So I kept going to classes, but sporadically.
Look at her all balanced up and happy. Yeah, not so much these days.
Anyway, so I am in grad school and paying for this venture with student loans. Stockdog lessons aren’t cheap, but at least I am not driving upwards of six hours like some of the folks that come up do, so I try to be consistent , but I’m broke.
And then, a few months in, I was given the opportunity to train and handle about seven Australian shepherds about eight miles up from me, every day, on sheep, agility, obedience, and we even tried conformation but the dogs weren’t socialized enough. And get paid for it. This also afforded me time to use the stock on my own dog. And the hubris was incredibly. I was such a good trainer, this guy was paying me! I could not possibly not figure this out.
But here is what I did: Long story short, the sheep were terrorized by his dogs always getting loose, getting in the pens and having their way with them. Fury and her go juice allowed her to chase the crap out of these extremely light sheep and fetch them out of the hills when they got loose, or move them from pen to pen, but even trying to start her in the round pen was work. She can work really large groups of sheep, but when they got small, they’d ping off the walls. And that’s where the problem went.
See, the dogs he had weren’t super strong on talent and instinct and it was mostly my job to bond with them and encourage them. They were very soft dogs. They moved slow and maybe didn’t listen so well, but I could get them to work the sheep enough to trial them because they were so soft and not so talented. They would follow the sheep just fine because they weren’t really reading them or trying to do anything. A few sits here and there and we could get through a course with me leading the way.
Here’s Fury with the darling father-son duo on trial weekend. The red dog, Bucky, got his RTDs that weekend with me handling, and Kodi (the black tri) got his sheep and duck legs. They were not high drive dogs, but they were sweet. Bucky died a few years back and unfortunately, Kodi’s owner died and the girl that placed the dogs wouldn’t communicate with me so I have no idea what happened to him.
Anyway, Fury, though, was all stockdog and she is still one of the more instinct-driven dogs I know. By this, I mean that she really doesn’t process so well. She just goes for things. It’s fun to train her, but if you hold a piece of food in your hand and ask her to do something, she stops thinking and just starts offering behaviors. She cannot help herself from heeling my vacuum, even though she knows it’s bad, and she has very little bite inhibition when people put pressure on her. (This was something I worried about with breeding her, but I do think I simply didn’t understand how to manage it, and I do think that this go round, we did fine with the same potential in Rippa. You gotta teach a dog that flight is much better than fight with people and not force them into things, Fury got forced.) PURE INSTINCT. And not always the good kind.
So Fury would get on those animals and try to turn them but they were so light they would bounce off the walls. Meanwhile, I don’t know how to handle at all, so I am not helping her out in any way. By the time I realized I really needed to start going to lessons again, Fury had learned that the way she should work livestock is like a bat out of hell, lest they take off.
Here’s a video of us in the roundpen:
So I tried to annotate this video and it made me want to cry so I had to stop watching it. If you know what a good stockdog looks like in this situation, you can see that she is literally doing NOTHING wrong except I’m yelling at her. And I did it five days a week for two years.
Uh, yeah. That’s how you break your dog. And the amazing thing is that Fury still loves the crap out of me and will always work whenever I ask and NEVER shuts down. She keeps trying and trying but I just never taught her want to do.
We’d actually work in an agility arena, too, so it was kind of fun. I had Fury send them over jumps and stuff, but it did NOT help her manage the sheep one iota. I could obedience her through drives and such, and I drilled her real well, but I couldn’t simply walk and have her keep the sheep with me. She would blow them right by me because she never learned that I was there to hold them, too (and mostly because it took me years to get that I was supposed to).
So, at some point I quit working for Doug when I knew I couldn’t do anymore with his dogs than I was and I went back to Kathy’s and was at lessons pretty much every day I could. And things got better.
So then I started trialing her, mostly because I knew I wanted to breed and I wanted to see what was out there, not because she was totally ready. Proof of that? I never had the guts to trial her on home turf where people I saw regularly could judge my wonderful dog poorly.
My first weekend, Trish Alexander and I went to Idaho. Fury and I took home Most Promising Started Aussie and a sheep and cattle leg. The sheep were unlike anything we’d ever seen, so heavy they would walk with me. It frustrated Fury because no matter what she did, they just stuck by me.
But obviously we did okay. The second trial was in Washington and not so good. And then we went for MVA in 2007 and Fury and I qualified in agility and on cattle, so we qualified on the whole shebang, while also finishing the started cattle title.
Everyone who watched that qualifying cattle run was impressed. The judge said she was like a little hornet on the cattle. Which is true.
On sheep, not so good – and it became clear we had a major handling issue. Away from me she worked fine, but as soon as she got close to me, it was dunzo. I would be too nervous and Fury would be too nervous and it would be a big, fat wreck. Ducks usually went pretty well, but I was bad at handling them so she never Q’d.
(I bought the photo, so don’t be mad. I just don’t have it scanned.)
And I felt awesome about that MVA award- it had been a life long goal of mine. I was going to keep at it and she wasn’t broken after all.
But, in the end, I began to realize that the lessons weren’t really letting us progress. I was learning a ton more from watching others and keeping at it, but Fury just could not balance the sheep when they came into contact with me.
This is the last video I have of us working together. The fact was, it wasn’t going to go anywhere. Kathy continued through all this to remind me that she was, in essence, a good little dog, and that it was I that had made some major mistakes. That’s why I also decided that breeding her was okay. Fury has been a wonderful pet, the smartest and most biddable dog I’ve ever known, and she has a lot to contribute to the gene pool, even if she’s small and has no titles.
As I said when I ran an ad in the Aussie Times for the litter I planned but didn’t work out, it’s not the titles; it’s the talent.
I tried giving her to Yishai to handle, but she's too far gone and he doesn't know enough about how to handle, nor does he love it. If I had really wanted him to, he would have kept it up, but really, it's not worth it. And now I think that if I had sheep of my own to work on every day, I know just enough to maybe fix her, but with Rippa around at $50 a day, I can’t afford to fund Fury, so for now she is retired. I am trying to figure out a way to make this work as I love working with Fury and she definitely misses it.
But that, my friends, is why I am able to write about training dogs but have no real titles to prove I know what I’m doing. Because I learned all this stuff the hard way – as most of us do.
If you are not a stockman, this blog may help, but you need someone to keep you from breaking your dog. Take it from me.
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