Stockdog Clinic at Trish’s New Digs

So, Kathy announced her retirement and sold all her sheep to Trish Alexander, who, after many years of renting a small house with so-so sheep facilities, managed to get AN AMAZING DREAMHOUSE in King City (and this is an even bigger deal to me, since King City is not exactly the pinnacle of places to live). First order of business?Host a stockdog clinic with Kathy before she heads north for the Winter.

Well, after a few months off entirely, and a month of confusion about whether I was breaking Rippa at Adelaida with my non-conventional training ideas, I figured I’d better take the opportunity to get out with Kathy and figure out what to do, now that I’m effectively on my own.

Some basic thoughts that I had:

1. Only taking lessons is a double-edged sword. I was a lot more confident with Kathy following me around and advising me pretty much what I knew, but I also stopped thinking about stockmanship because I guess I’ve always felt like Kathy was there to tell me how far I could “push” the sheep. At first it was super necessary, I think, to have her hand on the bike, stabilizing it, but I definitely feel like it’s time to let go and balance on my own, if you get that. I need to stop letting Kathy be a crutch for what I really know, and have confidence in myself because, well, I guess I do know enough to do this on my own without breaking Rippa.
2. I honestly think that teaching stockmanship as an instinct is job one. When I am at Adelaida, I do not make foolhardy choices because I feel like I need to protect these people’s stock before I train my dog. This weekend, with Kathy there, I let that slide a bit. That was both good and bad for me. When I saw that these sheep were, indeed, different from Adelaida in that they would settle and fetch to me, I relaxed a lot more, but that also caused me to make mistakes I normally wouldn’t make – like not preventing dive ins soon enough (on the first day) to starting an outrun with the sheep not settled and mashed on the fence (giving my dog nothing to do but dive bomb to get in between them and the fence on the third day) to just plain working the sheep longer than I needed to for success (that, I fear, was more the effect of knowing I was paying to be out there and wanting more than five minutes).
3. There was a time when sitting around all day was fun – especially when I was knew and standing there, watching the lessons and trying to understand what was happening provided a lot of new experiences (which I thrive on), but largely I felt like I knew what was wrong and Kathy helped me figure out ways to fix it, and so watching other people was more an exercise in seeing what they weren’t doing right. I’ve been stuck so long at just the handling facet of fetching that until I feel ready to drive, it’s all the same now. I’m there, effectively, for maybe thirty minutes a day, and I guess I really would rather be doing something else with the other part of my day – though I did plow through an enormous book. It’s definitely time to get my own sheep so I can do that.
4. I really need to find some sturdy bamboo to make the bottle sticks. Rippa needs them.
5. In the same vein, Rippa really really needs to know that I will get really mad if she does anything bad. I think we all fantasize that we can stand out in a field and whisper commands and they’ll just go right through it. Unfortunately, I think most dogs – or at least dogs with some real drive behind them – take a bit more than that. Rippa is a really honest dog for the most part, but she’s also an alpha and headstrong. You gotta be a real alpha to make her listen, and then it’s really fun. Kathy’s big lesson for me was “PREVENTION, NOT CORRECTION.” IE, start out being tough, and you can always soften up. Kind of like how, when I was in my mid 20s, I dressed up a lot to teach my college students so they’d perceive me as someone to respect, and then progressively got more casual as the semester progressed.

This was pretty much my entire weekend – Rippa chilling, me reading . . . waiting, waiting, waiting. I am definitely over that “new hobby” syndrome where you spend all day talking about whatever it is (I have done it with lacrosse, climbing, and dog sports) forever and ever and feeling like you have a corner on the market of happiness, so I don’t generally engage conversations at lessons. I’m an introvert, so sue me. I did however discover that I like Gina’s cake pops (though, right after found out that the filling was cake and frosting mixed up and swore off them for sheer badness for you), learned a lot about septic systems, and got to talk horse war stories.

Oh, and I got to pet a lot of dogs, which is always lovely.

Duke gets a belly scratch from me. We’ve been friends from way back when – it was nice to catch up.

Other things I thought were wise lessons from Kathy – most gleaned in casual conversation, before I get to the actual training:

• When I set up my sheep, don’t be married to the arrangement. You won’t know the ideal setup until you actually use it enough to create problems that might exist.
• When I buy sheep, I should work the group first, decide if they are good for my dog, and then buy them. Don’t just buy sheep someone wants to sell me.
• The secret to maintaining your weight as you age is portion control and forcing yourself to exercise (not stockdog related, but Kathy has been quite successful in this way) and not letting those around you convince you to get lazy about this.

So, onto the actual lessons.

The first day, she was a bit of a wild child – which I expected from many months off of this type of work and two months off from stock in any form. Kathy told me I wasn’t correcting strongly enough, and I needed to just go in there and be serious. It might not be everyone’s cup of tea in training, she warned, but that’s what Rippa respects and that I should enforce it quickly and then life will be easier. She also had me put a tab on Rippa so if I have trouble with  her (as I have in past lessons when she got confident and bratty) I’d have an easier time catching her.

I was so scared of doing outruns with her, but basically Kathy had me do what I was doing at Adelaida: obedience call offs. I’d lay her down on one end of the arena and call her to me. And back again. In a z pattern, getting closer and closer to the sheep. That way, we got Rippa calm and thinking “obedience” and the sheep calm because Rippa gets in there, gets low, and zeroes her beady yellow eyes at them with all the upright eye control that any Aussie has ever had behind her. 

This got her to relax, and then, interestingly, she started going to me kind of wide like she was going around me. I should note that when I call her, I call her to my outside leg – which builds up the dog’s outrun because instead of just coming in and facing the sheep, the dog will naturally have to swing wide around you, getting a wider arc, during outruns.

Well, this wide arching thing seemed to be a solution to my usual outrun of me between the sheep and the dog because instead of amping her up with a “get around” (which, if you use in casual conversation now, the dogs perk up as much as if they’d heard “cookie” or “sheep”), she would casually trot around me and get ready to lay down when I told her. So was born the sneaky “get around.”

I just called her around to me, kind of walked toward the sheep as I did it, and just never told her to lie down. We found that as long as I wasn’t running to protect the sheep, Rippa stayed pretty chill and in control. And thus, we have accidentally begun her slingshot outrun training.

Next, when I got them going, I had to trust Rippa to come back to balance, which she did. If I didn’t watch the sheep, and instead watched Rippa, we got into trouble. My handling always improves if I worry about what the sheep are doing.

BUT, I also needed to be much more “hardcore” about my unhappiness if Rippa came in too quick. The first day she got away with stuff because I was busy protecting the sheep from her. The second day, I got all kinds of serious and yelled at her and  . . . bammo. The next two days, the ratio of yelling or stick dropping  to “no, out, good dog” was a lot lower. In fact, there was one point that I clearly remember where she was ready to go for a sheep hock and I said, “Ahh, no” and she shot out of there like a bat out of hell. That’s my honest Rippa bear!

So, here’s your video of this, on day 3.

So, hoping that getting my own sheep works out soon so I can put the kind of mileage on her that she needs to get her calmed down so there’s less “out” and we can work on flanking commands and driving. And maybe reintroduce “get around” without overly stoking her. . .