A Dogless Stockdog Day

I volunteered to help Stephanie in the pens during her field trial yesterday. I just really like moving animals and interacting with them, and moreover, by the end of the day, I felt like I’d done something good for the world, and not in the way you’d suspect.

This was my first border collie field trial – every single person had a black and white dog (sometimes they had copper, too) and it was hard for me to tell them apart when working: oh, this one is short haired, this one has low ears, and that was about it. Mostly that’s because in field trials, I’m completely away from the action and all I mostly saw were people who were helping me and their dogs.

I’ve only heard about these trials in the context of “Aussies can’t do them” so it was interesting to see why. Frankly, I think the right Aussies could definitely do them, but it doesn’t highlight their strength, so I get it.  It looked like a lot of finite training going into the dogs and not so much functional. In ASCA stockdog trials, the dog has to get the sheep itself in some of the courses, pen them, get them through chutes, etc. It was interesting watching these insane outruns where the dog didn’t see the sheep at all and needed the owner to tell them when to move (one dog came over to my pens, saw sheep, but heard the command to keep looking and took off across an entirely separate field and it took 20 min for him to come back when called). But it was all training. I never got to see the dogs read their sheep or really work them. It was all whistle commands and a lot of yelling up close (so ha, ha, BC people yell too!).  To be fair, the only part I could see was the dogs picking the sheep up. (I heard the yelling, though!)

The thing I like about the ASCA trials is that the dog, if it really understands, is going to do what has to be done to achieve the directive, and if it’s a good dog, it won’t need a ton of direction. These dogs were working untrained, terrified, small groups of range ewes and only a few really kept control of their stock, and I think it was because they were being handled so much, not because they didn’t know how.

I got the classic, “Oh, you have Aussies . . . well, they’re good for penning” comment, too. Yes, a trial like this would likely fry Aussie brains because they’re very much “think for yourself” dogs and this kind of work is mostly, “Do what I tell you” stuff. At least that was my impression, from watching and talking to the people setting the sheep out.

Also, lordy, that was  a big thing. The pens weren’t set up ideally but my thought was like, “Someone tried, let’s get this done.” There was SO much bitching about how they were set up, but you know what, I did get it done and the people bitching weren’t there all day with me. The setting the sheep thing seems crazy to me. I get them into the squeeze pens, then they’re released, and three people and two dogs have to settle the sheep, then move them out into the middle of a field for another dog to pick them up. This took up to a half hour to do with terrified sheep, flapping tarps, dogs EVERYWHERE, and shadows from a tree that everyone kept telling me was for shade but was set up on the south side of the tree and not a bit of shade ever reached us, except in the squeeze chute and right when they popped out, which made them crazy if there wasn’t cloud cover. One thing that also drove me nuts was that you had to be SUPER quiet and you couldn’t use a livestock flag in the pens because people said the BCs trialing were too sensitive to it and I would ruin the run. I kept thinking that if a border collie picking up sheep is going to get shut down by me talking at a regular volume waving a flag stick WAY away from them, something’s wrong with that – but whatever. I don’t know BCs very well or the pressure of trialing in this environment. But I damn well expect my trained Aussie doing an outrun to just . . . do the outrun, even if there is a bar fight going on in the pens next to it.

The sheep would get away from the people setting the sheep out and we’d have to fill our exhaust pen with perfectly workable sheep (and sheep leaping the fence to come back in to escape the dogs) to keep it moving, and everyone was really worried that there would not be enough sheep and the trial would be ruined.

My first helper was awesome, mostly because he said he didn’t know that  and was happy to learn from whatever advice was given. So I taught him about his own little “hula hoop” of pressure that he could apply to the sheep, but to read them when they were upset and sometimes putting pressure off and giving them time to be curious and take steps on their own was the best. We talked about how being tight in the pens was comforting to the sheep, not because they didn’t think they could escape, but because livestock like body pressure and it keeps them calm. We talked about why the tarps were there and how effective they were at hiding the sheep from the draws (not, the sheep were tall enough to look over), how shadows worked (livestock have crappy depth perception, so shadows look like cliffs) and how little things like a bit of twine can be scary. The morning, into the afternoon, went really well – he was really fun to work with and we were high-fiving eachother on difficult penning job successes and I look forward to running into him again.

Around 2 (after about eight hours of me doing this), there was a changing of the guard (and I was the only all-day worker) and suddenly it got crazy with people literally pulling sheep by the legs to get them into the chutes, trying to push them in with intimidation and smacking them with the stock sticks. They eventually dumped a dog in with the tight pens who basically only got trampled and caused the new people to cuss and snarl at the sheep who were just terrified.

I got really pissed about this because I wasn’t going to contribute to this. I don’t really want to come off like I was judging them because I know that most stockmanship looks like this, but I’ve been taught to think about the sheep before anything else (thanks Kathy, and others) and I knew how to keep them moving smoothly even scared and this was not helping. Why did I know? Stockmanship. Having horrified sheep doesn’t make for good trialing nor good meat. Or, you know, good Karma. I’ve read Temple Grandin’s books, websites on this stuff, been taught how to work pens and move sheep by Kathy, have a number of livestock management classes under my belt from college, and I do, after all, have an affinity to animals. These little guys saw dark holes, shadows that looked like cliffs, angry, cussing people, and they just quit. It was about a half hour of nothing after the setting people went through three pens of sheep before getting a trial dog on them and I didn’t have a sheep draw to help the loose sheep trust that they weren’t walking into hell.  I kept trying to tell people why it wasn’t working, but without a clear, designated leader, it fell to everyone just trying a new approach on their own. In situations like that, I generally back off and let people do their thing because my thing might not actually be the best thing and fighting other strong-willed people isn’t going to fix it.

When people started talking about rearranging the panels and stuff when I finally threw my hands up into the air and was like, “That’s it, I’ve been here for 8 hours and there’s nothing I can do here so I’m leaving,” which finally caused one woman to go, “Wait, yes, she’s been working here all day and they’ve been moving smoothly, we should listen to her.”

Sure enough, calming everyone down after ten minutes I slowly, slowly put pressure on my sheep with just my body (and took it off if it was too much) and we got four in the chute. The rest followed and it was a very enjoyable experience for everyone after that, I think (except the gal that got peed on – yuck!).

I felt good about myself in that I didn’t make the sheep upset and I could get it done in less than ideal conditions (even if that meant clambering into each pen and physically turning sheep around to go through to the next pen as we moved them up), and that for that day, those sheep were treated well. I also felt good about myself because prior to this, I haven’t really been given much opportunity to do work like this in the dog world. My friend Amy and I did sort ducks for ASCA finals last year, but that’s about all I’ve ever been asked to do for a trial in my world. It was nice to know that all the work I’ve done has paid off and I’m a quite good stockman that everyone was happy with.

People were calling me the “range ewe whisperer” and it felt great.

I also reaffirmed a lesson I’ve learned earlier: you can’t force leadership. Even if you know better, saying so won’t matter. You have to let other people recognize you and put you there. During the whole debacle I described above, I had no idea how to fix it, but I knew criticizing others’ approaches wouldn’t work, so finally deciding to let them to their own devices was the best idea I could come up with. And it did work in an unexpected way": people recognized I could be effective, stopped going in all directions and gave me time to do so, and we all were happy again. So yeah, there are greater life lessons in stockdogs for sure.

Arena Video Footage–I need to calm down

Thinking I was going to fly to Canada today, it turns out I’m going on Thursday. So, I thought, why not one more lesson in the arena? There was some neat stuff I saw here that people learning about this might like to see so I roped my husband into video taping it for me. Boy howdy, did I need to see the tape. I am really lucky I have tough dogs, guys. I need dogs who keep going even though I’m being hard on them, because I really, really need to work on that.

As I said, last time was the first time in the big arena for us and she showed me a lot of really neat stuff, but I was having a hard time with outruns and such. Watching the video, I’m pretty sure someone needs to put a shock collar on me. I am so freaked out that the dog is going to be bad, I don’t set her up to be good.

Case in point – when I start her, I start her maybe twenty feet from the sheep in an arena. Watching the video, she’s totally being responsive to me, but she’s excited to go and I’m worried so I don’t send her, and we amp up. It’s not until I get way back and give everyone space that everything goes mostly well for newbs in an arena. Watching Rippa like this reminds me this is how Fury used to be before I put too much pressure on her when she came into contact with me. Sigh.

Anyway, things I am learning from working in the arena: I need to take advantage of that space because Rippa and I both ease off if we give eachother room to make mistakes without being harsh. With the sheep close in on the initial outruns, they have a whole arena to run at, so they do, and I’m making Rippa work close under real pressure from me instead of JUST GO. So I need to JUST go when we start and stop stressing if it’s not perfect. This is the stage where Rippa and I have to learn to read our sheep and control them without fencelines, not worry about perfection.

So, here’s the video. It’s pretty long but it’s because I wanted to include a couple things: how hard I start Rippa and where it’s really obviously I need to stop doing that. Working on teaching her to pick the sheep up off the fence and bring them to me without too much help – you’ll see her fail a couple times, and do her customary “shut down” I talk about, but then it gets it together. And then, in the end, we have a nice lift off the fence and I take the sheep for a jog. I don’t know why I felt like jogging, but I did, and she kept them balanced even then.

I did take the time to start a little drive on her that doesn’t show. I’d noticed that she was really taking commands from me so a little “it’s okay to drive the sheep” in there wouldn’t fry her. It lasted like two minutes. I decided I shouldn’t add too much new stuff. Now that I’m getting used to being my own guide, I’m quite liking how it’s making me feel. I sense myself relaxing into everything I’ve learned over the years and finally taking ownership of it.

So now I really am off for a month and we’ll come back on work on my crappy starts on sheep and just letting Rippa learn to handle her sheep (including that damned red one that flips out all the time).  Oh and the #1 thing: Trust your dog, Kristin . . . TRUST YOUR DOG. It’s when you’re a jerk that she freaks out.

Playing with the Big Kids: We Move to the Arena

I try to write every time we get on stock because it helps me solidify thoughts and feelings, and it’s pretty realistic to look at the archives and see how much work/how many sessions have gone into this. I skipped a work on Friday.

After the nice session we had in the round pen, I decided it was probably time to move to the arena to give her more to do, work on outruns, and not let the small enclosure become a crutch for us. I thought it was a good time to take a lesson with Stephanie to transition, so signed up for one. Her style is very different in some ways, but the changes she’s encouraged have made a world of difference in our partnership so I think it’s a good idea to have her involved when I feel ready for it.

When I showed up, she had sheep in the round pen for me and not in the arena like I wanted, but I went with it. She said she’d seen me using the flag wrong and wanted to fix it. “You were moving into Rippa – but with the flag, you have to move away. And you can’t use it too much or it will become a crutch.”

So, back to the stick. That went fine, but she started throwing lots of new things at us – she critiqued how I started my outruns, and after a bit of confusion which riled me and the sheep and the dog up, I had to stop and find out what exactly she wanted. What she wanted was completely the opposite of how I’ve learned to teach outruns (go between the sheep and the dog, then transition to slingshots, then move further and further), but was more about trusting the dog to learn to pick the sheep up while it makes mistakes. I kept trying to do it, but it was really, really difficult. Eventually I figured out a hybrid of the two that worked for us all – which is that instead of slingshotting, I walk in the direction I’m going to send Rippa and then send her. It keeps her out wide when she starts.

Then Stephanie started trying to make me send Rippa on her flanks but I know that we’ve spent time just trying to get easy flanks and she really doesn’t take flank commands yet, nor do I expect her to. So Stephanie was like, “Well, then, lie her down if she doesn’t take them and make her.”

It was just a lot of change for both of us, and my handling started to fall apart and then Rippa stopped covering her sheep, and then . . . I admit . . . I started crying. I haven’t cried doing stockdog stuff (at least during a lesson) that I know of ever, so I thought it was a good sign that I was comfortable with Stephanie’s reaction to the crying to allow it, while also being just REALLY frustrated.

Everyone tells me that Rippa is stubborn or spoiled, but I do know my dog and I’ve been training dogs for years so when I say I know how she learns and “make excuses for it” I really feel I do know. When Rippa shuts down, she does it because she doesn’t know what to do at all. Stephanie was like, “Just make her do it” but my inclination was to just go back to what we knew to reinforce us both. It’s frustrating taking lessons from people when you have your own idea about how things work. I need to work on one thing at at a time, and I think Stephanie may be a bit eager to have me improve in leaps and bounds and thinks I can take it, but I can’t. And I cried.

So we took a break and she moved me into the arena and said to just do what I normally do and forget everything she said, and we did. And we did pretty well. Rippa behaved well and you could see her learning how to manage the sheep in a larger arena, but definitely we had work to do.

And so here we are today. I am taking off for an entire month of travels next week, and I was pretty booked but I wanted one more lesson in the arena before we took the time off so she could think on it (yeah, I do think they do, because they seem to always come back a little better after time off).

So, I just rented sheep. I brought the flag and the short stick and here we were. Rippa has some eye to her, and some power, so we spent the first couple minutes just following the sheep to let them settle after we went into the arena. I started out with the flag because I have no confidence (see me thinking hindsight here) and she picked them up a little sloppy, so that was what we worked on. As soon as it was nice, we started trucking around the arena (the goal for a bit here is mileage and letting Rippa learn how to balance to her sheep in this environment with minimal “training” from me for a while), but she got too close in so I started trying to push her with the flag. And then I remembered what Steph said about the flag and put it back, picking up the stick.

And from there, things went well. I used her method of starting the out runs and then trying to take walks into the arena. Rippa would do really good, then put some pressure and lose her sheep, come back and get them, etc. Eventually she started to settle and handle things a lot more evenly – without much guidance from me except some stick and pressure and then, more importantly, taking it off. She was like, “Why yes, sheep can walk” which was pretty awesome.

We’d get about halfway and then this one particular sheep would peel off and return “home” to the gates and I would take the opportunity to leave the parked sheep and encourage her to “look back” and get the sheep. She built up her confidence on this task and by the third time, she wasn’t carefully following her and looking back at me, but charging after her to stop her and then backing off as she turned and headed back up to my other flock.

She also started doing distance gatherings with me far away – slow, easy approaches, I could see her “outing” herself along the fence and really reading her sheep. She’d take it slow and easy with me a 100 meters out and seeing which way they leaned, fixing it, and bringing them to me. Once they got to me, she’d balance up and we’d take a walk. Eventually she’d push too hard, and we’d have to start cleaning it up again, but I think probably just mileage and confidence will help there.

I started trying to do Stephanie’s out-run flank “down” thing that I talked about above for a bit, but decided this was way too much new stuff and to leave it be.

I saw some really good stuff today. Calm, thinking, and I think she’s going to have an easier time learning the drive than most dogs I’ve seen start because of this. I remember when we first started and Trish made a comment after working her that she was a “finals-quality" dog that really got me motivated but I haven’t really felt that way about her until today.

All that battling and her going hard and all I needed to do was take the pressure off and she’s gathering sheep up half a field away without ever doing it before like it’s old hat. Her stopping and listening to my commands without me having to yell. Me just being pretty sure that no one is going to get harassed and injured enough for me to just stand there and watch what happens.

We’ve both come a long way in this. I was terrified to do anything on my own without someone “who knew” watching me, but I am starting to really feel that I do know, especially when it comes to my dog, how to do this.

I don’t think we’ll make it to finals – I just don’t have the years of experience trialing, and I honestly don’t love the trial atmosphere and never really have, so I probably won’t get the experience you need. Like that book I was really excited about says, to be a champion takes real sacrifice and I’m not motivated to do that.

But I hope when I’m ready to go for this, that we do well.

Today was a good day: nice outruns, calling off the top

Last sheep rental, I wasn’t feeling so good about things. I was really frustrated with Rippa’s outruns – it seemed like she just didn’t want to come in easy on them but dive right in, and that once she did that, she didn’t want to bring them to me – she’d just kind of coast along behind them and the natural size of the pen brought the sheep to me. I was feeling kind of down after all the progress we made.

Today I did two things really differently: I brought the husband (who video taped me), and I remembered the green flag that Stephanie kept telling me to try using. I didn’t think my dogs respect it so I never really used it, but so far, everything Stephanie has told me to do has been right, so might as well try this.

It also helped running across this article Terry Martin did for Ranch Dog Trainer: The Aussie Style and Outrun. Reading this article made me feel less like a failure. Why couldn’t I get Rippa to just get out and get around? Because it’s NORMAL for her to want to dive in and then get them. She’s doing what her instincts say.

And it made sense why our last session was a downer for me – I spent most of it really trying to obedience her to the outrun – I wanted her to turn out away from me and the sheep and then go in. That’s not going to work.

So this session, I decided to quit doing that and go back to slingshot outurns, thanks to another article I found on Working Aussie Source: Fixing the Outrun.  And based off the instructions there, with the flag as an extra powerful visual that a stick (even with a bottle on it) can’t compare to . . . we got this:

The video covers a lot of random stuff I’m doing – the outrun work, just giving her mileage on sheep with me leading, and then some calling off the top work. This is the baby step toward teaching her to drive the Kathy Warren method. Stephanie, as I said before, has a different way, but I have seen enough dogs start with KW’s method, I am going to do that first, because I understand it best.

I think next time we go out (tomorrow), I’ll take a lesson with Stephanie and we’ll go to the arena. At this point I really want to work on that gather/outrun and get some mileage walking around. We’ll go back to the calling off when I feel like I have those two things under control with less fence pressure. Wish me luck!

(Oh, and PS? The mouth breathing? It’s because it’s cold and I have allergies that make me snuffy. Problem solved.)

Zen Comes in the Form of Horsemanship

So, this blog has taken a new tack with the advent of me starting to work sheep regularly again, as I’ve said. It’s now not just about what I’m mechanically doing and what my dog is mechanically doing, but I’ve learned that to move forward and make myself a lot more whole, it’s a venue for me to explore the spiritual connection of my own self and that of the partnership with my dog.

I had mentioned this to Stephanie when she was sorting sheep for me last lesson and she told me that I really should pick up The Nine Secrets to Perfect Horsemanship by Don Blazer. So I did. And in the last two days I found time to get through it and . . . the whole time I was like, “Yes! This!” I got through chapter 3 and realized I needed to take notes, because this wasn’t something you read passively, but something that needed to be engaged with and shared.

Here are some notes from it that I loved:

The secrets are these:

1. Accept your and your horse’s creative potential. (IE, understand that you have unlimited potential within your physical and creative abilities and that this is your guiding light. It could be the angel that sits on your shoulder, or it could be the universe. It could simply be the true essence of your soul, or whatever you want it to be)

2. Let your heart decide. This is a hard one for me because I was taught to judge my value on my extrinsic value to others. I am getting better. I really loved how he tied this into setting goals and not taking or seeking criticism, but letting your own intrinsic knowledge be your guide. I feel like this blog is a record of me doing that. I’m not openly seeking criticism, I’m just recording my experiences.

3. Practice non-judgment. When I saw this I was definitely sure it was time to take notes. Blazer is speaking my language here. I truly feel that the whole world would be a lot better off if we stopped judging people according to how we think is the best way to live and just let things be. This also means, however, that we have to stop judging ourselves and even our animals.

4. When you no longer judge, you can give. Give opportunities, give space to choose the right behaviors.

5. Make conscious choices about how you respond.  Don’t let your emotions rule. Ask “why” and ask mentors. Continue evaluating your answers and being open to changing tacks.

6. Everything is exactly as it should be. Things go wrong so that you should learn. The young, green animal tells the trainer every day how he is progressing. Calm, mild acceptance of lessons means he is ready for more. If there’s a battle, try giving, but sometimes a showdown is needed, too.

7. Create the future through your intentions and desires. Visualize your perfection and go where you need to in order to learn the truth. When you name your intentions and desires and begin your quest, you don’t have to defend your choices. Do not hear criticism nor ask for it. Follow your inner heart.

8. Accept uncertainty and give up your search for security. Know yourself and believe in yourself to get beyond fear. Give up attachment to specific outcomes and expectations. If you feel insecure, do something differently and see how your will will help the outcome and that you have within you all you need.

9. Find your talent and then use it to benefit others. That means not staying on the track of success you pick in the beginning unless it feels right. It’s right if it comes easy to you (even if it’s hard work). Redirect if it becomes joyless.

This, and so much more. It’s advice for life, partnership, horses, and dogs.

At one point he says: ""If you have thoughts about devoting less than 100 percent of yourself, don't choose to be a champion. . . Dedication can also be defined as sacrifice. Your friends will praise the thought and labor you put into reaching your goal. Yet the same effort will be derided by those you surpass. Your qualities of honesty, loyalty, and persistence, will suddenly become stupidity and stubbornness to critics you have just defeated in competition, or to those who believe you have failed them by not providing them as much time and attention as they expected. If you are willing to make sacrifices, then you re willing to accept the glory of achievement. To gain, you must give away. By giving away, you will receive."

I can tell you this: I will never, ever be a champion because I am too much of a perfectionist for this to be healthy. I’ve had to give up the part of me that wants to be #1 at everything a long time ago because I know that I can’t stand the pressures that take over when you vy for that spot. I simply want to be good. I want it all, but I don’t want all of it perfectly and so have disappointed people in the past. Yes, I do have unlimited creative potential, but I have so many other competing interests that it would never be a reality for me.

Kudos to the people out there who are willing to make the sacrifice and receive the rewards.

Minding your Breath

Well, this lesson went really well. We took everything I gained from Monday’s class, applied it consistently, and I had myself a lovely fetching dog.

It went so well that I felt comfortable taking phone videos while getting mileage on Rippa.

Basically, as I said, I had a couple goals for this lesson: keep teaching her how to pick sheep up nicely, keep myself calm, and work on her flat go-by. We did all of that.

This time, I started Rippa by putting her in the round pen and just hanging out with her, hoping she wouldn’t just get this emotional charge if she learned that entering the pen didn’t mean going to work right away (again, a nice thing about sheep rental and not lessons).

Unfortunately, this is what she did for fifteen minutes:

This, friends, is not a relaxed dog pose. Had I taken a video, you’d also see that she is shivering a little. That specific pose is what I call the “Don’t make me leave, I am just a torso with no feet” pose.

She learned it from her mom:

This is to let us know that now that they are in the driveway, it’s a good decision to take us along for a ride or walk, but they can’t go back in the house because, clearly, they have no legs.

Anyhow, so that was not the most effective plan to teach her to be chill. I’m not sure if I’ll keep doing it in hopes she calms down eventually, but whatever.

So, I started by getting Rippa to “out” and turn away from me in the direction she wanted to go toward the sheep to get them and that resulted in a nice, wide, and easy outrun, where I would have her balance the sheep up and just stop. Rinse, repeat.

Her go by side is harder for her, both in the “get out” phase and when she picks them up. This is because since it is harder for her, I tend to put more pressure on her, which stresses her out. This, in turn, makes her charge the sheep harder than she should, which freaks the sheep out, and then it makes her harder to cover the go-by side and point them toward me.  We did a couple drills and then worked on plain fetching and back to that again and by the end of the lesson, stuff was looking pretty good. I am pretty confident that she can keep control of her sheep if she’s not got the pen holding them in at this point, though she does occasionally get too close and that causes the sheep to spaz and her to want to grip. Just mileage, I think.

So, we did some mileage and then to see if I could get her go-by side less flat (and start teaching her a drive), I started having her do outruns around me. Strangely, I had an easier time of getting her to run around me on the go-by side than on the way-to side. She was clearly confused, but she would get up at the top and turn in at 12:00 nicely, so that’s looking good.

At some point, I felt like everything was going casually enough that I could video some of it to talk to you about, so here’s the video:

Perhaps the first thing you’ll notice (at least I did), is that I appear to be a mouth breather when I’m working stock. This is an interesting phenomenon to me because I’m not a mouth breather and walking backward like this should not make me tired enough that I need to open my mouth. I am SERIOUSLY going to start wearing a heart rate monitor because if I’m that winded, I’m either doing it wrong or I’m stressing out for no reason.

Next, my timing on commands is kind of off but she’s going off my body language so I let it be because that’s my problem to fix, not hers. She’s absolutely right.

I’d really prefer to be quiet when I do stuff like this, but Stephanie notes that Rippa needs to learn her commands at this stage and to label it as much as I can without having too many expectations, and I think that’s fair.

Toward the end of the lesson, I took the pressure off her and just had her play follow the leader with  the sheep, which she did marvelously with no oversight needed from me.

Now we just need to get that outrun solid so that I can feel comfortable that she’ll control and cover in the arena and it will be time to give that a go again. I think it’s a couple weeks of training out, though, but I feel really good about where we started and where we are today. A lot of that is thanks to Stephanie having a really good outlook about everything and me learning to not panic if stuff doesn’t go well on her sheep.

That breath thing does bother me though. Part of the practice of meditation can be watching your breath. So your breathing goes, so your mind goes. If I have a hard time being calm, that heavy breathing is a sure sign of me not being calm.

So, goal next week is to knock off the mouth breathing.

Zen and the Art of Sheep Moving

I’ve always been a student of spirituality, though it took me a bit to accept it. In grad school, as an avowed agnostic, my Christian friend told me one day that I was the epitome of “Spiritual, but Not Religious,” and for the first time, coming from her, it didn’t sound like some kind of weak cop out.

I think no matter what banner I fly overheard, I’m probably a lot more that than I realize, and I’ve spent a long time learning from spiritual masters of all ilk, looking for the secret to a quiet mind and open heart.

So, after the last session I had, I suddenly began to understand that I could use stockdogging to that end, as well. Moreover, I probably needed to.

So, after a couple weeks off after the sheep’s owner traveled to border collie trials, I returned today with really only one major goal: a pacific mind and a quiet voice.

When I woke up this morning, I was a little nervous about if I could turn that on and wanted to sit down and read this blog because that’s the point – me thinking and getting it out really seems to be a way for me to remember it for good, and reading it again can provide insight.

BUT I DIDN’T.

I didn’t because of something in a book I used to teach college students: in it, the author makes a statement that we read a science book and we don’t constantly need to refer back to it and study every word like people do with the Bible or any great religious text. My take on that is this: you may know what it says in that religious text, but you constantly need reminding of it because you live and think so in opposition to it just because that’s how the world works. It’s easy to understand and work with gravity. It’s harder to deal with complex relationship and mind stuff.

I intellectually knew that my goal today was to simply be pacific in mind and body, and I didn’t need to read what I did last time that worked because I KNEW, I KNEW, like I know gravity, that if I maintained that practice, things would go okay. And if I didn’t know, I didn’t have any business with that as a goal.

So, when we got into the round pen, I checked my mind-body connection and felt peace. I connected to that, and I think, showing that to Rippa, I sent her to fetch the sheep and . . . it was fast because she was excited, but it was also fine. No sheep bowling or inappropriate behavior.

But as I asked more and more of her, I could FEEL my body losing it’s peace. I had a talk with a naturopathic doctor who had a booth next to mine and at an event yesterday and she said that the panic state of mind is a constant today for us, and it wasn’t like that before, which is why we have all kinds of odd and troubling diseases.

“Back in the day, people couldn’t work all the time or form overly complex relationships and plans. The fire went out, you went to sleep. And your adrenaline would only kick in when a bear came into camp and you’d have to run from the bear.

“Today, however, we’ve got complicated relationships, intense work, money troubles, etc, etc and we are always running from the bear. Our adrenal glands never give up and we get into this habit of freaking out easily. It’s so bad.”

So I am standing there and I can feel my body telling me a bear is running. I always think I am calm, at ease, not stressing this stuff, but I can feel it, like a cowbell vibrating in my chest.

So it’s time to call a break (this is why renting sheep is awesome). I pull Rippa out of the pen, go get my phone, then go back in and sit there with Rippa, doing email and seeing what’s going on for Facebook. It’s good for Rippa, too, as she finds out that sheep can just hang out. Then we just sit some more until I feel pacific again.

And it starts over. And with me being like that, instead of focusing on the wrong, or even the right, I’m starting to see what Rippa sees and feels and it’s pretty obvious that Rippa doesn’t understand some of the basics of this game: like that she is supposed to quietly lift the sheep up and bring them to me. Or how, exactly, to do that.  She does mostly fine when we’re in a moving fetch, though she’s flat on the go-by side, and I’ll get to that in a second.

So, now I add something else to “be pacific” – which is – teach Rippa how to pick the sheep up quietly and just bring them to me. I determine that the best way to do that is to start over and get right up close to the sheep and send her on an outrun, verbally telling her to get out (but quietly) and giving her space to get around them. It works. I think I have to do a lot more of that before I start trying to slingshot send her – which turns into sheep bowling – because I think she just isn’t getting that particular part for some reason. Maybe she forgot it.

Anyway, in general she’s really good on the way-to side, but not the go-by side. Way-to, I get a really excellent square corner, where she’ll turn away from the sheep and move perpendicular to them until she’s just out of the flight zone before turning in. Go-by, she’s a lot more slanty. It almost looks like the photo above, but it’s enough that she’s slicing off the flight zone of the sheep and they just can’t get balanced to me with her there.

I think, “Man, I really want the long stick.” And then, pacific mind says, “No you don’t – Rippa is softer than that, you need finesse.”

So we know that my usual method of chasing her out of the flightzone is scary to her, and we know that Rippa doesn’t know that when I send her, it’s to pick them off the fence and bring them to me or she wouldn’t sheep bowl if I wasn’t there to babysit her. It’s probably a likely thing that she doesn’t know she needs to square her go-by corner.

So we do some half moons. That works pretty well, and when she looks good and square, she gets her sheep. When it doesn’t look like she’s going to balance up, I skip ahead to some pre-cursor drive training and teach her to “get around” the sheep, all the way around me and the sheep and back to 12:00 and try again. All of this falls apart after a couple laps around the round pen, but I think if I keep it up, she’ll get it pretty quick. The instinct and stock sense is there, but I just see some holes in Rippa’s understanding of what we’re trying to do.

Anyway, so we just did some laps around the round pen with her balanced up and getting praise for giving me nice square corners and here we are.

Once I know she understands things, I think we’ll be able to move into the arena and work on things there, but I don’t expect it will be soon. She’s had way too much time off and obviously, I’ve got a lot of mental training to do myself.

Anyway, it’s definitive: a quiet mind makes for happier herding. Ohm.

Speak Softly and Carry a Shorter Stick

Today was my first day renting sheep unattended. I totally brought a video camera with me, but for some reason it only shot 12:52 of each time I turned it on, so it missed the good stuff toward the end and I think the bad stuff without the good stuff isn’t a good idea to show you.

Basically, today I learned how much *I* needed to apply all my spiritual zen and calming down practices in order to be successful.

When I arrived, Stephanie had a hard time getting the sheep to the round pen because one was fighting her dog but it happened. When I got in there, without supervision, I came in hard on Rippa, and it made her come in hard on sheep. I set up an outrun by doing the “z” obedience thing that Stephanie wants me to break away from and instead of starting out calm and trusting her, she started running hard on the top and I yelled at her.

This tanked Rip’s confidence and then I guess made me angry so then it was me yelling and sheep blowing past me. “Get out, get out, get out!” She wasn’t getting out. “Get out get out get out!” I start fighting her. Then, I’m watching this happen and I know pretty well that whatever’s going on is likely my fault. The sheep are kinda lighter and Rips is keyed up, but hold up.

We’re renting sheep so instead of trying to get the most out of the lesson, I call Rips to me and we time out. She gets some water and then we go back in, but I sit with her in the shade and look at the sheep.

“Okay, Kristin, what’s different between before and now?”

Stephanie’s not here to tell me what to do. I have to tell myself what to do. What do I know? I know that I’m loud and I’m scared that my dog is going to hurt sheep. I know that I’m scared I’m going to teach her something wrong.

What can I do about this?

1. I HAVE to be quieter. Rippa isn’t stubborn unless she doesn’t understand what you want. Then she will stop offering behaviors until she does. She’s not confident enough to keep trying. She’s bowling sheep because I’m freaking her out. But she’s not even bowling sheep that badly. It just feels like it.

2. Remember what Stephanie said, “She’s not an alligator. That dog doesn’t want or need to bite. She does it when you stress her out.” Zen, Kristin, zen. Even so, like I said, she’s not even biting. She’s just buzzing them and getting close to them before pulling out and trying again. Zen.

3. The only way you’re going to teach her something wrong right now is if you stop using what you know. You’ve been doing this a long time. You know what it’s supposed to look like and what it looks like getting there.

Kristin, I tell myself, calm the eff down. Everybody is fine. Work on outruns. Work on keeping Rippa calm. Work on your “out.”

Note on that, Stephanie thinks “out” is a throwaway command and that the dog will naturally get out when it learns what to do. I do get that, that’s what putting mileage on the dog like this does. But the thing is, it can help Rippa be right if she takes her outs. She is cutting her corners and blowing sheep past me, so  that’s the first step. Get the “out” better.

So I do some half moons. But I’m yelling at Rippa a lot. I wish I had the longer stick, but I know it’s a crutch. The last couple times on sheep, I can totally do this without a longer stick, in fact, it works better. That’s not it.

Time out, Kristin. We go back to the shade and sit in the round pen for a while, looking at the sheep. Maybe 20 minutes. I’m calm, Rippa’s used to being there, and the sheep have calmed down and started eating some weeds in the pen. Okay.

I slingshot Rippa out and whisper “away.” She gets away. Everyone’s okay. She comes in too hard, so I catch her as the sheep blow past and do some half moons. I whisper “Away” – just one time. Not like how we started. At first Rippa doesn’t get it, but all I need to do with the stock stick is kind of underhand it at her and she hits the far side of the round pen. Okay. We do it again. She gets out and and walk back and give her sheep. She balances up.

Yes!

“Go by” I tell her as I turn, so that she can get her flanks down. She fetches them. As she comes in I tell her “Steady . . . down.” She does. We sit there a minute.

I do another outrun and wait for her to bring them to me. “Down,” I whisper. She does it. We sit there for a bit. “Walk up,” I whisper. She does. “Way to”, she goes out.  We walk backward. “Go by,” and as she takes it I tell her that is exactly what I want. She comes in a little tight so I underhand the stick out at her with an out and she turns her shoulder out .  . . the sheep come toward me. “There.” She straightens out and watch them. Man, this little dog has some eye.

We do some more easy “steady . . . . down . . . walk up” to keep her balanced and calm, and then a few more turns and it’s over. I’m so tempted to work on preparing for a drive, but it’s pretty clear that Rippa doesn’t get the fetch perfectly, nor the outrun, and that’s stuff I can do in this round pen.

Once I can walk around without a lot of handling, we’ll get to the arena again. I just have to be sure she understands the game, and when she doesn’t she’ll have the confidence to play it on a bigger field.

It’s good. It’s peaceful. I really need to meditate before I go in next time.  Speak softly and carry a shorter stick.

Back to the arena? Nope

So, today we took another lesson from Stephanie, only this time in the arena. I am going to rent sheep for awhile, but I wanted her help in the arena. Good thing I did.

Not as pretty as the round pen, and there’s a couple issues there that make sense now.

1. Rippa really doesn’t get her job yet. Without me giving instructions, she’s not doing a full fetch – which is what she was doing on cattle, too. Need a lot more mileage in the round pen to show her what I want.

2. I’ve gotta stop yelling and fighting her. I started out with the big stick but Stephanie said I need to trust Rippa because she gets upset whenever I put pressure on her. So, trusting her, I got the smaller stick and just backed up instead of following Rips to push her out at the top. She did pick up clean, but then she just wouldn’t go all the way to head to balance them so we moved back to the round pen.

So, I’ve got some homework and will be back out there Wednesday. Hopefully I can get the huz to video tape me. Stephanie’s method for getting Rippa to give her best is working well, but it’s going to take some getting used to: the quiet, the not freaking when she makes a mistake, the movement away and not toward her, and different stick handling. It would be good to show you visually instead of in writing.

And we begin anew . . .

Ever since I got back from Montana, I’ve been really bugging on my stockdog situation. Despite my best efforts for the past year or so, I still haven’t figured out how to get my own livestock. We are looking at a house sometime that’s $800 more in rent and probably not worth it, but there’s a potential to have sheep training there so my husband was supportive of a possible move while we wait for the house buying situation to shape up.

But here’s the thing. If I’m paying $800 in rent, that’s just rent. That’s not the added cost of having sheep there, and I’m not someone who should be giving lessons so it’s not like I’m making any money back. Almost $1000 a month, and then having to hire a sheep caregiver when I am away . . . and I’m supposed to be saving money for a house and just to be a responsible adult. And we’re starting to think seriously about kids and what happens when I do that?

So basically, I really want sheep and I know I probably shouldn’t get them yet because none of the situations presented themselves that worked right. I feel like I should either give up altogether until much later or DO this. I’ve got a dog that can and I hate that she’s not.

So back a year ago, at Kathy’s recommendation, when I thought I was getting sheep, I wrote to Stephanie to see if she had any, which she didn’t. Kathy had told me it was a good idea to rent Stephanie’s sheep, but if you’ve been following my blog, you’ll know that when I’ve gone to other places, it hasn’t gone well and I’m stressing on hurting their livestock. Plus, in the middle of this back and forth with Stephanie, she didn’t reply to an email and my stupid ego kicked in.

Not in the way you think, I bet. I’m super insecure when I really want something and don’t have something equally exciting to offer someone. In this case, I really wanted access to sheep and Stephanie had them, and if she thought I was a joker, she didn’t need to take my money. Instead of having confidence that I wasn’t a joker and she didn’t think so, I just assumed that was the case and dropped that option altogether. I knew a lot of people went to Stephanie, and liked her, but I’m THAT insecure.

I talked to Pat Lambeth about local options and she told me she talked to Stephanie and that I should try her again. And I don’t remember why I didn’t. Maybe work. Maybe I was just shy, I dunno.

But yesterday I decided that I wasn’t a loser and I should trust Pat that she likely didn’t think so and I contacted her again. Her not knowing me from Adam was like, “Where are you. I don’t let dogs harass my sheep.” And me being me . . . I’m like, “Well, she’s a border collie person and I’ve been warned I handle a bit harshly for some. WHAT IF SHE THINKS MY DOGS HARRASS HER SHEEP?!” I mean, by very nature, putting beginner dogs on sheep is kind of harassing them. There’s a spectrum. So I sent her a link to this blog with the last time I’d worked Rips at Trish’s, but not before she came back and invited me to her house today.

I didn’t need to send the video, but it turns out Trish works at Stephanie’s, too. That’s a good thing in my book.

Anyway, so I show up with my big bean pole with a bottle on the end (thanks Donna for that) and my new W Lazy J stock stick and tell her I’m nervous because I don’t want Rippa to chomp her sheep and I want to be sure she’s comfortable with everything.

I decide we should start in the round pen since it’s been over a year since she’s been on sheep and I am sure we have some foundation to put back in after the cows (she wasn’t taking “out” much).  I go in there with my long stick and tell Stephanie that I have to do this “z” obedience call off thing to warm Rippa up to taking commands and being easy and as she’s watching it, she’s like, “You should get her off that soon. Also, she’s going to be fine. You can send her.”

And I am like, “No she isn’t.”

So we go back and forth in our little exercise where I lay her down and then walk off like I’m doing a slingshot send but am just calling her to me and slowly approaching the sheep going back and forth to keep her focused on me and not the sheep.

And then I send her, and it goes well, but she goes at it a little hard. I’m out there with my 8 foot pole pointing at her shoulder and waiting out her excitement where I can give her the sheep as she runs hard around them. Eventually she does and balances them up but comes in hard as I point the stick at her.

Stephanie says put the stick down, but I don’t know what she means so we stop the action and she gets the stock stick out and shows me how you can use it to put some pressure on the dog with body language and sweeping it at them, but that I really need to take the pressure off Rippa with the stick – it’s what’s keeping her keyed up.

She says it’s like horses, too. A little pressure, but ease off as fast as you can and trust your dog. I’ve heard the “trust Rippa” with Kathy before, but this time I kind of  “got it.” Maybe because of my recent experience with the cattle where I could see really clearly that Rippa got grippy and got kicked when I had pressure on her.  I also see it with Fury – how she works nice off me but when she comes into contact with me on the other side of the sheep, she keys up. It’s me. My pressure is too much. My anger and my position and my not trusting the dogs and myself to handle right.

So I start up again with the short stick and when she doesn’t give, I run into her like Kathy has me do to push her out. Stephanie stops me again. “No. That’s what’s making her get upset. Pressure OFF. If she bites the sheep, it has a lot of wool, it will be fine. Pressure OFF.”

She bit the sheep. It did,  indeed, have a lot of wool. She had me lay Rippa down and calm down. We tried it again, but I felt lost so she came out to handle but Rippa started shutting down because someone else was telling her what to do. I really appreciated that instead of thinking Rippa was stubborn, she could see that she was just feeling too much pressure. “It’s okay,” Stephanie said, “She’ll desensitize if I work with her more over time.” But since she wouldn’t work and Stephanie couldn’t show me, I  told her this was a lot of information and I was having to learn too much quickly, so could I go back to the big stick for a little comfort while I tried what she was saying. Yes.

So now that I had the big stick and experience with how to handle it, I tried the pressure off thing. I sent Rippa without the “z” because she was being easy, and she got around nicely and balanced up. When she got tight, instead of going into her with the stick, I eased off and focused on me walking back and letting her bring them and Rippa calmed down.

As I write this, I think about how Kathy handles and while it felt like all new information, that’s what she wanted me to do, too . . . but I just didn’t get all the pieces until now.

When we had her fetching and balancing, I figured that was a good place to quit and we took a break, with Stephanie working her dogs and showing me how she starts a drive (quite different, but we’ll get to that in a different session).

Next session, I started out with the big stick, but sent her on a flank command with no “z” and just trusted her not to eat them, and she didn’t. Whenever she sped up, I thought about where I was and got out of the flight zone and she’d clam down. I even got her to lie down with the sheep balanced on me and start up walking from there as I backed up (which used to be too much pressure for her to handle without biting).  Since it all went so well and so easily, I switched back to the short stock stick and handled the way I was now beginning to understand. We did circles and such around the round pen, had her stand balanced up, had her walk up from there on them, worked on flank commands and “there.”

The biggest take home for me today was this:
Your dog is intense for two reasons: because it is intense (maybe not used to the stock or working, a new location, being young, or because it just is) and because you are intense. If it’s because the dog is intense, then absolutely I would think that following with the stick until the dog calms down and gives, and pushing out with the stick and being heavy handed can work. But, at that point you need to learn when YOU are being intense. What are YOU doing that’s causing the dog to get nervous. Whatever that is, do the opposite and relax if a dog makes a mistake. When you stop being intense, so will the dog after it gets over the causes of its internal intensity. 

I think I get this so much that I really want to try Fury with Stephanie and see what I can get out of her. At 10.5, Fury has not slowed down at all, and she has all that training on her that if I can fix MY intensity with her and handle better, I wonder if she can’t get some solid training in as well. (I could be pie in the sky on that one – but that’s how much I feel I “get” this now.)

Anyway, as I made turns with Rippa in the round pen, I felt like no time had gone by at all, or, more accurately, like time had gone by and someone else had been working with her in the meantime. Maybe it’s that she had time to mature. Maybe it was the cows. Maybe it’s me putting things together, but I feel like I had a major break through with handling and a couple more lessons (in the arena this time), and  I should be ready to start a drive, she was so nice.

Stephanie remarked as I was finishing up some fetching in the round pen that she was a nice dog and I was going to get a lot out of her. It shouldn’t matter what other people think, but I’m glad to hear it from her: here I was afraid of Stephanie and that she wouldn’t like my pushy, bity Aussie because of stuff I put in my own head.

Part of that is something else entirely. You hear BC people talk about pushy Aussies that can’t do a thing or you hear about BC people who say this. You hear Aussie people tell you that a BC trainer can’t do anything for Aussie people. And sometimes these things are true. But they weren’t true this time in the least. Stephanie impressed me with her understanding of dog behavior and her insights. I liked something she said about the difference with Aussies and BCs. BCs you don’t have to teach to get out or get an outrun with. With Aussies, you do, and she calls it mechanics (which is funny because Kathy doesn’t like “Mechanical training” either, but what she does to start a dog with the stick and pushing the dog out is what Stephanie calls mechanics). She said, “With Aussies, when you start them, you absolutely have to apply mechanics to them to get that behavior solid, but as soon as you do, you can stop and train naturally again.” (Naturally meaning let the dog learn to rate and move its stock on its own). In context, she’s not wrong. I just never thought of the stick and push method as mechanics, but that’s exactly how I perceive how Kathy starts dogs – show them what you want, and when they get it, it’s time for miles added just fetching and letting the dog learn how to do it without your commanding all the time.

I feel like I’ve got a new dog friend, and I’m finally going to go somewhere with this after so much time off – she’ll let me rent sheep outside of lessons so I can go up there a couple times a week and just get some mileage and then go back to have someone else’s eyes on me and fix what bad habits I pick up or continue. And it’s not going to cost me $800 a month.

Moreover, I’m really appreciating this going to other places now. Getting a solid foundation on dog behavior, stock behavior, and the principles of training a working dog from Kathy as a consistent mentor was so valuable, but what’s making it the most valuable is hearing other people say what she did and it clicking more because I’m out of my element and it sounds all new from someone else. I feel like I’m about to grow as a handler and trainer, and that when I feel like I am not getting something, it’ll be time to attend a clinic or go somewhere new, at least for a bit.

I guess I feel a little more grown up. That I can do this after all. I know Kathy said I was ready, but I didn’t feel ready. Now I do.  I hope this feeling continues.

W Lazy J Camp: Stuff I Thought About

Being in a totally different environment really made things I “knew” stand out to me while at cattle camp. Things I probably haven’t written about before because I took them for granted.

These are little notes I made to myself about my works and observations throughout camp:

• Keep your mouth to a minimum. When I (and many other people) get nervous, I tend to run my mouth a lot. I kept it shut when I was giving the cattle space, but once it was clear they were heavy and I wasn’t just letting Rippa try stuff out, I think I kept my mouth running way too much. (Also, I’m loud, so other people commented on it.)
• It seems like if you don’t have a dog with experience to introduce your pup with for help, it’s nice to start the cattle in smaller areas and work them off the fence as Betty had me do – just teaching them to stay back and get between the cattle and the fence to fetch. She starts them in small pens because most dogs lack confidence in a big arena.
• If a dog goes crazy wahoo, it’s okay to put a line on them and correct them physically until they calm down and stay back. No line training at Kathy’s (except to catch them if they don’t recall) but I saw it used quite effectively here. It’s key that you use the line to show them where you want them, that you read the cattle so you can keep your restrained dog safe, and that you praise the dog when its in the right spot so it learns from that and not just the line restraint.
• When starting cattle, the first goal is confidence, then you can work drive and/or fetch, THEN you can work on finite training.
• Rippa starts really hard so I have to remember to do our z-recalls at least at first to calm her down.
• She also wants to quit when she gets mad, so doing outruns perks her up.
• Dogs without any exposure to a ranch can take longer to turn on because the stimuli are just so strong.
• For dogs showing stress behaviors (like checking out, eating grass or poop), make it fun. Don’t push and don’t let anybody’s frustration grow to a point that the dog feels all wrong. If they check out, DO NO punish them by dragging them or yelling to them. Get them, make it a party, and have the dog do something so she can be good.
• Bring the many to the one. A lot of handlers didn’t seem to know about this particular rule, but it made my life a lot easier than trying to catch one freaked out cow.

W Lazy J Cattle Camp: Lectures by Betty Williams

One night I’m out, walking the dogs and taking photos of the sunset, when all the cattle pop out of a hole in the fence, and, one by one, with real purpose, saunter over to the alfalfa field. I would have stopped them, but they moved like they had pressure on them so I wasn’t sure if it was okay or not until it was over. It made a neat shot, though. Everybody had to deal with that problem that night and the next day, but . . . it got handled.

So some highlights from Betty’s talks at camp (I don’t do stenography, so this is paraphrased, I apologize if I get anything wrong):

Day 1:

• Smart dogs don’t go to cattle and act like an alligator – it will take them a while to figure stuff out. Be patient: don’t give up on them. A lot of people want to see alligator to start. Some of the best dogs, including Spur, took some time.
• Dogs are wearing because they’re trying to catch the cattle’s eye out of her blind spots. They can see really far behind them, but the dog is in her blindspot if she stays up straight on the drive. The wear is a good thing. Trainers will teach a walk up for trialing, but it doesn’t work in real life work
• If cattle are worried about a dog, they’ll turn to look for it.
• They have really bad depth perception -
• Fast and tight heading is scary for cows because they can’t see what’s coming up and feel it’s a threat
• Cattle putting their head down isn’t necessarily a challenge – they’re trying to see what’s in front of them, not initially fight
• This is why shadows really freak cows out – they can’t see what they are and it looks like a cliff.
• The stock stick is there to protect the handler. Use it like that.
• Heeling
• The cow the dog is heeling isn’t necessarily the one that kicks a dog – it’s the neighboring cow seeing the heel and kicking at the dog
• Dogs generally start heeling high and then drop lower (and how, Rippa tried a stomach shot first time out, but after a smack, she didn’t do it again)
• Smart dogs heel rear cows and don’t heel just to heel (but this comes with experience)
• When you start pups, you do it on 5-10 head of cattle and increase size of the herd as soon as possible.
• 35 is great for some dogs
• Less cattle is less threatening to pups who aren’t used to cattle, but the dogs work better on big herds
• Dog and handling break your cattle way prior to starting your pups – use chutes, too
• Send dogs softly so you don’t scare the cattle.
• At trials, think about whether your stock is heavy or light. If you’re first up, look at how they’re handling back in the pens for a clue.
• Cattle are handled by steering the head and point of shoulder. (You’ve seen me write about this in the past so no elaboration here)

Lecture 2:

• Separation from the handler in every day life is a good thing – dogs get really dependent on their owners for security and it shows in stock work. If they’re babied a lot, they won’t have confidence without you.

Lecture 3: 

• If you’re having a hard time out there, think back to your foundation. Something isn’t solid so take it back to the round pen and make it solid.
• The Round Pen is where we start
• You stay for a short period, or not, until your dog can square up, get back, dog rates the sheep – start with the bamboo pole but end with the ability to handle with just your fingers.
• Then, start in the round pen and move to an intermediate space (for me, I call it the duck pen because that’s what it was at Kathy’s)
• Work on side commands (only when easy working), steady, square shoulders (the dog turns back squarely, as we’ve talked about in other blog entries), out
• Look for the side the dog favors and work the other one a lot
• Once you’re out of the round pen, start and end with a fetch every time. It’s easy to get a drive and work on that all the time, but you’ll lose the fetch if you only work on driving.
• When you’re teaching square shoulders, the dog should give more than 90 degrees to you so that when you can’t enforce it and the dog cheats, it’s cheating at 90 degrees
• Teaching the drive
• For the drive, do an off-set balance exercise with 10-15 sheep.
• Basically, you get the dog on the outside, you in the center,  with the sheep on the other side of you. You’ll want to keep them pretty much in the same place and send the dog around. Betty moves with the dog as this happens, though when I did it with Kathy, and have explained it before here, we stayed put.  The dog should then be told “there” for it to turn in and face the sheep, but Betty says between dog and sheep.
• You should be able to do this 360 degrees around the sheep and your dog should stay out enough to not affect the sheep bunched in the middle of the imaginary circle you and the dog are walking around and stopping randomly.
• This is the time to teach short flanks by saying “way” and “by” softly. (As opposed to AWAY and GO BY – which should help tell the dog to get way out).
• When the dog is able to get all the way around, you can stop ding the arc exercise.
• This should be done for 5 minutes max at a time as it fries dogs’ brains
• When you’re done, have the dog fetch, then put everybody up.
• Next step in the drive:
• Now the dog should go into a fetch with the owner stopping them and telling her “there” – “walk up” – “good there.” The dog should be able to handle this for a tiny amount of time before it feels like its losing the head. Don’t expect more than 6-10 feet of driving for a while.
• Call the dog back after the short drive and then set up an outrun, fetch, and you can set it up again.
• After being patient and not asking for too much in a session, after 2-3 day a dog should be able to drive about half an arena if all the foundation is laid..
• If training isn’t working, stop and think. Go back to basics or find another way to try things.
• Different lines learn differently. Not every approach will work with every line – try different things.
• Dogs are task oriented – give them good jobs that put all this schooling in context (ie chutes, penning, loading trailers, etc)
• Starting a puppy:
• 4 months do a little with the rake – just play with it off stock to teach them to respect it
• 6 months – do some slightly more seious lessons on sheep – should be short, maybe 15 min max. Make it fun.
• BE CAREFUL OF FEAR PERIODS, which can occur:
• 8 weeks
• 4 months
• 8 months
• 12-15 months
• 18 months
• Know thyself: do you get pushy? If so, wait until the pup is emotionally mature enough to handle it.
• Make sure they go to trials before their first exhibition – so they’re used to how that all works and feels.
• You can train flank commands with toys on the end of sticks.

W Lazy J Cattle Camp

So, clearly the “get your own land” thing hasn’t worked out, though I’m still working on it. In the mean time, back in January I decided to give the famous Betty Williams’ clinics a go since I was saving so much money in not having any lessons. My huz was in full support and we decided to make it an adventurous road trip all over the Western US.

I wanted to go for a few reasons:

I’d heard a lot of good about Betty and her dogs and it seemed like a good way to find out about both, because despite my inactivity, my interest in learning is nowhere near dead.

I wanted to meet and see different people and dogs than I have met in the past – travelling is a sure way to get out of the usual.

Two years ago, Rippa was nice, but she just wasn’t powerful enough on Kathy’s cattle for me to feel good about having achieved my goal in creating good cattle dogs with her litter and I wanted to see what she did now that she’d grown into herself (I could have done this in California, but it provided the reason to do it in the first place).

I’ve been wondering if I really know how to start a dog on cattle, and learning from a different person would augment what I already knew. Now that Kathy’s retired, I’m more on my own and if this is a long term thing, I’ll need to work a little more on my own because I’m not the sort that enjoys devoting her life to traveling to stockdog clinics.

I’d say on all fronts this was a massive success. Huz and I packed up the F250 and headed North (then East), climbing and mountain biking along the way, until we landed at the W Lazy J ranch.

The clinic started out pretty much just like I was used to at Kathy’s, with much the same format: a lecture in the morning, then a run order that had the dogs go through twice and the day was over. Everybody ate dinner and lunch (and even breakfast) together.

I’ll talk about Betty’s methods as she taught them in a post following this one, including notes on her lectures, but I thought you’d appreciate more of an overview of how things went and what I learned.

Initial Impressions

Betty’s cattle were very different from Kathy’s lesson cattle. Maybe it was because they had been used to trial and do clinics on, but they were a lot heavier and more mellow about everything. Betty had to encourage me to get right up in there a number of times because I had been taught to be hyper aware of the cow’s flight zones and danger to myself and my dog.

She started most of the dogs in a smaller pen, about equivalent to Kathy’s “duck” pen with five cattle. Rippa went right to the cattle and enjoyed driving them around, but when she went to head, she wanted to keep doing it. Betty was trying to get me to hold Rippa back after she turned the heads in a drive and this was SO foreign to me that it took a while to figure out what Betty wanted of me. Eventually I got it:

This is a photo of me so close on the cows that I am running up to Rippa to push her back while trying to get out of the way of the cows at the same time. Toward the end, I was so good with the cows not being light that Betty had to tell me to watch getting kicked. I definitely got Rippa kicked in the beginning with all that pressure we were both putting on the cows, but after a while I figured out what Betty wanted and I don’t think the final two days we had any kicked dog action.

In other news, Rippa got the crap kicked out of her while I figured out this “turn the dog back and hold her there” thing. She generally went back to work, but thought a lot more about it and wasn’t quite as resilient as some dogs, but Rippa is a thinking dog and I was the one getting her kicked every time and she didn’t seem to hold that against me.

Another totally foreign concept was having the dog go between the cattle and the fence. I took this photo just for this blog:

This is Stef and Lena pulling the cattle off the fence. The handler grabs the dog by the collar to put pressure inside the fence and uses herself, the dog, and the stock stick to get them off, and then sends the dog through to the heads to get them off. This is not something I’d ever seen employed at Kathy’s and man, I failed miserably at it. The first time, I made such a big hole, it was definitely me pulling the cattle off so the second time, after watching other people do it, I didn’t make a big hole and still sent Rippa through. I should known better. Rippa got kicked because she felt too much pressure on the fence and bit a cow without anywhere for her or the cow to go. I didn’t make that mistake again, but I felt bad.

It really was a pretty effective method of getting the dog to take them off the fence. By the end, most of the hot-to-work dogs were figuring out how to peel them off themselves a bit (if not all the way) on their own without the collar handling, and it’s good to have that in your belt if you don’t have another way to do it (a second dog, or a person or something).

Betty mixed up this driving/fence work with fetching at what seemed at random or at the handler’s behest. I took her lead as I figured she was the one that was best equipped to tell me what to do with my dog. In the end, I think it was a little problematic to switch back and forth for Rippa. She would act very stubborn when you would work on one thing, go do something else, then go back to the new thing. She would really avoid doing what I asked (like get back with the rake or stick as a blocker), but having worked with her for a while now, I really think it’s more how she learns – Rippa gets resistant and cranky when you ask for too much and she doesn’t understand it. Once she does, she’s on it. I didn’t feel like Rippa got a good idea about driving OR fetching, because she was spending too much time trying to figure out what she was supposed to do and getting cranky about us pushing on her and changing the rules a lot. Maybe I’m being kennel blind and she’s just stubborn, but if I had a better idea of that and more of a relationship with Betty, I’d probably have advocated we just stick to one thing (fence work OR fetching) during the clinic so Rippa’d feel confident on it.

Rips had the same trouble she did two years ago on cattle during the fetch work – but I think for a different reason. Two years ago, Rippa didn’t really want to go to head, which was now no longer a problem:

Now she just had a hard time working away from me – so when she got on the other side of the cattle, and couldn’t get my help, she didn’t keep going to head and let them drift. Betty got out her Spur and had him work with her to give her the confidence she needed to get around and watch the heads and fetch them up.

This worked really well, but again, I was really worried about Rippa messing Spur up or running cattle over him. Kathy had always been careful about this when putting a green dog with her lessons assistant dog and usually had you shut up so you didn’t distract the dogs. These lessons, I definitely was not shutting up with all the “get back” and flank commands I was giving Rips to get her to fetch to head. Betty assured me Spur could handle it so eventually, I did to stop stressing, and sure enough, the cattle never ran him over. Again, I also think they are quite used to him, and us, and we’re as light and dangerous as Kathy’s cattle could be. 

Eventually, Rippa was fetching well on her own (and even pulled them off the fence into a fetch when they got there), but would lose it periodically because of that working away from me thing. When I asked Betty, she said she was guessing that since Rippa hadn’t been working in a long time, she just needed help working on fetching in general, much less on cattle. “You think they forget it?” “They can.” I guess I took the foundation for granted that Rips would pick it back up, but it does make sense that she needed some hand holding.

Conclusions

Overall, it was a good experience. Betty didn’t say a lot during lessons, which made me rely a lot more on my own knowledge – which at first was disconcerting since I was used to a constant flow of advice from Kathy. Once I stopped expecting Betty to tell me what I’d done wrong or right, I started feeling my own abilities to make those decisions (like in reference to the kicks I was causing) and I came away from it feeling like I could start a dog on cattle, light or heavy, based on my experience and that ten years of lessons on and off were not a huge waste on me. That was the goal.

I also am pretty happy with Rippa. She showed really good stockmanship, had enough power and presence to get the job done (and knowing her, if she really had figured it out, that power would ramp up a lot more), she responded pretty well to me except during those “stubborn” episodes, and I really liked what I saw. I have every confidence that she will be a nice cattle dog and is still a candidate for breeding since I want a good cattle dog line.

Betty’s was a really good place to start a dog on cattle, though I did feel like some people really didn’t respect that the cows would be different elsewhere and might have come away with an inflated sense of confidence of what their dogs could do on cattle in a trial. By the end I was quite sure I could get through a started course with Rippa and qualify (Betty had us do panels for the last lesson, I’m sure she’s used to people liking that experience) – but I’m not sure we could on the trial cattle I’ve been on in the past.

I also met some very different dogs than ones I’ve met previously, got some ideas about Aussies I hadn’t, met some lovely people, and got the snarly photo of Rippa I really wanted:

I also got a kick out of Rippa and Fury being correctly identified by one clinic attender as being Slash V based. She said they had that very clear Slash V look, even though Terry’s dogs are looking different these days. I got my type set, so success on that breeding goal as well. This photo below makes me think of Slash V’s landing page photo .  . . this is pre-stalk for Rippa, but yeah, I see similarities.

vs

Photos courtesy Stef Player and Yishai Horowitz

Self Teaching and Back to Basics

No news on the stockdog front, really, but my roommate moved out and the backyard is a lot more clear to use as actual training stuff. I tried making an actual pen, but the chickens were surprised to run into the expen barrier I set up and flew up instead of moving off it. Oh well, just got to teach them it’s there. Definitely learning a lot of stock management with just the chickens.

So I let Fury out while I was putting laundry out to dry just to mess with the chickens and decided to let Rippa do it.

The game is just letting her move them around the yard and me saying “yes” when she balances herself and “no” when she gets too excited. It was pretty fun.

I know I did this kind of stuff with sheep when I was taking lessons but it feels different when it’s your dog and your stock and no one is going to get hurt, even when a certain dog tackles a chicken who then goes into submission, because I know that causes certain dog to back off.

Rips got them stuck up on that table, though – and for some reason it never occurred to her to jump up on the table to get them off. Oh well.

Penning Hens

Not a joke. We’ve moved on from fetching and putting them into their coop. I was thinking they’d pretty much eaten all the grass in my backyard, might as well let them work on the front, so lately I’ve been bringing them out to graze it.

Well, obviously, I was going to need to contain them if I didn’t want to shepherd all day, and I had all these ex-pens lying around . . .

And finally, after a few days of this, the chickens got with the program and went pretty easily down the “chute” that is my sideyard out to the grass. They didn’t make a run for places they could get lost (under the porch, in the ficus, etc), and I find that when one does escape, they usually come on back when they see me. Chickens, believe you me, are definitely herd animals. They want to stick together and they want to stay near home. That makes the next logical step . . .

Using the dogs to drive them down the chute (side yard), into the open area and into the center pen.

Holy cow, this is fun. I started with Fury because she’s a lot more gentle on them than Rippa is – like ducks, they tend to give up and submit, and Fury is more likely to just sit on top of the chicken and lick it than munch it.

Well, despite not using her on stock since well before Rippa was born (so maybe four years), all the chicken practice in the back yard made her mind pretty well and before I knew it, we were slam-dunking the center pen, even with trucks and bikes and all kinds of obstacles.

Checking for a command . . .

They overshot the entrance and went the wrong way, so I sent her on a way to . . .

And then asked her to turn back (she gave me SUCH a nice shoulder), and came “go by” and tight enough to smush them in but not overrun them . . .

Balanced up right here . . .

Okay, Kristin, you can close the gate!

Rippa is allowed to put them away because that doesn’t involve quite as finite details (I don’t really think she knows her flaking commands, for example) since all I need her to do is fetch them back to the side yard out of the pen and they go right in.

The dogs are happy, and so am I . . . while we wait for the right property and our own real stock to work and mow the lawn . . .

I can’t believe how much is coming together now that I own my own stock . . . learning to understand just what the stock need to be thinking like for success . . . when to introduce dogs . . . how much pressure everyone can take.

And for the most part, I scream in panic a lot less. It also amuses my neighbors as all get-out.

I’m getting pretty good at this . . . maybe we can trial on ducks in the future . . . but what happens if Fury decides to lay down on one and lick its cloaca?