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.