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.)
Nice. Looks like things are going pretty well now. So glad you've found a place where you can work your dog.
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