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.