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.
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.
So glad you had this opportunity. You can learn so much in the pens. And, it's nice that you were able to maybe do a little subtle teaching in the process.
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