When it’s time to let the dog just do the work . . .

So the last two sessions (if you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m working twice a week at Stephanie’s) have gotten better and better. So much so that this session, I thought, “Well, I should get off the big stick crutch and use the little stick.”

But this is a bad idea. We get so ahead of ourselves we forget how much foundation we need to lay to change so many things. Rippa is just now starting to figure out how to work in a larger space without the fence for help – why would I add something else to that mix if she hasn’t got it dialed? And so, no, I stayed with my 8 foot stick.

But I have to say, this work today was pretty flawless in terms of my setting expectations.

We are now just sorting the sheep ourselves. Stephanie generally lets the sheep out and then sorts out the sheep she wants into a smaller squeeze chute off the arena, but I’ve been taught how to sort with just a gate so all I need to do is ask Rippa to walk up to the sheep, and she’ll easily go around the barn obstacle and bring them to me and the gate. They didn’t really want to do that today (instead wanting to circle), so it took a few goes, but once Rippa got what I wanted, she positioned herself in a balanced spot so that the sheep would stop in front of the gate.

It takes some work to pull the adult lesson sheep out of the lambs, but she would inch forward without my asking as I needed it and we got a good batch of four sheep today.

As soon as we got them out, they headed to the middle of the arena, so while I closed the gate, I let Rippa get them without giving her a command. She starts out slow to see if I want it to happen and if I say nothing, she starts heading toward them.

It’s not a beautiful outrun where she stays way outside their flight zone and then dips in at the top – it’s a pretty rough gather in that she just kind of tips in and banks them toward me, but she does it, and then when they come up to me at the gate, she stops herself. I’m good with that. That’s healthy, happy, functional work and we can work on the fancy later – the foundation for what’s expected (calm control of the livestock) is laid and she’s half-way out of the arena getting them so hey, I’m happy.

The sheep are nearly always spooked, but I have figured out that if I show them how Rippa controls them (unlike the eye-dog BCs she’s used to who work them very differently) by doing silent half-moons on the fence while Rippa balances up and reads her sheep, we can start going.

And so we did. We headed out all the way to the end of the arena and back – not straight, mind you, lots of zigging, but we did it.

At this point, I think I need to focus on handling my end of the sheep because they are light enough to just blow past me if I don’t sometimes block them and let Rippa figure out where she needs to be to stop running like crazy as she wears them back and forth  - she’s getting wider and wider and will go “out” if I remind her, but I don’t really want to have to keep “out”ing her, so I’m trying to keep it to a minimum – right now my goal is less command oriented and more just letting Rippa use her instinct and knowledge to work the sheep.

I have to say – it’s fun to watch. Now that she’s learned not to go flat on the top but that with sheep like this, you win by getting further out, it’s cool to watch her do it. She gets a massive workout because the sheep don’t easily settle  and she can’t just fall in behind them – she’s got to move to each side to check on the sheep and she’s got to poke them back in (but then they over correct and it’s back to the other side), but it looks good from where I sit.

Last lesson, we did some center pen work (FABULOUS) but I made the mistake of opening the gate to send her in and the whether with horns fully rammed her. Rippa didn’t blink – she just went back to work – not even made at the ram, but definitely watching him.

This work there was a ewe that kept breaking off (I mentioned this ewe in earlier lessons a couple months ago) and Rippa did a great job of not letting her get too far. She tends to drop the singleton if they get out too much and go, naturally, to the bigger group and bring them to her – I can hear Kathy yelling, “Bring the many to the one!” I’m impressed the dog is doing it. I’m not sure I want her to do that in trialing scenarios, but it shows me her stock sense and I’ll let her  have it.

And then, since she’d been working so hard, we got back to the gate, she balanced up, I opened the gate, and we put them away.

It was pretty great. Not all days will be that great, but it’s tangible progress and feels great after a few weeks ago when I was nervous that the arena was too big and the sheep too light.

The plan now is to keep putting miles on until Rippa manages them herself, then go to the short stick, and then we’ll start working on some issues (the less than beautiful outrun, she goes a little flat on the top instead of staying out) and refining our commands.

One step back, two steps forward

So, I last left you feeling a bit “iffy” about moving into the arena and how the sheep were really bouncing all over.

I post this blog to my Facebook page and basically, I came to the conclusion that I probably knew what I was doing and wasn’t going to break my dog, so the last two days of lessons this week, I just relied on that. Realizing that we looked great in a pen, we absolutely had to slide backward with a huge new environment to work with. Rippa has to learn how to work the sheep with a whole new set of terms: bigger space, more insecure sheep, more insecure handler. Gotta realize that and know that things will go okay, just like they did in the round pen.

This morning, Stephanie was away and didn’t set sheep out so I had to sort my own. She’s only got about four adult sheep we can work right now because the rest are pregnant. There’s lambs, but working lambs is cruel for a dog as green as Rippa.

This is the first time I’ve tried sorting with Rippa with full intention to do it because I knew it was okay, and I have to say . . . I’m super impressed. Rippa is definitely proving herself as a viable stockdog partner now that I’m not stressing. She went into the holding pen with all the sheep in it very cautiously and worked with me not being able to see her (there’s a little shed for them that she has to go around) and while I stood at the gate, she brought them to me and laid down.

I can’t give her flank commands in this situation yet, but if I went to replace her, she did it happily.

And so I sorted out six sheep (some lambs) thinking maybe if I had more, it would be better. Then, knowing I can’t set up a nice outrun, I just started with half-moons on the fence until Rippa balanced herself, but I kept finding the lambs on the outside getting the brunt of her pressure and didn’t like it, so I used her to help put them back. Very successful work.

And then we took a walk. I have to use the big stick to point out what I don’t want her to do right now, but it’s not a battle. It’s just there as a visual cue to stay out or go a different way.

We can’t walk straight anywhere right now because she’s coming in too close to them and making them kind of zig zag along, but I think the more she does this and when I mark the good, straight bits, the mileage will work out.

This whole method worked great and the sheep stayed under her control the whole time. I have noticed she’s kind of flat on the top of the arc (what’s creating the zig zag) so I used her flanks to make her circle and watch where she jogged in, using the big stick to push her out and it worked well.

Now that I’m using the big stick again after the little one, I totally see how I crutched on it before, and I’m trying really hard to only use it as a tool and not a necessity. I think we’ll need it for when we start out to remind Rippa to keep out and easy, but next work I’ll drop it in favor of the little stick because she’s definitely taking my “outs’ and “nos.”

I’m really excited that we’ve got it going on now. I don’t feel good about her outruns and flanks, but my thought is work a little on those but let her learn to manage her sheep without me and that will come.

And then I went to visit with my friend on her big ranch and took the dogs hunting for squirrels in the hills. Good day.

Transitioning from Round Pen to Arena

So, this week we went back into the arena to work on our foundation, but it wasn’t as seamless as I had hoped.

We were in the the round pen and we had good balance, good responsiveness to my needs, and her outruns were pretty good, and probably only getting better if I got out of that tight space.

I’m used to transitioning from the round pen to a smaller pen that Kathy called “the duck pen” for duck trialing – it was a good size to move into because you still had the control on everything and then the dog and sheep got some more space to work in, usually for the better. I found moving from there to the arena was pretty painless in terms of expectations – the dog could do good outruns to pick the sheep up and had a fetch, and now it was time to just work on finite training and drives.

So, jumping from the round pen where it was getting pretty boring from one perspective, I am now in the arena.

I went in on Wednesday, but Stephanie forgot/didn’t know I was coming (email lines crossed) and so there weren’t sheep set out for me. She trusts me not to mess stuff up, so I decided to sort my own lesson sheep out and give it a go if everything went fine.

Rippa did an amazing job in the pens holding her ground while I sorted. I am really used to Fury’s abundant energy and intensity, and Rippa is far more laid back than I give her credit for – it was really not a big deal for her to lay down and let me sort sheep, and this is something we’d never done before.

So the sheep are now in the arena, but they are BOUNCING ALL OVER THE PLACE and I can’t set up anything for Rippa. These are the same lesson sheep we used in the round pen, but now they have space to escape and my green dog doesn’t really know what to do with that. So, we walked around a bit, I downed her, tried to get them to settle, but even I was too much for them. After five minutes of realizing it was going to be “chase sheep around the arena,” I put them back. I figured not to mess with stuff, especially if Stephanie didn’t know I was there.

So, as soon as I got home, I let her know what I did, and as I expected, she was fine with it, so now we’ve got it going on that even if she’s not around, I can come out, which is super.

I came out today and rented sheep after she did a lesson for someone in the arena for an hour or so. I gave the sheep a big, big break, and then we went in.

Same thing. Sheep bouncing everywhere – they are lighter than I’d like for this. I had thought about the earlier fruitless work and knew that Rippa wasn’t going to seek and destroy, so I probably just needed to let everyone get the feel of things without expecting too much out of anyone.

Now, armed with the assurance that Rippa gets what I want, I aimed to get them on the fence and let Rippa do her thing until she figured out that she needed to take pressure off them. It wasn’t pretty, but after me sitting there and just marking good things with “yes” and bad things with “no” we had the sheep settled enough to fetch a bit and stop and they wouldn’t bail.

It basically feels like starting over again, but Rippa knows commands better. Toward the end of the lesson, I tried to kind of teach Rippa her distance outruns by obediencing them – I’d tell her “out” and if she gave the sheep shoulder and moved laterally, she got a “good” and tried adding “out – go by” and it worked pretty well, but eventually she’d had enough and we put them away.

I have to admit it’s frustrating that it didn’t go as cleanly as I’m used to it going from one pen size to another, but there’s not option for something intermediate. Rippa has to learn how to rate her sheep with no help from the fence pressure, and I think I probably just have to settle into things not looking as nice in the round pen until she does.

I also think it’s time to bring the big stick with a bottle back – in the arena, the extra space makes her turn on the pressure too much and I think she’s going to need help getting out to take it off. Me running at her with the sheep running in the opposite direction won’t help us out one bit.

So, we’ll see how that goes. I did a lot of searching the Internet for something about that transition, but it doesn’t appear to be “a thing,” so  . . . I guess I’ll do my best. Advice welcomed.

The Tipping Point (AKA we hit the balance point)

I had two sheep rentals last week but didn’t think writing EVERY SINGLE LESSON down was anything anyone (including me) wants to read, though I do want to chronicle exactly how much time it does take me to get a realistic idea of how long it takes.

One thing that’s hugely different in my ability to make big leaps and bounds in training is not being in a 20-minute lesson scenario. Granted, lessons were shorter with Kathy partly because Rippa was a baby dog and didn’t have much attention span. As time has gone on, she can handle working for much longer (I haven’t pushed to see where that line is), and our lessons range from 45 minutes to an hour – not me timing it, just me kind of getting a feel for how the sheep and the dog are doing (and me – I’ve called it much earlier on myself when I was stressed out and not getting what I wanted out of the lesson).

I’ve also calmed down a lot since I started going to Stephanie’s, and since I was working Rippa in general. Stephanie kept telling me I needed to let her make mistakes and after enough times where nothing horrible happened, I was able to do all my little mental games to calm myself down and now I think I’m pretty dang mellow when I work her. At least, you know, for me.

Anyhow, last week we went back to the round pen because I didn’t want to go into the arena and have to work on fundamentals while I worked on the different challenges of the bigger space. I want Rippa to be able to balance the sheep with me so that I can cruise around and not worry about losing sheep, and I want Rippa to have a decent gather and understand her flanks. We got both this week.

She still starts out pretty hot on the gathers, which to me just shows I don’t have enough mileage with us to trust her yet without more help. I’ll continue to toe the line between holding her “paw” and letting her figure it out, though, in the arena even, because I think she and I have a pretty good understanding about how this is supposed to go and what makes us both happy seems to have aligned.

I only had three sheep the last lesson and two lambs so they were a lot lighter and it took a good half hour of working to get everyone to settle out. I was a little disappointed because it didn’t look like I’d be able to progress much with these sheep (but that’s fine, Rippa gets to learn to work different types this way), but it ended up working fine.

And then it happened. For the first time in my stockdogging career, I got my dog to balance when fetching. Fury could do flanks really well and work away from me, but the key issue with us was that when she got in contact with me, or close to it, I taught her essentially to dive past them. We could never really take a walk with sheep or do much other than drive or distance fetch because of this, at least in the end.

I was wondering how/when that would ever happen, and so I was like, “I wonder if I can figure this out” – so, the same way that I am teaching the flanks (calling it out, signaling, and then making it happen), I started warning her I would stop with “stay” and body language that stopped the sheep as well as the dog, and slowly started playing with not saying “stay.”

And then it happened, I turned around, walked a bit, stopped, and the sheep stopped. Then I started, and the sheep started. Rinse, repeat. Rippa was in back there balancing the sheep to me.

So, at this point I was like, “I should film this to show the troops” so here’s a video of it. Of course, I had to laugh because after many takes, I realized that filming the dog through us all off and she wouldn’t do it if I tried to walk and hold the phone. So . . . in the clip, you’ll see me start it  and be able to stop the sheep, but when I show you Rippa, it falls a bit apart.

You can see I know I’m on camera because I ask Rippa to “go by, please.” Yeah – you can see that I am working on my lovingkindness taking over my stress, but that’s a little much. But hey, she did it, right?

On another note, I think this work has made Rippa defect from my husband’s dog to mine. She’s a lot more loyal and underfoot these days, to his chagrin. Both dogs now sleep on the bed sandwiching me so they can touch me with their backs and husband gets paws.

I will also note that dogs sleeping in bed was husband’s idea, so serves him right.

My Furry Little Friend

So, after a bit off, I was feeling nervous. Like, oh, man, I am never going to get this stockdog thing, I don’t know what I’m doing, etc, etc.

This morning I went out to Stephanie’s and went into the round pen with a couple rules for myself:

1. She is your friend, and you need to remember that sometimes she does bad things, but she generally is trying to do what you want her to do so give her time to do it.

2. Stick in opposite direction and reinforce it.

3. Let her learn by keeping your trap shut unless it’s instructive.

And it worked. By the end of the lesson, I had Rippa picking the sheep up nicely from both directions and calmly bringing them in to me. We’d been successfully pulling her off the top with her flank commands and some help with my stick. And we balanced up just with me stopping instead of walking backward and making space. I’d say that was a good showing and a leap ahead in training goals.

When she made mistakes (like sheep bowling) I assumed I hadn’t set her up right and taught her what I wanted, which also showed me that she thinks “Get Around” means go hard right at them (oops, early training issues), so I can only use “Get around” right now when we do pulling off the top to keep her going instead of trying to balance them to me. I am sure we’ll get it back to what it should be, but nice to know I should not use it when I send her on a fetch.

We took lots of walks with me signaling flanks and “there” to help her start understanding what they’re for (I haven’t been using them yet, trying to get the basics down), and she did a bang up job.

We did pulling off the top and circling the sheep and me – a little harder on the way-to side, but by the end,  both sides looked even and lovely, finishing with a “there” back at me.

And then I did some balance up work – I realize that I nag her with “out, out, out” while we’re just doing fetch work and she takes it, but it would be smarter to just show her what I want. So, I stood on the fence and waited out her attempts to work the sheep in front of me, pointing my stick at her non-aggressively and saying “yes” when she gave pressure to me, until, eventually, she just stood there. Rise, Repeat.

Then, I thought to myself, this is all going so well, but now she only balances to the fence and me . .. what about in the open? So, using the same technique of non aggressively flicking the stick at her with the sheep in front of me in the middle of the pen, Rippa gave and just stood there. We backed up, she followed. I stopped.

Now, previously, if I tried that, she’d be like “YOU JUST FED ME SHEEP! NUMMY!” But instead, when I stopped, she stopped.

So, yeah, I’d say that’s a pretty excellent work today.  I think the goal is to stay in the round pen and work on flank commands and that balance trick and when I feel confident that she’s mastered them both, we’ll head back into the arena.

Steph told me I really should enter the next trial with her, but I don’t think so, no yet – we’ll need some takepen work, and she still starts out that initial send pretty hard. Until we get that send mellow, I’m not going anywhere, and I’m in no hurry to, either.

Also, happy birthday Rippa-Beezle! 4 years old on Dec 26th. Her mom blew all her coat and is naked – and looks like a cartoon dog right now.

On that note, there’s a part of me that’s a little guilty that she’s not really been trialed or gotten a title at 4 years old . . . but you know, I had other stuff going on and she’s going to be super fun to trial when it’s time. Looking on trying to get a CD on her this year, and eventually go back to agility. (Which, btw, she can do in that crown.)

Back to Basics

Sometimes it takes me a while to process new information – I’d say this took me a couple months. As I was driving home tonight, thinking about how I was going to start lessons up again after a month hiatus, I was thinking about I would start Rippa out again.

We’ll be going back to the round pen to work on some basics and flanks and such, and as I said, I’ve had some difficulty getting her to start working nicely (enthusiasm can be such a killjoy on sheep). My method has long been that when you start, you point the stick at the dog and kind of block them from running in. Or that’s how I saw it.

And tonight, I realized when Stephanie pointed out that you’re supposed to point the stick in the opposite direction you want them to go, that me doing this push thing isn’t right and despite me knowing that particular gem, I wasn’t applying it. It’s why I always had trouble. And looking at old videos of Kathy handling, she’s not pushing the way I think I’m supposed to be doing.

It reminds me of when I was little and learning subtraction. Despite being pretty smart, the whole carrying numbers thing got me pretty good. For at least six months I thought you always carried a 9, no matter what number. And that’s what I did. My teacher didn’t catch it, but my mom did, and we spent a whole summer relearning math.

This is a classic corollary to stockdogging for me, and maybe life. I tend to overthink things to an absurdity and sometimes miss the forest for the trees. I was carrying a 9 because you just did – I didn’t fully understand what I was doing and it must not have been explained in a way I got it. And so it goes.

So, that completely explains why I broke Fury with the pushing too hard on her and why Rippa’s starts aren’t right. Even under Kathy’s tutelage, I don’t think I “got” it until tonight.

So: if the stick is supposed to point AWAY from where the dog is going, I shouldn’t be thinking about using it to “push,” but think about it in terms of “DEFINITELY NOT THAT WAY” and make it clear. If the dog is doing an outrun, the stick goes “DEFINITELY NOT THAT WAY” and I make my point instead of crutching on it to point and force the dog a stick length’s away (ideally more).

I think I started that line of thought when Kathy was helping me learn to walk straight backward (it helps for me to point where I want the dog to be and walk away from that). But that’s for me.

So I think I get it. Let’s see if it plays out tomorrow.