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.
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