Dogs Gripping

I have it in my notes to write something up about dogs gripping (aka, biting) because the whole point of this blog is not just to talk about what I’m doing but help leave a trail of notes for someone trying to learn to work with their dog on livestock, too.

The PC term for “biting” in stockdog land is “gripping.” Ideally, the grip is measured depending on the stock and what it needs. The dog will use its bite to get the livestock’s respect. Ideal reasons for a bite are to get them moving (like biting a hock of a cow, or heel (hence it being called heeling)) or to make them stop fighting (like biting the poll, or forehead, of a cow).

Odds are, however, your dog is going to bite a lot more than that (or not at all), in different locations, and I wanted to address this.

There are some “nevers” that apply to trialing, but in real life, they don’t apply. A dog should “never” bite poultry in a trial, and very rarely should it bite a sheep (only if it’s fighting, and that’s really depending on your judge). But, at home, you can bet your sweet bippy that when Rippa got headbutted by a ram she was working I let her correct him for it.

But what’s appropriate correction? Let’s start with NOT MAULING. A strong, simple, non-vindictive correction that ends when the animal gets the message and goes back to calm movement.

Does that come naturally? Sure. But odds are, if you’ve got a dog with enough fight in her to go against a huge cow, she’s going to have to learn to control that fight with practice.

Let’s talk about your dog with no fight. Some dogs just don’t come with it – they will work as long as they’re not challenged and when challenged, it’s over. This seems to be a confidence thing that is partly inherently in the dog’s personality and can’t be fixed, and partly it’s just  lack of confidence from lack of experience. The latter you can work with. It’s key, however, not to force a dog into a grip situation when they are getting started, because it’s just as easy to shut them down with the pressure there.

Okay, so back to bites. A dog’s ideal target areas are the poll (spot where the horns are) on the head and the bottom of the hock (or heel). Some dogs will instinctually go for these spots right away. If so, hooray for you!

If not – your dog may never hit the ideal location – but most times they will learn through experience.

Most dogs grip for reason other than what the ideal is. It is almost always a function of confidence. If the dog feels like she has no other choice or option, out comes the bite. It may be because the dog is inexperienced and doesn’t know she has other options. It may be because she is inexperienced and it seems like the best option at the moment (not thinking of the consequences that a bite will have – such as losing or overly stressing the stock). A lot of times the bite comes out when the handler makes a mistake – feeds the dog the sheep, loses control the sheep herself or stresses the dog from yelling, fighting, etc.

I know these things because I did all these things. I know that things are bad when my dog starts biting sheep and it’s time to take it easy and reevaluate why.

1. My dog is just an alligator that wants to kill sheep

2. My handling is feeding my inexperienced dog sheep

3. My handling is frustrating my inexperienced dog and she feels like that’s all she can do

4. The sheep are not handling well and my inexperienced dog feels like that is all she can do.

5. The sheep are being bad and my dog needs to correct them.

6. The sheep aren’t moving and nothing but a bite will stop them.

7.  My dog just really likes gripping.

1 & 7 : nothing you can do here, that’s instinct, except maybe yell at them or let them get run over by cattle until they calm down. At which point, they might calm down because they are dead.

2-4: take a deep breath and get better at handling. If you can’t, it might be time to try heavier sheep, a more experienced dog, and definitely get a second set of eyes on your work

5-6: Do not correct your dog. This is okay. It’s easy to get upset when a dog grips at any point, but take a step back. Appreciate that your dog has enough power and judgment to make the call.

Now on to bite placement – as I said, not all dogs will start out with that ideal placement, and not all will end up with it. But . . . if you put your dog on cattle, they will eventually figure out that bites anywhere else are pretty dangerous. Newbie dogs tend to hang on to tails, bite higher up the thigh, bite the nose, and grab onto the sides of the livestock. Cattle will teach them quickly that this isn’t okay (but there is a risk of injury in letting this be the way they learn. If you’re just working sheep, experience can help there.

Anyway, just my observations at this point. Feedback welcome.

Take Pen Work and Relationship Building

Well, we took CA Sharp out to lessons with her dog today and I rented sheep. The drawback to me renting while she takes a lesson is that she gets the sheep I use in the arena and it’s lambs for me.

What happens with lambs? They are SO SCARED and they don’t like to stick together. Rippa has a lot of power behind her – and her instincts are to go in hard – she’s bred to work large herds of cattle. Lambs do not deal well.

They shot around the arena again like our “heavy” lesson sheep did when we first started, but I knew I just needed to let it go and she’d take care of it, even if it wasn’t pretty. And then I did it – I didn’t trust her. She would come in hot and I’d yell at her to lay down and then POW! Those sheep would be outta there and she’d have to get them again. I knew I was doing it, but my instincts are to make it look nice and I need to stop it. I took Rippa’s power away. Yes, she comes in hard, but she doesn’t go through them anymore. She’ll come up when they hit the fence, but I just can’t trust her.

And not trusting her is when I fall apart. She totally showed me why when we got the sheep back to the draw. I’ve said this before, I think, but she has an interesting arena setup – just past the draw where the sheep live, the pen jags in in an 8 x8 open area. The lambs would go hide in there and at first, Rippa would make an appearance and they would explode out of there.  After they settled, Rippa showed me she is trust worthy in a number of ways:

1. She eased up considerably when she saw them exposed and would get out of their flight zone without my prompting.

2. She walked up (straight up) easy on them to push them out, balancing a few feet out and waiting to see what they did.

3. She took her flanks and stayed tight against the fence.

This is a big deal because I haven’t had the opportunity to train 2 & 3 because of the conditions of Stephanie’s setup. This means that my method of just waiting for Rippa to learn how to handle the sheep is working – and that she’s got enough instinct and smarts for it to work.

SPARKLE!

Stephanie is bringing Jack Knox to the field on my birthday and I think I’m going to do it. I decided that since Kathy wasn’t around locally anymore that I would take opportunities to go to other clinicians just to see what they were about. It was a nice experience to do it with Betty, so might as well stay on my home turf and find out more about that. Stephanie says he should be very good for us because he’s good at relationship building, and that’s clearly what I need. I’m also prepared to have to fight for Rippa on this, though, because if anyone is a Border Collie trainer, it’s Jack.  I don’t know much about him, but I’ve heard that about him.

Tired Dogs . . . how’d they get that way?

Today I saw even more progress after a solid week off (Stephanie was busy and didn’t get back to me to schedule sheep rental) in terms of Rippa self-regulating herself. She’s getting better and better and sorting the sheep and more responsive to me – when the excitement wears off she gets more and more biddable, which is really exciting to watch.

But the sheep – my goodness! – they were feeling their wild oats today or just terrified of Rippa and were trying their hardest to get back to the gate draw and all the lambs. We had a really hard time stopping the action and holding them, even on the fence. They’d go one way and where they’d normally balance up, they’d push past and make a break for it.

Partly this is my fault – one time I wanted to try an out run with me between Rippa and the sheep since she is doing a really nice arc out around me but then getting tight when she picks the sheep up and was hoping I could push her out but instead she just dove straight at them and then moved out. Scary for a sheep!

But usually they would settle with some half moons and I wouldn’t get it this time. So . . . despite a couple pauses for them to calm down and catch their breath, we didn’t get a lot of useful mileage on them – though Rippa sure did.

She’s staying out wide now without as much reminding, but as I was saying, when normally they’d balance between me and the dog, they were aggressively pushing past me and Rippa would have to go around to me to balance them. As soon as she did, they’d hightail it the other direction and she’d have to go opposite me again at the top. Repeat, repeat, repeat.

Goodness, that little dog had to run a lot. She didn’t show much signs of being tired but I was pretty acutely aware that this was a pretty rigorous session for her physically and she was doing a beautiful job of handling it. One thing I know from my pursuits as an athlete is that if you get tired out, you stop paying attention and that’s when you get hurt and make mistakes and I didn’t want Rippa going there yet. It’s one thing to do chores for a whole day but baby dog is still learning to ease up and read her sheep and me.

So, we did the best we could to bring them back to the gate/draw under Rippa’s control and repen them (the repen looked awesome – full trial points for that if I do say so myself).

But it got me to thinking as she splished around in the stock trough for the dogs after (and she ALWAYS runs straight to the arena gate to get to water) . . . I am so grateful that I’m not just some hobby person whose main exercise for the dogs is sheep. She had plenty of go left after 40 minutes of what I described above (with breaks for everyone) and I am sure it’s because my husband and I put easily 50 trotting/running miles on her and her mother a week with runs and mountain biking.

I remember being at Betty Williams’ in Montana and she definitely lost some go-juice on the cattle there. Partly the weather (quite warm) and partly the brain fry in that case.  And I’m not sure I’ve talked about this in a blog post so thought I should.

A lot of times, people starting their dogs on livestock cannot understand why they fall apart quickly. The answer is – this is tiring!

1. It could very well be physical conditioning. I think the average dog gets way less exercise than I would think is healthy, and that’s simply because people don’t get that much exercise, either. Most dog people I know do very little in the way of fitness and figure some agility training or dog parking is enough. I like to think my dogs are incredibly healthy because they’re part of a family that wants at the least 30 minutes of real cardio a day. They get out EVERY DAY. And many days they get hours of real, solid cardio. If people are taking even ranch dogs just around with no real pressure on exercising them for hard tasks, they’ll tank out just like people. Dogs have better natural athleticism for this kind of thing than people, but they’ll collapse at some point.

2. Brain frying. I think most times a dog getting started gives up and looks tired, it’s less the exercise thing (because sessions are really short to begin with) and more the brain thing. Imagine being immersed in a situation that you find incredibly stimulating, but people (usually strangers) are poking at you with sticks and expecting something. You’re not totally free to explore that thing in a way that keeps you energized (for good reason, dogs running on pure stoke can get bad habits and hurt things, including themselves), so the stress of trying to learn in that environment just wipes them out.

If your dog is looking like she’s had enough, don’t push her beyond that. She’ll get hurt, you will get hurt, or your stock will get hurt. She either needs some leg up or she needs  some time to process. Both are okay.

Working in Public

Only one work day this week, but that’s okay – it rained and that makes me happy. So today we rolled out again to Creston, and just put the miles in. I don’t have too many expectations and don’t want to do too much “training” because I feel like Rippa needs to learn how to manage her sheep. An outrun here, a fetch there, a lot of walking. Some fence work. I pulled out a couple lambs with this group but they were just panicking too much so we put them back. Sorting is going really well – as is just sitting back and having her bring me sheep – she’s doing less sheep bowling and more “getting” out, which I kind of figured would happen if I helped her and also trusted her.

I’m really happy with Rippa as a stockdog, and I realize I’m just a hobby person but the end goal for me is to be an ambassador to the cattle community here and everything I’m seeing in Rippa is what I want to see – she’s got a better sense of group than her mother, but a bit more biddable (though again, that could be because I didn’t mishandle her for years). She’s willing to take it down a notch and takes commands pretty well – though I’m not expecting too much yet. Good team work, good instinct, I feel like I’m getting so much from her without having to show her too much. Good stuff.

Anyway, Stephanie was gone today so again I was on my own. I’m getting into a rhythm on the drive: look for the exit, through the trees with the deer, up the grade, there’s the lavender farm with the lavender trailer for selling it . . . long horns, vineyard with the old car parked on the ridge, and turn.

Stephanie lives on the top of some rolling hills so the arena I’m working in is in plain view of two of her neighbors – both of whom happen to always be home. The neighbor with dogs doesn’t pay me much mind, but the neighbor that loads the horse trailer every time I’m there (what are you doing? Every time?) watches us. I generally think I do a good job of keeping my voice down compared to how I handled in the past, but once in a while it gets “western” (a term I recently learned for . . .  less quiet control of stock, if you will) and I’ll start yelling to get some dog respect and I’m sure people in a mile radius can hear me.

It’s different – that. I’m used to working in a canyon with no one but dog people around. I think it’s good to know you’re accountable to the outside world like that, though. As I said, I’ve been doing a good job keeping my voice down and now that I’m not panicked like I used to be, I can manage situations before they get ugly. The neighbors watched Rippa try to bring a lamb in really hard but she was too close and it became kind of pointless so I had to call her off and do it myself, but you know, that’s okay. At least they know I’ve got the little baa baa backs.