Wednesday, February 19, 2014

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.

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