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.
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