So today, I went out to Stephanie’s with the goal of working on Rippa’s fundamentals. I sorted out the heavier sheep and basically worked on her flank commands and getting her to both take her out and downs faster. And, of course, her outruns. I had posted this blog last week and Carol McLaughlin suggested I basically just do more fundamentals work with her and take smaller baby steps, which sounded about right so here I am.
We entered the arena really calmly and got ourselves set up nice for the outrun practice. I started facing her with the sheep behind and calling flanks and looking for her to turn her shoulder out to me and make a wide circle. When she did, I got next to her and did the same. Then I went behind her and had her come around me. It works. I tested it by going behind her and sending her but fail. It’s clearly just going to take some mileage there, but I could see the gears turning and I think I’ll have it where I want by the end of the month.
Then we just did stuff like I described above – simple, easy things with heavy sheep so I could easily get after her without losing them and without worrying so much about my handling and timing. When we were tired, I put them up in a small pen and then got out the lambs.
The lambs are soooooooooo squirrelly that I wanted to take what she got from the early lesson about taking my commands and such and use it here to show her that when they freak, it’s not as useful to freak her self, either. It worked pretty well, but man, Rippa really has to charge those lambs to stay in contact and I have to work on my end because they’re pretty scared of me. Lamb work doesn’t last long because the little guys just give themselves a ton of running to do.
So, Rippa put them back up and went to water. I was going to work her again with the heavy to leave on that note but the huz had convinced me to bring Fury and I wanted to see if what I saw last time was the same. I figured five minutes off some outruns and balance work and putting them away would show me what I had.
Sure enough, like last time, Fury still has her nice outruns, takes her flanks, and works wide. She downs really easy, too. She just comes in way too hard if I try to do balance work on her. I had started out with the big stick (I don’t use it much with Rippa any more because it’s made me get better at handling to use my body), but I could clearly see that Fury was so used to fighting me and my job was to show her that I wasn’t here to do that anymore, so small stick it was.
That made her relax a lot more. I didn’t say anything to her when she came in too tight and fast, I just kind of got out of the sheep’s way and pushed Fury around. She was getting it after a few minutes and I daresay in a few sessions I might be able to pick up where we left off and get that Started Sheep leg I need.
The key was giving her tons of space to not feel constricted and me not being hyped up about how she was dealing. It was just basically me watching where Fury gets worried and doing my best to show her she has nothing to fear. I’m actually really, really impressed with her. She’s so much more responsive to me than Rippa is – Rippa’s more a chore dog to Fury’s ability to finesse when she calms herself down.
So, we’ll see if Stephanie is up for having me rent sheep for a second dog. We talked about it a bit last time I saw her and it seemed like it wouldn’t be an issue. More $$ for me, but I’ll feel a lot of satisfaction being able to both let Fury do something she LOVES to do and also being able to come back from the bad place we ended things. How many people have the chance to take their first “broken” dog and go back and make it right? That’s a real opportunity.
And what happens on Wednesday? Cattle!
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