Warts and all

I started this blog mostly for me – I wanted a way to track my ups and downs and remember my thoughts. I’m a huge fan of journaling for this reason because for me – how far I’ve come never seems far enough until I look back. But there are always bumps in the road.

We’ve kind of hit one.

The last month or so, Rippa has totally quit me. Not, “Hey, I am leaving the arena” but more of a sulky, “Please, I don’t know what you want, I don’t know how to do that” reaction with some hopping up on me, following me around, and generally not taking direction at all, even simple things like ‘get around’ to start an outrun.

It was really scary. To go from bragging on how we’ll we’re improving and being ready to trial to having a dog act like she has no will to do it, no talent, no instinct, what?

At first I blamed it on her heat, because that’s an easy out, but I doubted it was really the issue. Last time I was on ducks, we did our usual chores, took them out of the take pen, started doing some obstacles and after trying to get them through a center chute – Rippa just quit trying.

And I really don’t know what to do in that scenario. Stockdog people say don’t let them get away with that, so I tried to force it. It didn’t work. Then I tried running around moving the stock like I was getting a puppy excited about it. Nope. I put her up, put Fury to work, made her jealous, but when I started up again, nope. I worked them together and that went okay, but it’s really hard to work dogs on ducks. They can’t take pressure or they quit and then the dogs aren’t finnessy enough to figure out the team work thing where rougher work will work with cattle etc.

I wrote to Kathy Warren, who told me Rippa’s always been a little weird about pressure and to just go back to chores (but make sure they’re done nicely) and fun stuff. I talked to Pat Lambeth, whining about how I’d never seen such a complete transformation. Pat asked me if I had done anything really different lately.

I had! A month ago, Dustin had me do obstacles with Rippa. Up to this point, I do them occasionally, but it’s mostly just ground work. We had no issues with that on cattle, but he also added some extra mechanical stuff – he put her on a line to try to make her rate herself faster than she was doing naturally (she gets pretty excited on stock on the first go), and the pop he gave her scared the crap out of her – so much so that she quit trying on cattle and just drifted behind them until we put her up.

With ducks, we’ve been working obstacles ever since. She likes the take pen – she gets that, but center chute? I lose them! Not only does she think she loses them, she does. When they see the back fence where home is, no amount of dog pressure is going to have my duckies come off the fence – they want to go home. Obstacles came to mean futility. Never mind trying to get them off the fence when they were tired. So Rippa quit. I would pick the ducks up and reset them in the middle and that probably wasn’t a great move either because she was probably waiting for me to move them since she felt she couldn’t.

By the way, she can, with patience. Fury’s able to do it, though Fury has a lot more power and eye than Rippa. You have to work the dog you have, not the one you want.

Anyway, I almost canceled my Wednesday night session with the Woods but Shannon thought she could help me through it and I tend to agree. So what’d they do – put us on baby goats. That was a new one.  I thought, at first, that the goats needed space, but what they needed was super tight pressure to get the kids moving. Rippa LOVED that. She had to gently heel their little hinds to get them to move and she had a real hard time getting them off the fence, but between the noises and the biting and the total novelty of it – she was on again!

We moved on to their new goats – that’s something I love about going there, they change out stock ALL the time. I don’t think I’ve worked the same set of stock more than a handful of times that I’ve been there.  It went well. No issues. Was she fixed?

I asked the husband to come along with me today to work ducks and she did it again. We got going, she got the ducks out of the take pen and parked, but when they drifted back to the draw of the pen, she gave up.

“What’d I do?” I asked him.

”Nothing, but damn, yeah, she really quit!”

I had him call her in and send out Fury. I worked the ducks back and forth with Rippa in plain sight while Fury did fun things like outruns and fetching until Rippa was quivvering. Then I let them both work the ducks. Again, this isn’t something I’d do with other people’s animals, as two dogs at once is kind of rough on the ducks. The dogs don’t bite them or anything, but sometimes they’ll end up on top of them or in between them and it’s not pretty, but it gets Rippa excited and moving. I was pretty impressed with how both dogs took my commands so well together.

After a minute or so of that (it was hot), I had huz call Fury off and Rippa was game to play again, fetching all over the arena. I didn’t try anything fancy, just wanted to keep her motivated and happy. We quit quickly and all was good.

So . . . it looks like I need to build some confidence back up. I was working on so many new things – perfect distance outruns, flanks, driving, obstacles, adding stuff like a line, etc and Rippa is so situational that she doesn’t take it easily. She needs to understand what the thing is fully to do it with full commitment.

I don’t love that about her – it makes her slower to train to be effective, but I think it’s fine. She’s reliable on the chickens at home and she’s great at bringing stock off the hills or to get sorted because she understands it. If she were a little ranch dog, she’d get the game easily and that’s all I’d need. She might take extra work to be a precise trial dog, but that’s not the goal here anyway. I want dogs I can get in ranch homes that can go to work with minimal formal training  - so far so good there.

Where did this come from? Fury’s not remotely like Rippa in this way. In fact, Dustin put Fury on his goats with the husband attempting to handle (he’s pretty clueless, as you’ll see). Fury doesn’t quit if she doesn’t understand – she just goes harder. I talked to a number of people who have Rippa’s relatives and I guess it’s a pretty consistent thing. The dog I linebred on (it looks like Spike – Andrew’s Red Chickaspike) seems to have a fairly reliable incidence of dogs who would get sulky if they didn’t get something right away and need a confidence build up. To be clear, I’m not blaming Spike, nor saying all his relatives are like that, but it seems like that side of the line has it in there.

So, good to know. If I breed Rippa, it needs to be a super confident dog to improve that.

Anyway, so some more work to go, but we’re not ruined yet!

And bonus: here’s the video of 11.5 year old Fury working goats:

Oh! And the ducks are now laying! Green eggs:

It’s inspiring me to make things like this epic French Toast I had for breakfast: