Trial Entered, goals to work on.

Last time I considered entering a trial, the thought of it made me a little sick, to be honest. This time, I’m reasonably sure I’ll qualify, and I might actually do well. January 4th – so long as I get in. Sheep, ducks, and cattle. And, I’m even entering the Fury. That latter idea might be a bad one, but she’s pretty good – Rippa is better, and why not? Nobody’s going to kill stock, and I can come out of it with more experience and some titles for both dogs.

So now I have have to work on some things that I haven’t: take pens. The course is basically – collect your stock from a pen on one side of the arena, collect the stock wherever they end up once they do that, walk the dogs through panels on opposite corners, and put them back.

I can totally do this with both dogs. But not well, not 100%.

We don’t have taken pens to practice with except with ducks. With ducks, I have it dialed. I went to look at Stephanie’s set ups today while both dogs waited and I basically have a choice of an 8 x 8 panel free standing pen, that weird collection pen with a corner in it, or some big pens that are not “take pens.” I decided to go with the 8 x8 pen, so today was about center pens for both dogs and then taking them out.

Normally, I just have them go on the opposite side of the pen and it goes nicely. But with take pens, the dog is supposed to go in there. That is a very tight space for dogs, me, and sheep.

Kathy trains take pens by having the dog go in on a long line and learning to circle and stop opposite the gate on your command. It’s too small for a long line and I debate using a leash with Fury because she is just so amped that she is good and then if the sheep look at her, she starts heeling and not thinking.

I tried a couple things like having her circle outside the pen to work off the stress, but really, I think I just need the Fury to work on impulse control a bit. I had her grazing chickens the other day and she was whiny and vibrating the whole time with desire to do more than sit there – Rippa, however, has been working a lot more and more often and she’s getting more patient about stuff.

That’s the other goal- work on both of their impulse control and command taking.

I’ve stopped working on Rippa’s drive since the duck quitting and we’re just going back to basic fetches, fixing outruns, and working on finite handling understandings. It’s really fun to watch her work stuff out without me saying much – though she still gets excited and starts getting pushy and I have to correct her.

When I trial, I have to think of it as more a training session than anything else or I have the potential to go backward from what I have got. Rippa made her practice run quite nicely, but she would get excited and push too hard and had to clean things up. Fury is always excited and pushing hard but my strategy with her is to just down her way off her stock because she’s so intense, her control is from very far away. The closer she gets to me, the more intense she gets. That’s bad for the take pen. But we’ll get it sorted.

I’m also working on introducing whistles. Right now it’s just “down.” I whistle, then yell down. Both are getting it, but I think they believe it means more “HEY PAY ATTENTION!” right now.

But that works. It’s sparkly.

And finally, just as I was finishing up the last outrun with the Fury, she comes up lame and won’t walk on her left rear leg. Noooooooooooo.

I’m super sensitive to the fact that she’s almost 12 and that knee injuries can be kind of common and lay a dog up so I have been very careful with how she plays with Rippa and does other stuff to watch this. She was coming in too hard to stop a runaway sheep and the ground at Stephanie’s is pretty rocky, so she probably came down wrong. I’m hoping she just tweaked it, but she’s hopping around right now and I’m worried. I’ll give it a day or two and if there’s no improvement, to the vet I go. I keep poking on it and looking for pain reaction but she’s not giving me much so I’m hoping it’s just a tweak – we all tend to do that. And now she’s banished to the down palace in our bedroom. Tough dog life.

Ducks back on!

Today I went back out to my ducks after a month-long break. To be honest, I was a little worried about it. I really didn’t want Rippa to be over ducks forever, but I was resigned to it being a possibility.

I tied her up and used Fury to get them out. We’re down to seven now as apparently Jennifer found one of the drakes dead the other day, no explanation. Ducks! I’m hoping the learn to brood some of the eggs the ladies are dropping or I’ll have to buy more in the spring just to balance out the ratios there. I read somewhere that it’s good to have all drakes, but Jennifer and I agree it’s good to have eggs, too.

 

Fury was a good little animal. I worked on her commands off them and she took them nicely, working the little guys much less stressfully that I would expect for her having to take over the job of moving them out of their pen and into the center. She’s learning to control her instinct a LOT better.

Then I put her up and got Rippa out. I went into it feeling soft, not asking for much, just that she doesn’t bowl them and I got that. She took advantage of me being soft at first and wasn’t honest with them at all, but once I gave her some correction, she started thinking again. I started her wrong. Must remember that.

The ducks, for their time off, are more subtle and take more thoughtful handling as they’re less inclined to move toward me, which is what I wanted anyway. It was really fun! I didn’t say a lot to Rippa and she worked out the problems as she needed to. I could see the obstacle work with Shannon really paid off here. I put her up quickly while she was happy and eager and brought Fury down one more time.

By then, the ducks had had it, so I just put them back up. I do need a bigger flock if I want to keep working. I could have divided them into two small groups, but I figured it was better to turn both dogs on with a bigger one that would be more forgiving.

Anyway, it was pretty great. I couldn’t be more happy with the dogs right now.

And then we went riding with V through a ranch adjacent to the ducks!

Space to think and not just feel

I gave a speech yesterday at my Toastmasters club about how the way to achieve more is to learn how to manage the stress that achievement brings with it.  In the middle of the speech (I speak mostly off the cuff), I connected something I’d seen recently with dogs to the point I was making.

This video was posted a while back on someone’s page, asking for what we thought of it.

Shelter Behavior Training - Aggression Toward People from Bound Angels on Vimeo.

People heavily into positive and clicker training obedience thought what the guy was doing here was wrong, and cruel. However, I think what he’s doing here is right. The dog has all these intense emotions and is operating on instinct. He can’t learn like that. He can only learn by finding an alternate way to deal with those feelings. That means making him strongly pay attention to other stimulus and see that flight is an option, not just fight. And . . . it worked. The dog started thinking instead of just feeling.

This is totally a stockdog thing, though I don’t think I’ve heard it articulated anywhere before. I always explain to people that my dogs are more edgy than usual dogs because when a cow says, “No,” they’ve been bred to instinctively react in fight mode to that. People, me included, don’t always come prepared for that and can really mess up how a dog interacts with the world if you don’t fully understand that.

But you’re going to get horrible messes if all they do is react with fight mode and instinct. You’ve got to have that space to think and react, too.  Training your dog (and you) needs to include this part of it, too. When a puppy and new handler first start, it’s usually the handler all thinking and the puppy all feeling and the magic happens when there’s a balance.

That’s what I’ve been working on with Rippa. She is getting to a point where it’s not just “wahoo!” whenever she’s on stock, but she’s thinking and applying the lessons we’ve used (like going around obstacles rather that going in tight, taking square flanks, and just balancing herself to me and the stock) more and more. She’s better on goats and sheep because she’s had more time on them. She understand them, and there’s no threat to her.

With cattle, though, she starts out pretty excited unless I put the screws to her in the beginning. I’m doing flank commands off stock and “outs” as well as plain obedience, then I go in, move the stock with her on a down stay and show her they’re mine, and then we go to work and things are nice. I saw a lot of thinking out there today and a lot of really good decisions when she had space to make them.

But, if she has to break into a run, you can see her brain start panicking and she goes for dumb moves – coming in too close to them, taking high bite shots (and getting kicked), etc. Experience is what she needs (and what I need) in this department. We’re both finding a balance between tightening the screws on her and just letting her work. Shannon wants me to be able to get more sharp responses because a foot or two can make a difference, but I also have to balance it with Rippa’s need to work independently of me, too.

I’m reading Bob Vest’s book right now to see what he has to say and one of the things I’ve got so far out of it is this thing about 55 gallon drums. You can have a dog with 55 gallons of confidence, but if you undermine the dog with bad handling and training, you lose a little in ever session (I feel like I did this with Fury). You can have a dog with 25 gallons and you can use that dog, but you might never get 55 unless you work on it – I feel like that with Rippa. And then anything less, you’re going to be working hard, but you have to do it. I don’t think a lot about building confidence in dogs when training, but the agility people have this part down. I think that’s why Rippa isn’t trialing well when I take her to agility trials – I’ve not built her confidence up because I assumed she was a 55 gallon dog like Fury and didn’t need to.

Now to figure out how to do that, exactly.