Well, my big insight lately is that I think the quality of dog you have is set and what I’m used to seeing is that it doesn’t really matter as long as you’re willing to work on your dog. That’s why it can take years for people to train their dogs to a finished level.
But it can also take years to train your dog to a finished level if you’re a crappy trainer.
For example, having gone out and done some real-world work . . . I found that letting Rippa cheat her outruns was a stupid thing to do. Guess what we’re doing now?
NOT LETTING RIPPA CHEAT HER OUTRUNS.
Also, obedience reinforcement.
Last time I went to a Kathy Warren clinic, she was really getting after people consistently for not making “down” mean “down.” Not having seen her or trained with her in a while, it seemed like something new she’d started to focus on . . . or else maybe not having Kathy there consistently made people lazy. My guess is the latter.
When I was timing at the COAST trial, one of the judges mentioned how so-and-so’s dogs weren’t really all that talented, but she had them trained to a point where it didn’t matter. I think that totally works.
I think there’s a rare blend of dog out there that’s talented, biddable, and drivey enough to take very little training to get things done perfectly at the trial level, but there’s a grip of dogs who get by on one or the other thing.
This trial thing, I think I’ve got a talented little dog, but she’s not as sharp as her mother in biddability. I like watching her work stuff out like panels and obstacles or when something she doesn’t expect happens. She isn’t pure confidence and never has been and I’m definitely going to need to put that back in on the next generation, but she’s more thinky than her mother, and makes the right choices even despite me.
Fury, however, I don’t think is as talented. It’s really obvious working the ducks because, same ducks, different dogs and the outcome is different. The Fury takes her commands faster, but the ducks line out and she often drops a couple because she’s watching ducky head and not the whole picture. Her sense of group isn’t there. Shannon made a point, once, though, that with big herds, that doesn’t matter – and the Fury has stronger confidence in fetching than Rippa seems to.
Rippa, however, keeps them in a group and points them where they need to go, never dropping them, never having to clean it up.
But with both dogs, I’m at the point on ducks where I feel like I can set up my easy chair and get ‘er done. Funny how the ducks seem to come so much more easily than the other stock – and the other stock the problem is that the dogs come in too hard. Of course, at the last trial: both dogs went in pretty rough on the ducks a couple times and the crowd went WOOOOOOAH! I personally stayed chill because I knew that was important to my handling, and also because we work chickens and ducks all the time – and they never actually get injured (aside from Lucky who stepped in a gopher hole and broke her leg a year ago). The job gets done, but I don’t worry about how it looks per se. The dogs aren’t going to mangle them.
I keep thinking how exciting it will be to start a new dog in the future because of how much I’ve learned and see how much of all of this is actually right and how much is my inability to see talent in dogs still (I think it takes a trained eye that I’m only just starting to get).
No comments:
Post a Comment