Day 4 – Oh, Chute

Well, the morning started out with rain. And lightning. And thunder. Which, you know, doesn’t happen too often here on the coast of California.  It’s 5:30 am and it’s definitely coming down out there. I’m worried about my little Cochin chickens – they have a dogloo to live in but we haven’t covered the whole enclosure yet and they have feathery feet, which, when they get wet, makes the little guys cold. I’m on the Internet looking at radar and thinking about how I’m slated to go walk around in the very hills where the lightning strikes and how I’m just not feeling all that awesome and maybe I should just go back to bed. I send Kathy and email and tell her I’ll wait until the lightning/rain stops. She emails back and tells me it never started where the ranch is at. Well, okay. Drink a protein shake and get in the car.

The last few days haven’t been very good ones for me in general. This camp fell during some bad mojo with my personal life and I’m not getting too much sleep and not too happy. Don’t worry about it, I’ll get over it.

But I get there, find Marilee and Carol out with their dogs in the back and join them. When it’s my turn (I’m not that late), we see a repeat performance of the last time. I’m really flipping excited about how easy miss Rippa is being, especially when Carol’s dog gets excited and loses control of her sheep and Marilee’s dog has to get them. Par for the course, but so far I am excited that this hasn’t happened to me. I’ve watched it happen over and over and it feels nice to not worry about that – yet. I’m sure when we’re learning to drive and not just fetching things will change.

So we all regroup and we’re sitting there and the first thing Kathy says is, “You need to fix your blog.” Okay, so maybe you don’t get this from me, maybe you do, but I have this stupid complex about being called out. Even if it’s not bad, I get all horribly guilty, feel awful, and want to go hide in a hole. The dumb thing is, even if I’m not doing anything wrong and I know it, I still feel that way. And the dumbest thing about that? I’m also totally the person that puts it all out there because I believe in being a voice when others are silent. I give people a reason to find faults because I put the whole story out there. Peeople like me should shut up and just keep their head down, but I can’t. You can see that I am a headcase. Oh well, you’re reading this so you like it. Anyway, being called out totally made me get all teary thanks to being already a bit of a head case the last couple days anyway. Stupid. I hope when I’m sixty I finally stop caring so much.

Basically, here’s what she wanted me to fix, and I did but I want you following along to know it too:

• The person that commented that her famous Fred started out weak on heads is dead wrong. In fact, when she was making the choice between him and another, he saw him go head-on (as a puppy) after a sheep (I think a ram) and that was that. Anyone who’s ever started puppies and seen that kind of confidence knows what I mean. Most are a little wary of big guys stepping up against them. And that I should never listen to hearsay.
• That Kathy never said I ruined Fury – I am the one that says I ruined her. She says that I started her wrong. I guess in my mind, it’s the same thing. Though, you know, that’s not true, either. Kathy’s always been patient with me about trying to get Fury to come back from all the bad habits I gave her. And she definitely has no problem telling someone that she has a lost cause on her hands. Me retiring Fury was my decision. I may start her up again when the goat thing works itself out as the miles she needs are free and she’s slowing down in her old age. Maybe not. But there is a lot of cool stuff about Fury that we got her to do, too.
• And finally, that I forgot the most important comment Kathy made about Rippa on cattle, that “She’s coming, she’s coming!” As in she is coming along and will step up. I just need some patience.

So there you have it.  And, as usual, I have some thoughts that spring from this.

1. Starting your dog right is really, really key. I cannot tell you how many illuminations I’ve had about this clinic about that. It’s almost been a year since I started Rips with Kathy and I only go maybe four times a month, if that, and she improves by leaps and bounds every time. As Kathy always says, if you don’t give them bad habits, it’s not about fixing things, it’s about progression. Poor Fury was mostly about fixing. There are some really talented dogs at the clinic, but they don’t have the benefit of Kathy’s supervision for every single sheep outing stopping them from making handling mistakes and fixing issues before they come up. All I can say is that if you think you can do this on your own, or from reading this, you definitely are barking up the wrong tree.
2. Pick your mentors carefully. I am very, very lucky to have learning relationships with a lot of the breed’s greats because I was a precocious kid who loved email.

I am not particularly tight with anyone in Aussiedom for a number of reasons (one of the biggest being that I am simply not around enough for real relationship building), but Kathy has been an amazing mentor for me. Her chastising me for posting hearsay always reminds me that she sets a good example about keeping her mouth shut with things unless she really knows, and then she really only tells you if you need to know or could use the info. In Aussieland, there’s a lot of talking about other people, but for the most part, I’d say Kathy does a brilliant job of keeping it classy and reminding me that it’s the source you should go to. You never know the whole story.

This also was reinforced when this guy showed up randomly to drop some ducks off and sat with me a while watching people’s runs. He was telling me he was dissatisfied with his show-bred Aussie that didn’t have a lick of interest in stock and was interested in getting a real stockdog puppy to train in the spring, and asked what advice I had about finding the right one. So I told him about what I’d learned from mentors that the public doesn’t always say, that he should really think about what qualities he wants in a dog and what he wants to do with it, and really do the research. I told him about how I did it and his eyes bugged out. I laughed and told him I might be a little hardcore about research, and Aussies in general. If not for the right mentors, I would be such a mess right now.

So, I know I told you I’d lay off the video camera, but Kathy wanted to do chute work with everyone and I was like, “Ooooh, good learning moment for everyone.” I’m not going to say a ton about it right now, but I did annotate the video for your learning pleasure.

What you need to know about chute-sheep-dog management is that it’s all about setting the dog and sheep up for success – telling them where to be, getting out of the way, and holding up your end of things. It helps when your dog actually lays down when you tell her to. This session ended with Kathy telling me that I really need to put some kind of stand-stay on Rips because she is fighting the down. What’s annoying about this is that she downs quite nice off stop. So let the obedience training begin.

In other news, a lot of people were working on their driving skills with their dogs.  Driving (that is, not fetching, instead of bringing the sheep to you, the dog drives them away) is a whole other game. People have just as hard a time learning how to drive as their dogs do. I think I finally understand the training philosophy, but understanding and doing are two different animals.

Kathy’s method doesn’t use props (like ropes) or the fence as a crutch. You start learning the drive out in the wide open, which I think is pretty cool. It makes for a well-rounded, thinking dog.

And what’s it going to take for me to start learning to drive? I think the following elements need to be all in a row:

• A solid stop (ie, down, which I don’t have yet)
• Self control (check)
• Balance on the stock (check)
• “Steady” (ie, a command that slows the dog down when they lose self control, do not have)
• “There” (a command that tells your dog to turn into the stock and go straight, not wear back and forth – I think Rippa knows what this means, but not totally)
• Flank commands (“way to” and “go by” – working on it, but not there yet)

But that’s not all! Rippa is currently training on heavy sheep (ie, not too scared of her or me) and we need to get her on lighter sheep to work on that control. Why? I asked Kathy. One very good reason is that her method involves taking the person totally out of the picture. When you back away from heavy sheep, they will try to follow you and bend in your direction when pressured by the dog. With light sheep, they’re happy moving into open space because they don’t know the person is “shelter” from the dog.

So, we have some things to get “down” before we move on.

Some Stockdoggy Terms

I thought since I will be dropping a specialized vocabulary like stink bombs, I should first start out with some basic terminology  . . .

First, the great herding vs working debate. The PC and proper cowboy way of saying your dog is herding sheep is to say your dog is "working" sheep. You are "working your dog" on sheep or cows or pigs or whatever. (Yes, you can work dogs on pigs - ASCA even had a title for it once.) So while the URL of this blog is "RippaHerds" I only did that because it would be easy to remember. These are stockdogs, not herding dogs. That's just the parlance where I come from.

Some terms:

Head - meaning a single animal, but also, well, the head of the animal. Heading dogs work livestock by watching their heads, and very often their eyes. That's why they are called "heading dogs." Heading dogs run circles around livestock because they are always chasing the head, which is always turning away from them.

Heel - Just like heading dogs, there are "heeling dogs" that work the heels of the livestock. Dogs like this are typically things like your Corgi, which is built low to the ground to work heels in stockyards (they fit under the bars of the pens in chutes and keep the cattle moving). The tend to follow stock, rather than run circles around it. Dogs of all breeds can do both heading and heeling, but one comes more naturally usually.

Fetch - This is what your heading dog will learn first to do - because that's what comes naturally to it. They will go out, seek out livestock, bunch it, and then bring it to their handler in a . . . you guessed it, fetch.

Drive - This is what your heeling dog learns first - follow the stock and keep them moving. Our Aussies learn this after they master the fetch.

Flight zone - This is the space around the handler and the dog that the sheep avoid staying in for any length of time. Imagine a Hula Hoop around you and your dog. The sheep are usually calm or not moving at all until the Hula Hoop touches them (their personal space bubble). If it touches them lightly and calmly, they move lightly and calmly. If it touches them fast and heavy, they move . . . you guessed it, fast and heavy. Flight zone is rough to learn for people - we are used to working with just our dogs, and not with another sentient being in the mix. You may work your dog's flight zone, but you fail on working your own. That's how I broke my first stockdog, Rippa's mom.

That should get you started, I think.