I Definitely Let My Freak Flag Fly!

So, sports fans, I haven’t updated this blog because Rippa didn’t get to work since last time. I haven’t called the goat cattlemaster because I found out shortly after that I was having surgery on my shoulder (old injury) and then I had it. And then, three weeks later, I have lessons.

And while you’re dying to know how we did and what we worked on, I need to explain what I looked like out there.

First off, I’ve got a big ol’ immobilizer brace on so that I can’t do anything stupid with my shoulder. Here’s a photo of the first day of surgery:

So, yeah, that big black thing. People think it’s an industrial fanny pack. I am supposed to wear it all the time – but the reality is that I am sitting here, lying on the couch with it off because I can type easier. Workarounds.

Okay, so, on top of that, it’s pretty hot and humid here in SLO, so, abhorrent of shorts, I have on a short little running skirts and some Nike Frees which are nothing but mesh glued to soles.

And there I am, wielding my stick with one hand and Rippa’s actually doing pretty awesome. We were all thinking this was spectacular and I look up at Kathy and grin, “Well, maybe we shouldn’t be practicing!” She’s staying off them, rating them well, walking straight up, giving them some space . . . Kathy says she gave me a notch up from the heavy sheep we were used to so I better be sure to keep them off my feet . . . which turns out to be literal because . . . RIP!

My right foot literally exits laterally from my shoes and my socks are exposed to the grass. My handling starts to fall apart, so I down the Rippa dog, kick off my shoes and am now handling her in the grass, which is a mix of sheep poo and pee and water. But I am classy and I don’t care.

By now I have fallen apart on my handling and Rippa doesn’t look as good. She’s not trying and not covering. She won’t lie down quickly on command. We practice the slingshot recall and she shoots and doesn’t sling a couple times and Kathy thinks she is clued into the fact that I’m hobbled by the brace.

But, you know, whatever, it’s funny and I had a good time. I still think Rippa dog is an excellent beastie and I’m looking forward to getting more miles on her and more skills on me.

One thing was super clear to me today (though it always is) – your handling skills make all the difference on these dogs.

Slingshot outruns and biting sheep

Video! We have video!

But first, a specific take home lesson Kathy gave that I cut out of the videos. As we said, I was going to try to take Rippa somewhere else to get some miles on her, so Kathy wanted to tell me something – if Rippa goes in to bite a sheep, I should not come down on her too harshly.

“Prevention, not correction,” Kathy says, “You think she’s not supposed to bite sheep but one day she might have to. They’re bred to grip and you can’t beat it out of them, nor should you.”

So there you go. Though, historically, it’s looked down upon in trial situations, there are, of course, situations when a bite’s okay. Especially if the sheep is challenging you. Having been head-butted, I can tell you, a weak dog that just gets run over is in for some headaches. Ah ahahahha.

To the video! I think you’ll be impressed that she’s only been on sheep twice (I think) since the last posting. Rippa is real interesting in that she really seems to digest what she’s learned or else mature into it as time goes on. She’s already way more under control than I ever really had Fury at.

Yeah, poor quality again, but you’d be driven nuts by the fence.

The interesting thing here is that the slingshot makes Rippa’s brain hurt a little. She would make a fabulous ranch dog because she likes knowing what’s coming. When you throw something new at her, she starts moving very slowly because the rules are changing and she doesn’t want to be wrong. Fury offers stuff quickly because she wants to please, she doesn’t mind being wrong. Very different, but I think it will be fun trialing her when she learns what the game is.

Good improvement and . . . the slingshot outrun.

 

Well, my camera is currently being held hostage, so no footage today. I am hoping to get it back tomorrow so I can shoot what we’re going to do, but we’ll see.

Wow. I have been bummed about not having time to take Rippa to lessons/not getting lessons, etc as I truly believe that you need real consistent work to improve, but she’s sort of proving me wrong. It’s going slower than I’d like, but it’s going.

Rippa’s an interesting dog. Not like her mother by much. Fury is very, “Okay, you want me to do something? This? No? This?” Very fast thinker, very fast behavior offerer. Rippa literally looks checked out, but the wheels are obviously turning because she seems to just “get it” whenever I start up a new lesson at teaching her. I have been taking her to the agility field to practice that and she is learning faster than Fury did because she’s not as urgent to please me RIGHT NOT. Which is interesting. I am thinking Rippa in the long run will be a nicer stockdog than Fury would have been if I did it right because she’s a bit more patient and think-it-through, which is what I wanted. Fury is a bomb little trick dog, though.

So anyway, after a week off, I took her up to Kathy’s and we went back to the duckpen for more miles. And I can see we are both improving a ton. Rips is staying off the sheep pretty naturally and I am making mostly the right handling calls. Not nearly as much circling and pushing, and a lot more backward walking, balancing, and rating. I am really proud of her and me. She gives me time to think so I can feel my handling improving. Fury just goes hard and then it makes me go hard. Here, I can chill a bit.

She also is downing nicely from far away – which was what I’ve been working on. Fury would always down too late and push the sheep past me, so we’re working on not having history repeat itself.

And then finally, Kathy was like, “Let’s see her recall.” So I left her in a down, facing the sheep, walked behind her and called her to my outside leg. No hesitation. She did it. No need to run at the sheep. Nope.

So, tomorrow, we try a bit of the “slingshot outrun” training which gets you that nice wide outrun.

You can see me do it here with Fury, a few years back:

The idea is that the dog swings wide around you and you act kind of as a . . . slingshot to send the dog. I LOVE teaching this. Fury loves it, too, she does it whenever we fetch. Rippa, however, doesn’t fetch, so we’ll see how that goes.

Well, Rippa fetches, but only if Fury’s not around, and not balls.

Miles to Go.

So, after about a month off, Rippa and I headed to lessons at Kathys. Today was only a one-off, and we won’t go back until next week. I have been thinking a lot lately about how my time is severely limited and I just really don’t know how I’ll manage to get Rippa out enough to progress her along.

We’ve been working out at a ranch a little north of town for events, and the owner suggested that his “cattlemaster” (oh man, do I LOVE that title) might be interested in meeting me. He has a herd of goats that he uses to train his (I think) McNabs on, and he probably would be cool with sharing them with me and maybe watching what I do because he just trains them to bring in cattle out of the hills. I thought this would be a cool opportunity to put miles on the Rippa dog. I have been looking into my own sheep, but it seems like I’d have to move out of town to make that work, and, well, I don’t wanna!

But, first I wanted to check with Kathy to see what she thought of the plan. She liked it. Said that it would be a good opportunity and that goats are pretty easy for people to learn on because they gentle up so fast, but, like geese, they can go sour if not managed well. She told me to go into this relationship seeing what his dogs do and just do that. Let everyone be comfortable with it. And if my dogs can’t do it, maybe he’d be willing to gentle some sheep for me to play with. I hope it works out. She said I could go out and do that at this stage and then come in for tune ups.

Because, well, the fact of the matter is – Rippa needs miles (just like Fury does), and paying $50 for forty minutes of lessons isn’t doing my wallet any favors. I also can’t take off enough time to do that. But this might be the solution.  I don’t think that it’s a good idea to put miles on a dog without any supervision (I did that, it didn’t work), and if you’re a novice, I think it’s much better to take “handling” lessons before you every try to manage your own training, but I’m glad to think she’s okay with me doing that at this stage.

So today we just put miles on. Kathy noted that Rippa was working better for me than she has and she was a lot easier on the down. Funny thing on that – Rippa is better at downing because she LOVES running Fury down when Fury is fetching and I hate it, so I started making her lie down and wait until Fury gets the ball and then she can go. So Rippa knows she’ll get to play if she lays down first.

Kathy also stopped me, midlesson, to explain how my stick use was affecting the sheep. I have been working for many years now, not really reading my sheep or thinking about my effect on their flight zone and I guess it’s time to fix that.

So here’s the deal:

With Rippa, I found that if I hold the stick flat out like this:

She is more likely to move out and stay out, instead of me pointing the stick at her. Kathy says that’s fine, but eventually I need to point the stick at her. My theory is Rips is fairly intense and she needs HUGE signals for her to not lock onto the mission and hear what I want.

But the thing is, the sheep are below the stick, so while I think I’m holding back my heavy sheep that want to stick close to me and are not afraid of me, I’m going way over their field of vision, and the stick should be here:

So now I have to remember the difference and stop fixating on handling Rippa and remember I am handling both her and the sheep.

Another interesting thing . . . Rippa sometimes lets the fence move the sheep so I have to help her get all the way around them to work them off me. So, what I do is tap the sheep in the direction I want them to stop going and go the other way. And it wasn’t working. Kathy was like, “WALK AWAY FROM THE TAP!” And I am thinking, I AM!

So she stops me and she makes me lie down and be a sheep and here’s what she shows me:

The grey is sheep and the brown is the dog. What I’m basically doing is pushing the sheep away because they see the stick and are like, “EEP, must not walk into the stick” while I am, indeed, backing up from the tap and then there’s Rippa who sees the stick that I’m holding out for too long and she’s also staying back because I am telling her to. Oops.

That stick position is SUPER important. It’s not a magic want you can just wave all over the place.

Boy howdy, do I look like a righteous bitch in these photos or what?

Rippa gets handled and you get a mini Kathy Warren clinic.

So the video is fuzzy because my computer wanted to take FOUR HOURS to render this 9 min video and I was not having that. It’s not as pretty to look at, but you get the idea.

Circles and Circles and Circles

I haven’t had time to digest the video yet, but I know some people are waiting on Rippa Puppy updates. This past weekend we did three solid days of training.

We worked on Rippa’s outrun (she’s quit splitting them for the most part, and quit doing that “change direction thing” that I talked about earlier that was hard for me to figure out how to manage), on her obedience (she still doesn’t stop before pushing the sheep past me), on her outs, and on my ability to hold the sheep.

First thought is: why do *I* run more than everyone else at lessons? I forgot to ask Kathy about this, but I think it’s partly that I can (when other folks are retirees or injured or just not in shape) and partly that I have more high-powered dogs than some. You gotta MOVE to keep ahead of them. Kathy’s pretty nimble herself and she gets out there, but I think timing has a lot to do with it, too. I need to hustle to get where she was two seconds ago.

Second is, MAN, am I tired of saying “Out.” The thing that you have to understand is that our dogs were not developed to work 3-5 sheep. They were bred to work a huge flock. That pressure is really important because when you have a huge flock, the front animals don’t feel the dog’s pressure, but they certainly feel the pressure of their compatriots urgently pushing on them. So, at this stage in the game, you’re trying to teach the dog to stay out so you don’t end up with a mess. Rippa listens for the most part, but there’s only so much she can take. She’ll get up, control herself and then . . . munch! Those lamb hocks are just too tempting that close up! MOVE, sheepies! Rippa is very pressure sensitive, both with stock and people. I think this makes her a nice cattle dog, but we’ve yet to see. She does not like a lot of pressure up front.

I’ve been dutifully chucking dog food at Rippa at feeding time after she lies down at a distance and Kathy says she sees improvement, but she needs to learn that lying down is a good thing. She just doesn’t want to. She looks really guilty when I ask her to down and go to her. Funny little dog.

The outrun issue, for the most part, have been fixed. She will take direction indications (ie, my body and stick placement), but she still runs pretty fast and flat at them. I have to run to keep her out around them, but I can feel her getting more control of it as time goes on.

Overall, good improvement over the three days. I started not being able to figure out what to do and Kathy stepped in to get Rippa right for me. The difference is night and day. She balances up (walks straight along with the sheep) with Kathy handling her, and with me she wears back and forth (what it sounds like, checks the outside eye of one sheep, runs back, checks the other, repeat). Why? I have a hard time holding my sheep – which is also how I broke Fury so badly. The sheep get past me because apparently when I run out to her to push her out, I run into the sheep’s flight zone and Kathy manages to stay out of it, so the sheep stay pointed toward her instead of going wide around me. We’ll see in the videos soon and hopefully get a clue as to how to fix this.  

Happy sheepsies in the mean time!

The Farmer’s Dog Philosophy

I finally got ahold of a copy of The Farmer’s Dog by John Holmes. Kathy told me to get it, along with a big list of other ones. I read the whole thing over the weekend and it was kinda neat to see what this guy had to see. Written in the 1960s, it’s a little “old school” but that’s how we kick it around here.

He spends most of the book trying to teach you about the instinct and choosing the right dog. He says in his second part:

“I cannot emphasize too strongly that dogs are not machines, but the reason I have written so much in Part I is to help you to prevent things from going wrong. To be able to do this, the first essential is to acquire some ‘dog sense.’ This is the ability to understand the canine mind and to be able to see things from the dog’s point of view. Without some dog sense the advice I have still to give you will be of little value.”

He says about instinct:

“It is of the upmost importance to remember that, when a young dog starts to run, he does so instinctively. When they see an untrained young dog ‘wearing’ a bunch of sheep many people say ‘It’s amazing how intelligent he is.’ Intelligence has nothing to do with it. The young dog which suddenly decides to run can be compared to the young man who suddenly decides that a certain young lady is the most attractive he has ever seen! one does not have to be clever to do that sort of thing, and there are many who looking back who wonder how they could  have been so stupid! The young dog herds, not so much because he wants to herd, as because he cannot help  it any more than, when he was born, he could not help squirming around until he found where the milk came from. “

“Run” = “herd.” But I like the term run because dogs start “running” far earlier than they truly “herd.”

He talks about the reserve that you see in stockdogs that gives people used to “city dogs” and the affect it has on his breeding:

”Temperament in the working dog is much more important than is generally realized. To the hill shepherd it does not matter so much as he is usually on his own. So long as the dog does not bolt at the sight of a stranger, it may be a first-class worker. Many good hill dogs are, in fact, shy partly because of temperament and partly because they never see strangers. On the general farm, conditions are very different. As the peace and quiet of the countryside become smore and more a thing of the past so does it become more and more important to get a dog with a good temperament . . . to keep up a team of demonstration dogs required constant replacements. Of the puppies which we selected at eight weeks as suitable, I doubt if 50 percent ever appeared in public. By the time they were six months to a year, we had to reluctantly decide to discard the other 50 percent . . . in most cases it was due to their not having to put up with people, the noise and the hustle bustle . . .”

He digs at people who breed for trials:

“Although trial dogs have done so much to raise the general standard of working dogs they have undoubtedly resulted in the production of a great many dogs that have no practical use to anyone. Many classically bred dogs have quite an abnormal instinct to work. The skilled trainer can use this keenness as a foundation for training the dog to the very highest degree. It will respond like a flash to each and every whispered command like the high-powered, well-tuned car responds to the slightest touch of the accelerator. But a high-powered car with a bad driver is far more dangerous than a low-powered!”

I laughed – I use this analogy ALL THE TIME.

He has a couple points that inform his training:

1. Dogs usually do not reason, so do not assume they will in training. (Actually, he says they cannot – and I disagree.)

2. No dog understands every word spoken to him.

What does this mean? That your dog is learning by association of ideas. So, when Kathy says “take the dog’s sheep away” after being bad – that behavior = no sheep.

Of correction:

“In the training of sheepdogs I rely almost entirely on two forms of correction.” Form 1 – grab dog, lift by scruff and shake. Form 2 – toss a hosepipe at it.

This is pretty consistent with training at Kathy’s. Ain’t no clicker that’s stronger than a dog’s instinct to run.

“If there is a secret to training I believe it arises from the ability to apply the type of correction and reward suitable to the particular dog, to strike a balance between the two and, most important of all, to apply them at the right time. The majority of failures in training are due to a – too much emphasis being put on how to correct or reward a dog, and too little on when to do so, and b – trying to work on the dog’s body rather than on his mind. The minds of some dogs can only be got at by making disobedience a painful occupation.”

And another gem:

“The first essential in training is will-power combined with the an active mind. This enables one to concentrate, to anticipate what the dog I going to do and, therefore, to correct and reward him as he does it. “