W Lazy J Cattle Camp

So, clearly the “get your own land” thing hasn’t worked out, though I’m still working on it. In the mean time, back in January I decided to give the famous Betty Williams’ clinics a go since I was saving so much money in not having any lessons. My huz was in full support and we decided to make it an adventurous road trip all over the Western US.

I wanted to go for a few reasons:

I’d heard a lot of good about Betty and her dogs and it seemed like a good way to find out about both, because despite my inactivity, my interest in learning is nowhere near dead.

I wanted to meet and see different people and dogs than I have met in the past – travelling is a sure way to get out of the usual.

Two years ago, Rippa was nice, but she just wasn’t powerful enough on Kathy’s cattle for me to feel good about having achieved my goal in creating good cattle dogs with her litter and I wanted to see what she did now that she’d grown into herself (I could have done this in California, but it provided the reason to do it in the first place).

I’ve been wondering if I really know how to start a dog on cattle, and learning from a different person would augment what I already knew. Now that Kathy’s retired, I’m more on my own and if this is a long term thing, I’ll need to work a little more on my own because I’m not the sort that enjoys devoting her life to traveling to stockdog clinics.

I’d say on all fronts this was a massive success. Huz and I packed up the F250 and headed North (then East), climbing and mountain biking along the way, until we landed at the W Lazy J ranch.

The clinic started out pretty much just like I was used to at Kathy’s, with much the same format: a lecture in the morning, then a run order that had the dogs go through twice and the day was over. Everybody ate dinner and lunch (and even breakfast) together.

I’ll talk about Betty’s methods as she taught them in a post following this one, including notes on her lectures, but I thought you’d appreciate more of an overview of how things went and what I learned.

Initial Impressions

Betty’s cattle were very different from Kathy’s lesson cattle. Maybe it was because they had been used to trial and do clinics on, but they were a lot heavier and more mellow about everything. Betty had to encourage me to get right up in there a number of times because I had been taught to be hyper aware of the cow’s flight zones and danger to myself and my dog.

She started most of the dogs in a smaller pen, about equivalent to Kathy’s “duck” pen with five cattle. Rippa went right to the cattle and enjoyed driving them around, but when she went to head, she wanted to keep doing it. Betty was trying to get me to hold Rippa back after she turned the heads in a drive and this was SO foreign to me that it took a while to figure out what Betty wanted of me. Eventually I got it:

This is a photo of me so close on the cows that I am running up to Rippa to push her back while trying to get out of the way of the cows at the same time. Toward the end, I was so good with the cows not being light that Betty had to tell me to watch getting kicked. I definitely got Rippa kicked in the beginning with all that pressure we were both putting on the cows, but after a while I figured out what Betty wanted and I don’t think the final two days we had any kicked dog action.

In other news, Rippa got the crap kicked out of her while I figured out this “turn the dog back and hold her there” thing. She generally went back to work, but thought a lot more about it and wasn’t quite as resilient as some dogs, but Rippa is a thinking dog and I was the one getting her kicked every time and she didn’t seem to hold that against me.

Another totally foreign concept was having the dog go between the cattle and the fence. I took this photo just for this blog:

This is Stef and Lena pulling the cattle off the fence. The handler grabs the dog by the collar to put pressure inside the fence and uses herself, the dog, and the stock stick to get them off, and then sends the dog through to the heads to get them off. This is not something I’d ever seen employed at Kathy’s and man, I failed miserably at it. The first time, I made such a big hole, it was definitely me pulling the cattle off so the second time, after watching other people do it, I didn’t make a big hole and still sent Rippa through. I should known better. Rippa got kicked because she felt too much pressure on the fence and bit a cow without anywhere for her or the cow to go. I didn’t make that mistake again, but I felt bad.

It really was a pretty effective method of getting the dog to take them off the fence. By the end, most of the hot-to-work dogs were figuring out how to peel them off themselves a bit (if not all the way) on their own without the collar handling, and it’s good to have that in your belt if you don’t have another way to do it (a second dog, or a person or something).

Betty mixed up this driving/fence work with fetching at what seemed at random or at the handler’s behest. I took her lead as I figured she was the one that was best equipped to tell me what to do with my dog. In the end, I think it was a little problematic to switch back and forth for Rippa. She would act very stubborn when you would work on one thing, go do something else, then go back to the new thing. She would really avoid doing what I asked (like get back with the rake or stick as a blocker), but having worked with her for a while now, I really think it’s more how she learns – Rippa gets resistant and cranky when you ask for too much and she doesn’t understand it. Once she does, she’s on it. I didn’t feel like Rippa got a good idea about driving OR fetching, because she was spending too much time trying to figure out what she was supposed to do and getting cranky about us pushing on her and changing the rules a lot. Maybe I’m being kennel blind and she’s just stubborn, but if I had a better idea of that and more of a relationship with Betty, I’d probably have advocated we just stick to one thing (fence work OR fetching) during the clinic so Rippa’d feel confident on it.

Rips had the same trouble she did two years ago on cattle during the fetch work – but I think for a different reason. Two years ago, Rippa didn’t really want to go to head, which was now no longer a problem:

Now she just had a hard time working away from me – so when she got on the other side of the cattle, and couldn’t get my help, she didn’t keep going to head and let them drift. Betty got out her Spur and had him work with her to give her the confidence she needed to get around and watch the heads and fetch them up.

This worked really well, but again, I was really worried about Rippa messing Spur up or running cattle over him. Kathy had always been careful about this when putting a green dog with her lessons assistant dog and usually had you shut up so you didn’t distract the dogs. These lessons, I definitely was not shutting up with all the “get back” and flank commands I was giving Rips to get her to fetch to head. Betty assured me Spur could handle it so eventually, I did to stop stressing, and sure enough, the cattle never ran him over. Again, I also think they are quite used to him, and us, and we’re as light and dangerous as Kathy’s cattle could be. 

Eventually, Rippa was fetching well on her own (and even pulled them off the fence into a fetch when they got there), but would lose it periodically because of that working away from me thing. When I asked Betty, she said she was guessing that since Rippa hadn’t been working in a long time, she just needed help working on fetching in general, much less on cattle. “You think they forget it?” “They can.” I guess I took the foundation for granted that Rips would pick it back up, but it does make sense that she needed some hand holding.

Conclusions

Overall, it was a good experience. Betty didn’t say a lot during lessons, which made me rely a lot more on my own knowledge – which at first was disconcerting since I was used to a constant flow of advice from Kathy. Once I stopped expecting Betty to tell me what I’d done wrong or right, I started feeling my own abilities to make those decisions (like in reference to the kicks I was causing) and I came away from it feeling like I could start a dog on cattle, light or heavy, based on my experience and that ten years of lessons on and off were not a huge waste on me. That was the goal.

I also am pretty happy with Rippa. She showed really good stockmanship, had enough power and presence to get the job done (and knowing her, if she really had figured it out, that power would ramp up a lot more), she responded pretty well to me except during those “stubborn” episodes, and I really liked what I saw. I have every confidence that she will be a nice cattle dog and is still a candidate for breeding since I want a good cattle dog line.

Betty’s was a really good place to start a dog on cattle, though I did feel like some people really didn’t respect that the cows would be different elsewhere and might have come away with an inflated sense of confidence of what their dogs could do on cattle in a trial. By the end I was quite sure I could get through a started course with Rippa and qualify (Betty had us do panels for the last lesson, I’m sure she’s used to people liking that experience) – but I’m not sure we could on the trial cattle I’ve been on in the past.

I also met some very different dogs than ones I’ve met previously, got some ideas about Aussies I hadn’t, met some lovely people, and got the snarly photo of Rippa I really wanted:

I also got a kick out of Rippa and Fury being correctly identified by one clinic attender as being Slash V based. She said they had that very clear Slash V look, even though Terry’s dogs are looking different these days. I got my type set, so success on that breeding goal as well. This photo below makes me think of Slash V’s landing page photo .  . . this is pre-stalk for Rippa, but yeah, I see similarities.

vs

Photos courtesy Stef Player and Yishai Horowitz

Self Teaching and Back to Basics

No news on the stockdog front, really, but my roommate moved out and the backyard is a lot more clear to use as actual training stuff. I tried making an actual pen, but the chickens were surprised to run into the expen barrier I set up and flew up instead of moving off it. Oh well, just got to teach them it’s there. Definitely learning a lot of stock management with just the chickens.

So I let Fury out while I was putting laundry out to dry just to mess with the chickens and decided to let Rippa do it.

The game is just letting her move them around the yard and me saying “yes” when she balances herself and “no” when she gets too excited. It was pretty fun.

I know I did this kind of stuff with sheep when I was taking lessons but it feels different when it’s your dog and your stock and no one is going to get hurt, even when a certain dog tackles a chicken who then goes into submission, because I know that causes certain dog to back off.

Rips got them stuck up on that table, though – and for some reason it never occurred to her to jump up on the table to get them off. Oh well.

Penning Hens

Not a joke. We’ve moved on from fetching and putting them into their coop. I was thinking they’d pretty much eaten all the grass in my backyard, might as well let them work on the front, so lately I’ve been bringing them out to graze it.

Well, obviously, I was going to need to contain them if I didn’t want to shepherd all day, and I had all these ex-pens lying around . . .

And finally, after a few days of this, the chickens got with the program and went pretty easily down the “chute” that is my sideyard out to the grass. They didn’t make a run for places they could get lost (under the porch, in the ficus, etc), and I find that when one does escape, they usually come on back when they see me. Chickens, believe you me, are definitely herd animals. They want to stick together and they want to stay near home. That makes the next logical step . . .

Using the dogs to drive them down the chute (side yard), into the open area and into the center pen.

Holy cow, this is fun. I started with Fury because she’s a lot more gentle on them than Rippa is – like ducks, they tend to give up and submit, and Fury is more likely to just sit on top of the chicken and lick it than munch it.

Well, despite not using her on stock since well before Rippa was born (so maybe four years), all the chicken practice in the back yard made her mind pretty well and before I knew it, we were slam-dunking the center pen, even with trucks and bikes and all kinds of obstacles.

Checking for a command . . .

They overshot the entrance and went the wrong way, so I sent her on a way to . . .

And then asked her to turn back (she gave me SUCH a nice shoulder), and came “go by” and tight enough to smush them in but not overrun them . . .

Balanced up right here . . .

Okay, Kristin, you can close the gate!

Rippa is allowed to put them away because that doesn’t involve quite as finite details (I don’t really think she knows her flaking commands, for example) since all I need her to do is fetch them back to the side yard out of the pen and they go right in.

The dogs are happy, and so am I . . . while we wait for the right property and our own real stock to work and mow the lawn . . .

I can’t believe how much is coming together now that I own my own stock . . . learning to understand just what the stock need to be thinking like for success . . . when to introduce dogs . . . how much pressure everyone can take.

And for the most part, I scream in panic a lot less. It also amuses my neighbors as all get-out.

I’m getting pretty good at this . . . maybe we can trial on ducks in the future . . . but what happens if Fury decides to lay down on one and lick its cloaca?

A new phase

So, as I said last post, I am really starting to understand the importance of owning your own stock when training a dog. Every time I take one of my green dogs to a lesson, they are SO excited and SO intense and the sheep are SO worried they might be eaten that there’s really no room for anyone calming down in my world. Kathy had fantastic, experienced sheep that knew they might get a bit of a chomp but no one was going to die and that made a difference.

And I now understand why she kept telling me never to work my old boss’ sheep with my dogs (I used to be hired to train and take care of a kennel full of dogs on property with agility equipment and a large flock of sheep) – because those poor sheep were hysterical. I have always known, in hindsight, that she was right, but now I think it was not entirely because of training mistakes I made, but just the kind of atmosphere stoked dog and fearful sheep create.

Anyway, so I have stopped actively pursuing lessons or outside livestock. Yet the tale is not over.

Despite me thinking we did not make nearly enough money to make a mortgage fly, my husband encouraged me to pursue it and, yes, we do.

We live in one of the prime real estate locations in the country, but it’s also surrounded by a lot of ag land. I LOVE living in the town I do – and where I do. I walk downtown for just about everything, my running club meets down the street, my climbing gym I run is a quick bike ride away, etc. However, if we want to stay in town, we’ll need to find a fixer upper in a less desirable location, but we can do it.

But . . . I find myself looking wistfully at the little farms in the town north of me when we pass, and when we talk about the future, it always includes land. We went on a real estate tour in the beginning of the year and found a house I love that we’re second in line for (it’s a short sale, so who knows). It even had sheep on the property when we viewed it. But . . . it opened up possibilities.

Yes, we would have to double our income to get an equivalent property in the town of SLO, but ten minutes outside of SLO there are farms we can have right now (well, relatively right now). And so, we are looking.

I find myself thinking of greywater recycling, solar panels, and, of course, livestock management throughout the day. It also doesn’t hurt that the community we’re targeting is special. It’s one of the last holdouts that I know of in this world where on July 4th, the town has BBQ parties on the front lawn and you party-hop. Square dances. Kids run to and fro to eachother’s yards all day long. It’s safe. I don’t need to lock my doors (not that I need to now, thanks to the dogs.)

At first our tactic was “well, we’ll see what we can afford and what works best” be it city or country, but I told my dude yesterday I need it to be country and land. He said okay. And here we are. So, hopefully by the end of 2013, I’l l be writing this blog again, with my own sheep, maybe some ducks, and in a house I can call my own and finally plant the trees I’ve got in pots . . .

Chicken Herding . . .

So, lately I’ve been working on letting Rippa work the chickens, too, since she has successfully not-killed them so far.  Today she did so great I went back out with a camera and back-up handler (the husband) and got some shots of it.

I am starting to realize that me doing this, and the chicken + dog combination is teaching me a lot more about stock and dog training and handling than I have gotten at Kathy’s from a realistic standpoint.

When your only real stock experiences is through lessons on other people’s sheep, at least for me, it becomes an intellectual exercise and it’s hard to see the full operations going on because it’s you vs the dog vs the sheep all learning. Having my own stock, which have become familiar with me and the dogs enough to know they aren’t going to die has shown me about real stock handling and reading. I feel like I can finally calm down about oopsies and the like, which means my voice calms down and I don’t feel like I have to be on top of the dog at all.

In fact, using what I learned at the last clinic about (1) cranking hard on Rippa to star and (2) maybe not announcing good times ahead but easing into it allowed me to get these shots. 1 – Angry voice downs in the beginning calmed her down and kept her from just joyfully running out to the chickens to scatter them squaking like live squeaky toys. 2 – I just had her walk up with me and then I stayed back and said “walk up.” Rippa has figured out that the goal is to get them back in the coop, so if I just stand there, Rippa does, too, thinking. She was actually standing behind the planter in the photo above for a good minute without moving, just watching . . .

And the chickens slowly got the hint and moved around it opposite her, and she just calmly watched what happened and then got to work. No ‘get around’ or ‘there’ from me, she didn’t have to worry about me at all – just the job.

In fact, she forgot about two of the chickens so . . . all that calm work kind of went to hell when one made a break for it:

But because they were my own stock and I’d had enough experience with oopsies to know that Rippa wasn’t going to maim or kill if it got out of control, I was able to see all the good work involved (see she’s actually trying to get around it from her earlier position?) and be calm about everything.

I’m also starting to really understand how hard it is to trial, and why these dogs would be fine without all the insane formal training I do – because they learn their chores and inherently “get” how to do it. It’s the finite work in a strange place that’s gotten me in such a tizzy.

So yeah, really amazing learning from my time off just playing with chickens. I am really tickled by the whole thing, too. I might just have to clean my yard up a little to provide less obstacles and try formal training now that it’s not a fearful clucking frenzy out there anymore to annoy the neighbors.

My husband has even suggested crating the chickens and just going to our climbing gym/warehouse to practice with them . . . it might be fun but I will wait until I get some commands on the dogs before that. Who needs ducks?

Pushy Dogs and Chicken Dogs

So, I was out in the yard this afternoon cleaning up the planting beds for spring (I’m a little behind for where I live) and Fury was out with me and the chickens. Every once in a while, I’d watch her, just for fun, move them around the yard. Nice and easy.

Which, you know, is totally the opposite of what she does when I take her to lessons and why I had to retire her and start her daughter instead of continuing her training.

And which is also why I am kind of stuck with her daughter because we don’t get stock exposure regularly enough and she’s turning into a wild child.

The dogs aren’t crazy unruly. They are just utterly STOKED when it’s time for lessons. They never get to move stuff. I yell at them when they think about heeling the vacuum or the skateboarder going by . . . and when you put them on animals, their brains LITERALLY SHUT OFF and I have to get all hard with them and really beat it into their little brains to listen to me, while still trying to figure out a way to get them to calm down.

So watching Fury, I realize now that there’s not really anything wrong with the dogs except that they don’t get enough livestock exposure. Because what I saw Fury doing, I liked.

I went out and took a short video, and it’s blurry because I didn’t focus it right (sorry, new DSLR camera), but you can see the picture plenty clear. Even the spot where the chickens worried, it was because I was right there putting pressure on them, not Fury.

I thought it was pretty smart of her to move them the direction she did–it was a dead end on the fence the direction they started in.Toward the end, she thought she just lost a chicken, not that she should get in the coop and push them out. I figured I got what I wanted.

I’ve also started working Rippa on them – now that she’s demonstrated she’s calmed down enough not to maul them when she gets frustrated. Rippa needs some more obedience to keep her behaving, but she’s getting there.

Yeah, that’s what I’m reduced to – backyard chicken herding. But, hey, it’s something, and it’s teaching me.

Pretty grateful to have dogs that are pushy, because it isn’t really a frustrating trait if they’re in a real life situation and not my suburban cowboy version – it means they’ll keep going, even when it gets old hat.

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No sheep for me.

Well, today, despite what seemed like something to get my hopes up for, I found out that I would not be getting sheep in town after all.

After two years of trying to figure out a working solution, Kathy retiring, and just not having the money, energy, and interest in driving hours and hours away to just put mileage on my dog, I think it’s time to give up the ghost.

It’s been a good, long run. Adelaida ranch is still on the table, but unless they somehow get tamer sheep for beginner dogs, it’s not going to do anything but teach my dog bad manners, and even then, that’s two hours out and back to get there just to condition them. There are other stockdog trainers in the area, but Kathy has recommended me not go there. It seems like I can only use her or not at all. And because I didn’t fully commit when I had the chance, today it’s not at all.

Maybe one day, but I would be lying if I didn’t say I wasn’t heartbroken over this.  To be surrounded by opportunities and just not have a champion in my corner for how long and hard I’ve worked is really frustrating. But I have also learned that when I bang my head against the wall like this, it’s time to turn around and go another direction.

I quit ASCA this year because I couldn’t take what was happening without trying to fix it (both just the attitude it was projecting and the business it was conducting), and I’m the kind of person who, if involved at all, expects to be REALLY involved. I signed off of all the dog lists (except the ones I help manage) earlier this month because I just felt like the environment wasn’t what I needed right now, and it was clear I didn’t have much use to anyone on there, anyway. I haven’t missed any of it (well, I do miss ASCA, but not enough to come back). 

Perhaps this will be the same. Or, perhaps the opportunity will show itself when it’s supposed to. There is something beautiful about the time it takes to train an animal. I love working with horses that are tougher for the same reason, as well . . . maybe it’s time to go back to horses after 20 years in dogs. Or find something else to invest my heart in.

At least for now.

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