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.

<3

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.

<3

A little update on things

Here’s my to-do list:

• Meet with organizations to get buy in on my Ranch Sheep Project
• Get sheep
• Meet with a local trainer to both use her sheep and maybe buy them
• Get back in touch with Nathan, who says it’s time for return to Adelaida, and he’s been using his puppy a bit so that might be really fun

So, as I last left you, I was working on getting my own sheep. I was asked to come to a meeting of The Ranch Development committee to present my idea, and pretty much had them excited the minute I opened my mouth. (Background, The Ranch is leasing the land that I got married on, owned jointly by the Jewish Community Center and my synagogue, to develop its unused acreage as both a fundraising ranch and educational opportunity for disabled youth and adults – my project would be part of that.)

What became a flock of five sheep with a small breeding program to restock them, me working them, and maybe letting other people have a shot, became “You are now the chair of the Animal Husbandry Committee!” They were firing off wanting turkeys, goats, chickens, horses . . . and while that is pretty neat (my own ranch without owning it), it was also not something I was prepared to be responsible for. Realizing the amount of space they wanted this stuff to be on wasn’t going to work, I sat down with my drafting stuff (yes, I have drafting stuff – when I was a little kid I REALLY liked designing floor plans of homes) and did some calculations, with room to grow and sent it to my friend who was like, “Woah, woah, woah, let’s just start with sheep.” Which is pretty relieving, as I’ve got a big pile of work in front of me in the meantime.

The cool thing about the project is that I’ve been kicking around the idea of doing kosher laughter lambs either at Adelaida or somewhere else and The Ranch was super on board with it. We’ll see if that pans out in the future.

Anyway, so now I  need to meet with the “wheat gal” and figure out the layout of the pens and then, as my husband says, “I got a hankering to pound some t-stakes.”

So that’s where we’re at. We’re in the middle of hiring and business trips so I haven’t really had time to visit Adelaida or hook up with the gal I might buy sheep from, but we’ll see.

Just thought I’d give you an update.

Stockdog Clinic at Trish’s New Digs

So, Kathy announced her retirement and sold all her sheep to Trish Alexander, who, after many years of renting a small house with so-so sheep facilities, managed to get AN AMAZING DREAMHOUSE in King City (and this is an even bigger deal to me, since King City is not exactly the pinnacle of places to live). First order of business?Host a stockdog clinic with Kathy before she heads north for the Winter.

Well, after a few months off entirely, and a month of confusion about whether I was breaking Rippa at Adelaida with my non-conventional training ideas, I figured I’d better take the opportunity to get out with Kathy and figure out what to do, now that I’m effectively on my own.

Some basic thoughts that I had:

1. Only taking lessons is a double-edged sword. I was a lot more confident with Kathy following me around and advising me pretty much what I knew, but I also stopped thinking about stockmanship because I guess I’ve always felt like Kathy was there to tell me how far I could “push” the sheep. At first it was super necessary, I think, to have her hand on the bike, stabilizing it, but I definitely feel like it’s time to let go and balance on my own, if you get that. I need to stop letting Kathy be a crutch for what I really know, and have confidence in myself because, well, I guess I do know enough to do this on my own without breaking Rippa.
2. I honestly think that teaching stockmanship as an instinct is job one. When I am at Adelaida, I do not make foolhardy choices because I feel like I need to protect these people’s stock before I train my dog. This weekend, with Kathy there, I let that slide a bit. That was both good and bad for me. When I saw that these sheep were, indeed, different from Adelaida in that they would settle and fetch to me, I relaxed a lot more, but that also caused me to make mistakes I normally wouldn’t make – like not preventing dive ins soon enough (on the first day) to starting an outrun with the sheep not settled and mashed on the fence (giving my dog nothing to do but dive bomb to get in between them and the fence on the third day) to just plain working the sheep longer than I needed to for success (that, I fear, was more the effect of knowing I was paying to be out there and wanting more than five minutes).
3. There was a time when sitting around all day was fun – especially when I was knew and standing there, watching the lessons and trying to understand what was happening provided a lot of new experiences (which I thrive on), but largely I felt like I knew what was wrong and Kathy helped me figure out ways to fix it, and so watching other people was more an exercise in seeing what they weren’t doing right. I’ve been stuck so long at just the handling facet of fetching that until I feel ready to drive, it’s all the same now. I’m there, effectively, for maybe thirty minutes a day, and I guess I really would rather be doing something else with the other part of my day – though I did plow through an enormous book. It’s definitely time to get my own sheep so I can do that.
4. I really need to find some sturdy bamboo to make the bottle sticks. Rippa needs them.
5. In the same vein, Rippa really really needs to know that I will get really mad if she does anything bad. I think we all fantasize that we can stand out in a field and whisper commands and they’ll just go right through it. Unfortunately, I think most dogs – or at least dogs with some real drive behind them – take a bit more than that. Rippa is a really honest dog for the most part, but she’s also an alpha and headstrong. You gotta be a real alpha to make her listen, and then it’s really fun. Kathy’s big lesson for me was “PREVENTION, NOT CORRECTION.” IE, start out being tough, and you can always soften up. Kind of like how, when I was in my mid 20s, I dressed up a lot to teach my college students so they’d perceive me as someone to respect, and then progressively got more casual as the semester progressed.

This was pretty much my entire weekend – Rippa chilling, me reading . . . waiting, waiting, waiting. I am definitely over that “new hobby” syndrome where you spend all day talking about whatever it is (I have done it with lacrosse, climbing, and dog sports) forever and ever and feeling like you have a corner on the market of happiness, so I don’t generally engage conversations at lessons. I’m an introvert, so sue me. I did however discover that I like Gina’s cake pops (though, right after found out that the filling was cake and frosting mixed up and swore off them for sheer badness for you), learned a lot about septic systems, and got to talk horse war stories.

Oh, and I got to pet a lot of dogs, which is always lovely.

Duke gets a belly scratch from me. We’ve been friends from way back when – it was nice to catch up.

Other things I thought were wise lessons from Kathy – most gleaned in casual conversation, before I get to the actual training:

• When I set up my sheep, don’t be married to the arrangement. You won’t know the ideal setup until you actually use it enough to create problems that might exist.
• When I buy sheep, I should work the group first, decide if they are good for my dog, and then buy them. Don’t just buy sheep someone wants to sell me.
• The secret to maintaining your weight as you age is portion control and forcing yourself to exercise (not stockdog related, but Kathy has been quite successful in this way) and not letting those around you convince you to get lazy about this.

So, onto the actual lessons.

The first day, she was a bit of a wild child – which I expected from many months off of this type of work and two months off from stock in any form. Kathy told me I wasn’t correcting strongly enough, and I needed to just go in there and be serious. It might not be everyone’s cup of tea in training, she warned, but that’s what Rippa respects and that I should enforce it quickly and then life will be easier. She also had me put a tab on Rippa so if I have trouble with  her (as I have in past lessons when she got confident and bratty) I’d have an easier time catching her.

I was so scared of doing outruns with her, but basically Kathy had me do what I was doing at Adelaida: obedience call offs. I’d lay her down on one end of the arena and call her to me. And back again. In a z pattern, getting closer and closer to the sheep. That way, we got Rippa calm and thinking “obedience” and the sheep calm because Rippa gets in there, gets low, and zeroes her beady yellow eyes at them with all the upright eye control that any Aussie has ever had behind her. 

This got her to relax, and then, interestingly, she started going to me kind of wide like she was going around me. I should note that when I call her, I call her to my outside leg – which builds up the dog’s outrun because instead of just coming in and facing the sheep, the dog will naturally have to swing wide around you, getting a wider arc, during outruns.

Well, this wide arching thing seemed to be a solution to my usual outrun of me between the sheep and the dog because instead of amping her up with a “get around” (which, if you use in casual conversation now, the dogs perk up as much as if they’d heard “cookie” or “sheep”), she would casually trot around me and get ready to lay down when I told her. So was born the sneaky “get around.”

I just called her around to me, kind of walked toward the sheep as I did it, and just never told her to lie down. We found that as long as I wasn’t running to protect the sheep, Rippa stayed pretty chill and in control. And thus, we have accidentally begun her slingshot outrun training.

Next, when I got them going, I had to trust Rippa to come back to balance, which she did. If I didn’t watch the sheep, and instead watched Rippa, we got into trouble. My handling always improves if I worry about what the sheep are doing.

BUT, I also needed to be much more “hardcore” about my unhappiness if Rippa came in too quick. The first day she got away with stuff because I was busy protecting the sheep from her. The second day, I got all kinds of serious and yelled at her and  . . . bammo. The next two days, the ratio of yelling or stick dropping  to “no, out, good dog” was a lot lower. In fact, there was one point that I clearly remember where she was ready to go for a sheep hock and I said, “Ahh, no” and she shot out of there like a bat out of hell. That’s my honest Rippa bear!

So, here’s your video of this, on day 3.

So, hoping that getting my own sheep works out soon so I can put the kind of mileage on her that she needs to get her calmed down so there’s less “out” and we can work on flanking commands and driving. And maybe reintroduce “get around” without overly stoking her. . .

2012 ASCA Nationals and I might get my own sheep after all!

Well, despite not having anybody to really trial at Nationals this year (I was really hoping to have Rippa bear ready for started, to go Most Promising Started – which is about a good award as any to get at Nationals), I thought since it was only two hours away, I should go. And I dragged the bandy (read, husBand) with me.

My friend Amy, who helps run my AussieBoard online bulletin board, was coming down and said that Finals needed duck handlers, which I was totally on board with. But, since I was going to be there Sunday and Monday, why not see if I couldn’t get into an agility pretrial, too?

So that’s what I did. We drove out to Bakersfield Friday night and got a hotel, up early on Saturday, and got there in time to hear the morning chicken song:

I am still wondering if that’s the club doing that or it’s an automatic fair thing. Either way, it definitely stoked me. It still does, even when I hear it on YouTube.

And so we were off. Fury hasn’t been trained in years – I just brush her off, maybe go up to the practice field once or twice before a trial, and we do okay. Rippa took an agility class with me back in April but my finances weren’t what they should be so I never continued it. But Y had built me a teeter totter because that and weave poles are her challenge. So, I’ve been poking at that half-heartedly and figured if I embarrass myself, who cares.

Well, I learned two things:

1. Don’t bring the husband next time. The dogs ran like this – oh, jump, and .. . Daddy? What? Oh, obstacle. Daddy? Daddy! And then it was over.

2. My tactic of training very rarely still works really great because my dogs have desire to please and learn. When they weren’t running to “daddy,” we did pretty good, with a qualifying and first place score for each! It’s not awesomely consistent, but it’s fun and I got myself a matched towel prize set for the bathroom!

Ribbons to match their red coats, and drinky cups for hot days (and it was hot!)

And then, I was so worked. 12 hours of hot weather, coordinating runs, helping everything run smoothly, etc took it’s toll.

But gotta do it all over again!

Only we did it in style, me and Amy:

Duck handling was super fun, when people weren’t complaining about how it was set up or what we were doing – but it was Finals, so I guess people get a pass, even though I think what we were doing was nicer to the duckies than what some of the Finalists wanted done.

At the end of the weekend, I was tuckered. I’d run scores for sheep and cattle and saw some really good dogs in some really good runs. I was inspired. It was gonna be okay.

And what of this blog and my training?

Well, Kathy Warren sent out an email a month ago essentially announcing her retirement and she has liquidated her sheep. Uh oh! But good for her – I’m sure she’s in love with her new grandson and her family in Oregon, and this has been coming a long while.

Last week, Nathan called to check in with me and said he’d finally finished harvesting and was going to classes with Laurie Batson, who I don’t know anything about. Missed the opportunity to go check her out last week, but may yet. She’s giving lessons in Atascadero, 30 min away.

In the meantime, Trish Alexander had moved an hour away to a ranch where she’ll give lessons and clinics, and trials, so there is that, as well. There will be a KW clinic there at the end of the month that I will be going to – which should help me address my questions and fears that I’ve come up with here on this blog. And hopefully make some good progress with Rippa bear.

And then . . . I went for a walk with my friend on the grounds I got married on – 15 unimproved acres that also houses my synagogue. A few years back, I asked about putting sheep on it, and everyone was amenable, but then a new project came to town: the Ranch. And they were ambitious, thinking the buildout would happen in months. I knew better.

A year or so later, they’ve broken ground and I tell my friend I’d be happy to help set up the animal part of the ranch, to which she sounds supportive and . . . one thing led to another, and I’ve got a proposal in front of the ranch committee for a sheep facility. For the cost of sheep and their housing, I’ll be contributing to a great project, have a sheep training facility right in my town, and even have people to help take care of them and benefit them in the same breath . . . can I say, yay?

Here’s a youtube video:

Next update will be whether that has gone through or not. I hope it does. We’ll know next week, hopefully.

The idea is they’d be behind that tree line there.

I Think I Get It Now

So after a day of fielding advice from people, and watching those videos over and over . . . (Poor Rippa goes crazy when she hears them)

I think I get it completely:

1. SHUT UP, Kristin.

2. Trust your dog. I keep watching this videos and even the ones where she “chomps” aren’t even horrible chomps. They’re measured.

3. I watched the one where I got a video of me trying to get her around and I am putting WAY too much pressure on the sheep to set up Rippa to be successful. I  have to just try it without being afraid of her wool pulling.

4. My timing’s not great. I understand that sometimes when I’m yapping, poor Rippa has no idea what I’m trying to show her because my body and my mouth are not in sync.

I am still worried that #2 will result in a wool pulling fiasco because in order to take the pressure off the sheep, there’s a moment between sending her and her fetching them to me where I can’t protect them if I need to stay off them to take pressure off and it could end up poorly. But, I guess, we can always stop it if it doesn’t work.