Dogs Gripping

I have it in my notes to write something up about dogs gripping (aka, biting) because the whole point of this blog is not just to talk about what I’m doing but help leave a trail of notes for someone trying to learn to work with their dog on livestock, too.

The PC term for “biting” in stockdog land is “gripping.” Ideally, the grip is measured depending on the stock and what it needs. The dog will use its bite to get the livestock’s respect. Ideal reasons for a bite are to get them moving (like biting a hock of a cow, or heel (hence it being called heeling)) or to make them stop fighting (like biting the poll, or forehead, of a cow).

Odds are, however, your dog is going to bite a lot more than that (or not at all), in different locations, and I wanted to address this.

There are some “nevers” that apply to trialing, but in real life, they don’t apply. A dog should “never” bite poultry in a trial, and very rarely should it bite a sheep (only if it’s fighting, and that’s really depending on your judge). But, at home, you can bet your sweet bippy that when Rippa got headbutted by a ram she was working I let her correct him for it.

But what’s appropriate correction? Let’s start with NOT MAULING. A strong, simple, non-vindictive correction that ends when the animal gets the message and goes back to calm movement.

Does that come naturally? Sure. But odds are, if you’ve got a dog with enough fight in her to go against a huge cow, she’s going to have to learn to control that fight with practice.

Let’s talk about your dog with no fight. Some dogs just don’t come with it – they will work as long as they’re not challenged and when challenged, it’s over. This seems to be a confidence thing that is partly inherently in the dog’s personality and can’t be fixed, and partly it’s just  lack of confidence from lack of experience. The latter you can work with. It’s key, however, not to force a dog into a grip situation when they are getting started, because it’s just as easy to shut them down with the pressure there.

Okay, so back to bites. A dog’s ideal target areas are the poll (spot where the horns are) on the head and the bottom of the hock (or heel). Some dogs will instinctually go for these spots right away. If so, hooray for you!

If not – your dog may never hit the ideal location – but most times they will learn through experience.

Most dogs grip for reason other than what the ideal is. It is almost always a function of confidence. If the dog feels like she has no other choice or option, out comes the bite. It may be because the dog is inexperienced and doesn’t know she has other options. It may be because she is inexperienced and it seems like the best option at the moment (not thinking of the consequences that a bite will have – such as losing or overly stressing the stock). A lot of times the bite comes out when the handler makes a mistake – feeds the dog the sheep, loses control the sheep herself or stresses the dog from yelling, fighting, etc.

I know these things because I did all these things. I know that things are bad when my dog starts biting sheep and it’s time to take it easy and reevaluate why.

1. My dog is just an alligator that wants to kill sheep

2. My handling is feeding my inexperienced dog sheep

3. My handling is frustrating my inexperienced dog and she feels like that’s all she can do

4. The sheep are not handling well and my inexperienced dog feels like that is all she can do.

5. The sheep are being bad and my dog needs to correct them.

6. The sheep aren’t moving and nothing but a bite will stop them.

7.  My dog just really likes gripping.

1 & 7 : nothing you can do here, that’s instinct, except maybe yell at them or let them get run over by cattle until they calm down. At which point, they might calm down because they are dead.

2-4: take a deep breath and get better at handling. If you can’t, it might be time to try heavier sheep, a more experienced dog, and definitely get a second set of eyes on your work

5-6: Do not correct your dog. This is okay. It’s easy to get upset when a dog grips at any point, but take a step back. Appreciate that your dog has enough power and judgment to make the call.

Now on to bite placement – as I said, not all dogs will start out with that ideal placement, and not all will end up with it. But . . . if you put your dog on cattle, they will eventually figure out that bites anywhere else are pretty dangerous. Newbie dogs tend to hang on to tails, bite higher up the thigh, bite the nose, and grab onto the sides of the livestock. Cattle will teach them quickly that this isn’t okay (but there is a risk of injury in letting this be the way they learn. If you’re just working sheep, experience can help there.

Anyway, just my observations at this point. Feedback welcome.

Take Pen Work and Relationship Building

Well, we took CA Sharp out to lessons with her dog today and I rented sheep. The drawback to me renting while she takes a lesson is that she gets the sheep I use in the arena and it’s lambs for me.

What happens with lambs? They are SO SCARED and they don’t like to stick together. Rippa has a lot of power behind her – and her instincts are to go in hard – she’s bred to work large herds of cattle. Lambs do not deal well.

They shot around the arena again like our “heavy” lesson sheep did when we first started, but I knew I just needed to let it go and she’d take care of it, even if it wasn’t pretty. And then I did it – I didn’t trust her. She would come in hot and I’d yell at her to lay down and then POW! Those sheep would be outta there and she’d have to get them again. I knew I was doing it, but my instincts are to make it look nice and I need to stop it. I took Rippa’s power away. Yes, she comes in hard, but she doesn’t go through them anymore. She’ll come up when they hit the fence, but I just can’t trust her.

And not trusting her is when I fall apart. She totally showed me why when we got the sheep back to the draw. I’ve said this before, I think, but she has an interesting arena setup – just past the draw where the sheep live, the pen jags in in an 8 x8 open area. The lambs would go hide in there and at first, Rippa would make an appearance and they would explode out of there.  After they settled, Rippa showed me she is trust worthy in a number of ways:

1. She eased up considerably when she saw them exposed and would get out of their flight zone without my prompting.

2. She walked up (straight up) easy on them to push them out, balancing a few feet out and waiting to see what they did.

3. She took her flanks and stayed tight against the fence.

This is a big deal because I haven’t had the opportunity to train 2 & 3 because of the conditions of Stephanie’s setup. This means that my method of just waiting for Rippa to learn how to handle the sheep is working – and that she’s got enough instinct and smarts for it to work.

SPARKLE!

Stephanie is bringing Jack Knox to the field on my birthday and I think I’m going to do it. I decided that since Kathy wasn’t around locally anymore that I would take opportunities to go to other clinicians just to see what they were about. It was a nice experience to do it with Betty, so might as well stay on my home turf and find out more about that. Stephanie says he should be very good for us because he’s good at relationship building, and that’s clearly what I need. I’m also prepared to have to fight for Rippa on this, though, because if anyone is a Border Collie trainer, it’s Jack.  I don’t know much about him, but I’ve heard that about him.

Tired Dogs . . . how’d they get that way?

Today I saw even more progress after a solid week off (Stephanie was busy and didn’t get back to me to schedule sheep rental) in terms of Rippa self-regulating herself. She’s getting better and better and sorting the sheep and more responsive to me – when the excitement wears off she gets more and more biddable, which is really exciting to watch.

But the sheep – my goodness! – they were feeling their wild oats today or just terrified of Rippa and were trying their hardest to get back to the gate draw and all the lambs. We had a really hard time stopping the action and holding them, even on the fence. They’d go one way and where they’d normally balance up, they’d push past and make a break for it.

Partly this is my fault – one time I wanted to try an out run with me between Rippa and the sheep since she is doing a really nice arc out around me but then getting tight when she picks the sheep up and was hoping I could push her out but instead she just dove straight at them and then moved out. Scary for a sheep!

But usually they would settle with some half moons and I wouldn’t get it this time. So . . . despite a couple pauses for them to calm down and catch their breath, we didn’t get a lot of useful mileage on them – though Rippa sure did.

She’s staying out wide now without as much reminding, but as I was saying, when normally they’d balance between me and the dog, they were aggressively pushing past me and Rippa would have to go around to me to balance them. As soon as she did, they’d hightail it the other direction and she’d have to go opposite me again at the top. Repeat, repeat, repeat.

Goodness, that little dog had to run a lot. She didn’t show much signs of being tired but I was pretty acutely aware that this was a pretty rigorous session for her physically and she was doing a beautiful job of handling it. One thing I know from my pursuits as an athlete is that if you get tired out, you stop paying attention and that’s when you get hurt and make mistakes and I didn’t want Rippa going there yet. It’s one thing to do chores for a whole day but baby dog is still learning to ease up and read her sheep and me.

So, we did the best we could to bring them back to the gate/draw under Rippa’s control and repen them (the repen looked awesome – full trial points for that if I do say so myself).

But it got me to thinking as she splished around in the stock trough for the dogs after (and she ALWAYS runs straight to the arena gate to get to water) . . . I am so grateful that I’m not just some hobby person whose main exercise for the dogs is sheep. She had plenty of go left after 40 minutes of what I described above (with breaks for everyone) and I am sure it’s because my husband and I put easily 50 trotting/running miles on her and her mother a week with runs and mountain biking.

I remember being at Betty Williams’ in Montana and she definitely lost some go-juice on the cattle there. Partly the weather (quite warm) and partly the brain fry in that case.  And I’m not sure I’ve talked about this in a blog post so thought I should.

A lot of times, people starting their dogs on livestock cannot understand why they fall apart quickly. The answer is – this is tiring!

1. It could very well be physical conditioning. I think the average dog gets way less exercise than I would think is healthy, and that’s simply because people don’t get that much exercise, either. Most dog people I know do very little in the way of fitness and figure some agility training or dog parking is enough. I like to think my dogs are incredibly healthy because they’re part of a family that wants at the least 30 minutes of real cardio a day. They get out EVERY DAY. And many days they get hours of real, solid cardio. If people are taking even ranch dogs just around with no real pressure on exercising them for hard tasks, they’ll tank out just like people. Dogs have better natural athleticism for this kind of thing than people, but they’ll collapse at some point.

2. Brain frying. I think most times a dog getting started gives up and looks tired, it’s less the exercise thing (because sessions are really short to begin with) and more the brain thing. Imagine being immersed in a situation that you find incredibly stimulating, but people (usually strangers) are poking at you with sticks and expecting something. You’re not totally free to explore that thing in a way that keeps you energized (for good reason, dogs running on pure stoke can get bad habits and hurt things, including themselves), so the stress of trying to learn in that environment just wipes them out.

If your dog is looking like she’s had enough, don’t push her beyond that. She’ll get hurt, you will get hurt, or your stock will get hurt. She either needs some leg up or she needs  some time to process. Both are okay.

Working in Public

Only one work day this week, but that’s okay – it rained and that makes me happy. So today we rolled out again to Creston, and just put the miles in. I don’t have too many expectations and don’t want to do too much “training” because I feel like Rippa needs to learn how to manage her sheep. An outrun here, a fetch there, a lot of walking. Some fence work. I pulled out a couple lambs with this group but they were just panicking too much so we put them back. Sorting is going really well – as is just sitting back and having her bring me sheep – she’s doing less sheep bowling and more “getting” out, which I kind of figured would happen if I helped her and also trusted her.

I’m really happy with Rippa as a stockdog, and I realize I’m just a hobby person but the end goal for me is to be an ambassador to the cattle community here and everything I’m seeing in Rippa is what I want to see – she’s got a better sense of group than her mother, but a bit more biddable (though again, that could be because I didn’t mishandle her for years). She’s willing to take it down a notch and takes commands pretty well – though I’m not expecting too much yet. Good team work, good instinct, I feel like I’m getting so much from her without having to show her too much. Good stuff.

Anyway, Stephanie was gone today so again I was on my own. I’m getting into a rhythm on the drive: look for the exit, through the trees with the deer, up the grade, there’s the lavender farm with the lavender trailer for selling it . . . long horns, vineyard with the old car parked on the ridge, and turn.

Stephanie lives on the top of some rolling hills so the arena I’m working in is in plain view of two of her neighbors – both of whom happen to always be home. The neighbor with dogs doesn’t pay me much mind, but the neighbor that loads the horse trailer every time I’m there (what are you doing? Every time?) watches us. I generally think I do a good job of keeping my voice down compared to how I handled in the past, but once in a while it gets “western” (a term I recently learned for . . .  less quiet control of stock, if you will) and I’ll start yelling to get some dog respect and I’m sure people in a mile radius can hear me.

It’s different – that. I’m used to working in a canyon with no one but dog people around. I think it’s good to know you’re accountable to the outside world like that, though. As I said, I’ve been doing a good job keeping my voice down and now that I’m not panicked like I used to be, I can manage situations before they get ugly. The neighbors watched Rippa try to bring a lamb in really hard but she was too close and it became kind of pointless so I had to call her off and do it myself, but you know, that’s okay. At least they know I’ve got the little baa baa backs.

When it’s time to let the dog just do the work . . .

So the last two sessions (if you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m working twice a week at Stephanie’s) have gotten better and better. So much so that this session, I thought, “Well, I should get off the big stick crutch and use the little stick.”

But this is a bad idea. We get so ahead of ourselves we forget how much foundation we need to lay to change so many things. Rippa is just now starting to figure out how to work in a larger space without the fence for help – why would I add something else to that mix if she hasn’t got it dialed? And so, no, I stayed with my 8 foot stick.

But I have to say, this work today was pretty flawless in terms of my setting expectations.

We are now just sorting the sheep ourselves. Stephanie generally lets the sheep out and then sorts out the sheep she wants into a smaller squeeze chute off the arena, but I’ve been taught how to sort with just a gate so all I need to do is ask Rippa to walk up to the sheep, and she’ll easily go around the barn obstacle and bring them to me and the gate. They didn’t really want to do that today (instead wanting to circle), so it took a few goes, but once Rippa got what I wanted, she positioned herself in a balanced spot so that the sheep would stop in front of the gate.

It takes some work to pull the adult lesson sheep out of the lambs, but she would inch forward without my asking as I needed it and we got a good batch of four sheep today.

As soon as we got them out, they headed to the middle of the arena, so while I closed the gate, I let Rippa get them without giving her a command. She starts out slow to see if I want it to happen and if I say nothing, she starts heading toward them.

It’s not a beautiful outrun where she stays way outside their flight zone and then dips in at the top – it’s a pretty rough gather in that she just kind of tips in and banks them toward me, but she does it, and then when they come up to me at the gate, she stops herself. I’m good with that. That’s healthy, happy, functional work and we can work on the fancy later – the foundation for what’s expected (calm control of the livestock) is laid and she’s half-way out of the arena getting them so hey, I’m happy.

The sheep are nearly always spooked, but I have figured out that if I show them how Rippa controls them (unlike the eye-dog BCs she’s used to who work them very differently) by doing silent half-moons on the fence while Rippa balances up and reads her sheep, we can start going.

And so we did. We headed out all the way to the end of the arena and back – not straight, mind you, lots of zigging, but we did it.

At this point, I think I need to focus on handling my end of the sheep because they are light enough to just blow past me if I don’t sometimes block them and let Rippa figure out where she needs to be to stop running like crazy as she wears them back and forth  - she’s getting wider and wider and will go “out” if I remind her, but I don’t really want to have to keep “out”ing her, so I’m trying to keep it to a minimum – right now my goal is less command oriented and more just letting Rippa use her instinct and knowledge to work the sheep.

I have to say – it’s fun to watch. Now that she’s learned not to go flat on the top but that with sheep like this, you win by getting further out, it’s cool to watch her do it. She gets a massive workout because the sheep don’t easily settle  and she can’t just fall in behind them – she’s got to move to each side to check on the sheep and she’s got to poke them back in (but then they over correct and it’s back to the other side), but it looks good from where I sit.

Last lesson, we did some center pen work (FABULOUS) but I made the mistake of opening the gate to send her in and the whether with horns fully rammed her. Rippa didn’t blink – she just went back to work – not even made at the ram, but definitely watching him.

This work there was a ewe that kept breaking off (I mentioned this ewe in earlier lessons a couple months ago) and Rippa did a great job of not letting her get too far. She tends to drop the singleton if they get out too much and go, naturally, to the bigger group and bring them to her – I can hear Kathy yelling, “Bring the many to the one!” I’m impressed the dog is doing it. I’m not sure I want her to do that in trialing scenarios, but it shows me her stock sense and I’ll let her  have it.

And then, since she’d been working so hard, we got back to the gate, she balanced up, I opened the gate, and we put them away.

It was pretty great. Not all days will be that great, but it’s tangible progress and feels great after a few weeks ago when I was nervous that the arena was too big and the sheep too light.

The plan now is to keep putting miles on until Rippa manages them herself, then go to the short stick, and then we’ll start working on some issues (the less than beautiful outrun, she goes a little flat on the top instead of staying out) and refining our commands.

One step back, two steps forward

So, I last left you feeling a bit “iffy” about moving into the arena and how the sheep were really bouncing all over.

I post this blog to my Facebook page and basically, I came to the conclusion that I probably knew what I was doing and wasn’t going to break my dog, so the last two days of lessons this week, I just relied on that. Realizing that we looked great in a pen, we absolutely had to slide backward with a huge new environment to work with. Rippa has to learn how to work the sheep with a whole new set of terms: bigger space, more insecure sheep, more insecure handler. Gotta realize that and know that things will go okay, just like they did in the round pen.

This morning, Stephanie was away and didn’t set sheep out so I had to sort my own. She’s only got about four adult sheep we can work right now because the rest are pregnant. There’s lambs, but working lambs is cruel for a dog as green as Rippa.

This is the first time I’ve tried sorting with Rippa with full intention to do it because I knew it was okay, and I have to say . . . I’m super impressed. Rippa is definitely proving herself as a viable stockdog partner now that I’m not stressing. She went into the holding pen with all the sheep in it very cautiously and worked with me not being able to see her (there’s a little shed for them that she has to go around) and while I stood at the gate, she brought them to me and laid down.

I can’t give her flank commands in this situation yet, but if I went to replace her, she did it happily.

And so I sorted out six sheep (some lambs) thinking maybe if I had more, it would be better. Then, knowing I can’t set up a nice outrun, I just started with half-moons on the fence until Rippa balanced herself, but I kept finding the lambs on the outside getting the brunt of her pressure and didn’t like it, so I used her to help put them back. Very successful work.

And then we took a walk. I have to use the big stick to point out what I don’t want her to do right now, but it’s not a battle. It’s just there as a visual cue to stay out or go a different way.

We can’t walk straight anywhere right now because she’s coming in too close to them and making them kind of zig zag along, but I think the more she does this and when I mark the good, straight bits, the mileage will work out.

This whole method worked great and the sheep stayed under her control the whole time. I have noticed she’s kind of flat on the top of the arc (what’s creating the zig zag) so I used her flanks to make her circle and watch where she jogged in, using the big stick to push her out and it worked well.

Now that I’m using the big stick again after the little one, I totally see how I crutched on it before, and I’m trying really hard to only use it as a tool and not a necessity. I think we’ll need it for when we start out to remind Rippa to keep out and easy, but next work I’ll drop it in favor of the little stick because she’s definitely taking my “outs’ and “nos.”

I’m really excited that we’ve got it going on now. I don’t feel good about her outruns and flanks, but my thought is work a little on those but let her learn to manage her sheep without me and that will come.

And then I went to visit with my friend on her big ranch and took the dogs hunting for squirrels in the hills. Good day.

Transitioning from Round Pen to Arena

So, this week we went back into the arena to work on our foundation, but it wasn’t as seamless as I had hoped.

We were in the the round pen and we had good balance, good responsiveness to my needs, and her outruns were pretty good, and probably only getting better if I got out of that tight space.

I’m used to transitioning from the round pen to a smaller pen that Kathy called “the duck pen” for duck trialing – it was a good size to move into because you still had the control on everything and then the dog and sheep got some more space to work in, usually for the better. I found moving from there to the arena was pretty painless in terms of expectations – the dog could do good outruns to pick the sheep up and had a fetch, and now it was time to just work on finite training and drives.

So, jumping from the round pen where it was getting pretty boring from one perspective, I am now in the arena.

I went in on Wednesday, but Stephanie forgot/didn’t know I was coming (email lines crossed) and so there weren’t sheep set out for me. She trusts me not to mess stuff up, so I decided to sort my own lesson sheep out and give it a go if everything went fine.

Rippa did an amazing job in the pens holding her ground while I sorted. I am really used to Fury’s abundant energy and intensity, and Rippa is far more laid back than I give her credit for – it was really not a big deal for her to lay down and let me sort sheep, and this is something we’d never done before.

So the sheep are now in the arena, but they are BOUNCING ALL OVER THE PLACE and I can’t set up anything for Rippa. These are the same lesson sheep we used in the round pen, but now they have space to escape and my green dog doesn’t really know what to do with that. So, we walked around a bit, I downed her, tried to get them to settle, but even I was too much for them. After five minutes of realizing it was going to be “chase sheep around the arena,” I put them back. I figured not to mess with stuff, especially if Stephanie didn’t know I was there.

So, as soon as I got home, I let her know what I did, and as I expected, she was fine with it, so now we’ve got it going on that even if she’s not around, I can come out, which is super.

I came out today and rented sheep after she did a lesson for someone in the arena for an hour or so. I gave the sheep a big, big break, and then we went in.

Same thing. Sheep bouncing everywhere – they are lighter than I’d like for this. I had thought about the earlier fruitless work and knew that Rippa wasn’t going to seek and destroy, so I probably just needed to let everyone get the feel of things without expecting too much out of anyone.

Now, armed with the assurance that Rippa gets what I want, I aimed to get them on the fence and let Rippa do her thing until she figured out that she needed to take pressure off them. It wasn’t pretty, but after me sitting there and just marking good things with “yes” and bad things with “no” we had the sheep settled enough to fetch a bit and stop and they wouldn’t bail.

It basically feels like starting over again, but Rippa knows commands better. Toward the end of the lesson, I tried to kind of teach Rippa her distance outruns by obediencing them – I’d tell her “out” and if she gave the sheep shoulder and moved laterally, she got a “good” and tried adding “out – go by” and it worked pretty well, but eventually she’d had enough and we put them away.

I have to admit it’s frustrating that it didn’t go as cleanly as I’m used to it going from one pen size to another, but there’s not option for something intermediate. Rippa has to learn how to rate her sheep with no help from the fence pressure, and I think I probably just have to settle into things not looking as nice in the round pen until she does.

I also think it’s time to bring the big stick with a bottle back – in the arena, the extra space makes her turn on the pressure too much and I think she’s going to need help getting out to take it off. Me running at her with the sheep running in the opposite direction won’t help us out one bit.

So, we’ll see how that goes. I did a lot of searching the Internet for something about that transition, but it doesn’t appear to be “a thing,” so  . . . I guess I’ll do my best. Advice welcomed.