Space to think and not just feel

I gave a speech yesterday at my Toastmasters club about how the way to achieve more is to learn how to manage the stress that achievement brings with it.  In the middle of the speech (I speak mostly off the cuff), I connected something I’d seen recently with dogs to the point I was making.

This video was posted a while back on someone’s page, asking for what we thought of it.

Shelter Behavior Training - Aggression Toward People from Bound Angels on Vimeo.

People heavily into positive and clicker training obedience thought what the guy was doing here was wrong, and cruel. However, I think what he’s doing here is right. The dog has all these intense emotions and is operating on instinct. He can’t learn like that. He can only learn by finding an alternate way to deal with those feelings. That means making him strongly pay attention to other stimulus and see that flight is an option, not just fight. And . . . it worked. The dog started thinking instead of just feeling.

This is totally a stockdog thing, though I don’t think I’ve heard it articulated anywhere before. I always explain to people that my dogs are more edgy than usual dogs because when a cow says, “No,” they’ve been bred to instinctively react in fight mode to that. People, me included, don’t always come prepared for that and can really mess up how a dog interacts with the world if you don’t fully understand that.

But you’re going to get horrible messes if all they do is react with fight mode and instinct. You’ve got to have that space to think and react, too.  Training your dog (and you) needs to include this part of it, too. When a puppy and new handler first start, it’s usually the handler all thinking and the puppy all feeling and the magic happens when there’s a balance.

That’s what I’ve been working on with Rippa. She is getting to a point where it’s not just “wahoo!” whenever she’s on stock, but she’s thinking and applying the lessons we’ve used (like going around obstacles rather that going in tight, taking square flanks, and just balancing herself to me and the stock) more and more. She’s better on goats and sheep because she’s had more time on them. She understand them, and there’s no threat to her.

With cattle, though, she starts out pretty excited unless I put the screws to her in the beginning. I’m doing flank commands off stock and “outs” as well as plain obedience, then I go in, move the stock with her on a down stay and show her they’re mine, and then we go to work and things are nice. I saw a lot of thinking out there today and a lot of really good decisions when she had space to make them.

But, if she has to break into a run, you can see her brain start panicking and she goes for dumb moves – coming in too close to them, taking high bite shots (and getting kicked), etc. Experience is what she needs (and what I need) in this department. We’re both finding a balance between tightening the screws on her and just letting her work. Shannon wants me to be able to get more sharp responses because a foot or two can make a difference, but I also have to balance it with Rippa’s need to work independently of me, too.

I’m reading Bob Vest’s book right now to see what he has to say and one of the things I’ve got so far out of it is this thing about 55 gallon drums. You can have a dog with 55 gallons of confidence, but if you undermine the dog with bad handling and training, you lose a little in ever session (I feel like I did this with Fury). You can have a dog with 25 gallons and you can use that dog, but you might never get 55 unless you work on it – I feel like that with Rippa. And then anything less, you’re going to be working hard, but you have to do it. I don’t think a lot about building confidence in dogs when training, but the agility people have this part down. I think that’s why Rippa isn’t trialing well when I take her to agility trials – I’ve not built her confidence up because I assumed she was a 55 gallon dog like Fury and didn’t need to.

Now to figure out how to do that, exactly.

The line between instinct and self control: we have found it.

My view on the way to Stephanie’s.

An interesting thing has happened with Rippa that hasn’t happened with Fury. When I started training Fury again on sheep and ducks, Rippa and Fury worked a lot a like in terms of how they were reading and the control that was happening. Granted, I was giving Fury slack for bad handling mistakes of the past and not working in a few years, but I felt like they were kind of in the same spot with training.

Rippa has utterly surpassed Fury in the last few weeks and the contrast is making it really obvious to me. It may be mileage, but I think it’s more to credit our work on cows than anything.

My dogs have a lot of drive and instinct to DO SOMETHING with animals. It has felt, with both of them, that I have a lot of raw energy that I have to keep under control with my handling, but something has definitely shifted with Rippa.

We’d been working roping steers the last few weeks and they have a way different dynamic than the older cows and the calves the Woods now have. There was this one steer that was a bully to the other one and made it really hard to control the whole herd. Rippa quickly ID’d that steer and wanted to work him and sacrifice the group because she was so annoyed with him (I assume – I felt the same way handing him). But with the careful, patient prodding of what to do with that situation from Shannon, I’ve been handling Rippa different and putting more obedience on things. When she goes to pick them up, I drop her just before her adrenaline takes control and she goes too hard to control them. I call her off the steer, etc.

It, in turn, has given her space to make decisions and think, finally. Our last session on cattle was really nice because she was doing that. A lot of the reason we’re not killing it at this point is that I’m still bad at handling and reading the situation, but Shannon had a nice thought on that: “You’re worried about what your dog is going to do. Keep worrying about her until you don’t have to, then you can worry about what you’re doing.”

But this all really came together on Stephanie’s sheep last time.

She has a LOT more sheep than when we started now because lambing season’s over (though there are some late lambs in the mix) and everyone’s all together again instead of separated out. That means I have a bigger herd to sort from and it’s a little harder because if I try to sort out of the pen she keeps them in, the light ones stay to the front and the heavy ones to the back, so I have to let them all out and then go over to this small, weird shaped pen with a point at the back and sort them into there because the leader sheep go first.

But, never overfill your pen, ESPECIALLY if it has a point at the back that they can get stuffed in.

It’s happened before and it happened again, I had one of the rams in there and when Rippa went to move them out of the pen, he wasn’t having it. Backed up and faced her, stamping, ready to charge. That kind of thing in a little pen isn’t good so I tried a couple things to fix the situation (like sending her on the outside of the pen, but he just rammed the fence), so I ended up putting her on a down and dragging him out by his horns. He was still being a jerk and backed himself into a corner and wouldn’t move. I tried backing Rippa’s pressure up with my stick but he wasn’t having it.

Rippa’s frustrated, but patiently waiting for me to do something. She doesn’t want to walk up on him because he’s going to charge her so she wants help. She literally says, “I don’t want to start a fight with him, but I don’t know what to do.” This, the dog that was bite first, ask questions later six months ago.

So, I told her she could hit him. She did a lot of yelling and feinting to try to make her point, but finally decided he needed some hits, so she would hit, reasses, hit again, reassess. This happened a few times, great shots to the poll until he still wouldn’t move and she hit him in the ear. That worked. For a bit. 

We had to have a couple gos with him, and I got some sheep out to get him moving nicely again (she had to heel the sheep to get them to move out of that little point, which was a bummer – not what I want her take pen experience to be like)– putting him away quickly, but the key was that even with Rippa hitting him, she didn’t let her instinct and stress get the best of her. It was hit, reassess, warn, hit, reassess.  She didn’t get him fixed with the hits, but I really don’t know what she was going to do because he would rather get bit by her than just run and give to the pressure.

Moreover, that would have had her all emotionally charged for her work the rest of the time, but she settled into the basic working jobs just fine . . . penning, working on calling off the top, driving.

I’m still sucking at the driving thing still – I can do fine with it along fencelines, but neither I nor Rippa feel like she’s got control on the drive away from them. It’s fine. I’ve been working on getting better responsiveness before we move on to that seriously.

And talk about giving to pressure – we have a cat who hates the dogs. Fury cannot help herself but to growl on back and charge the cat, but Rippa? She just turns her head away and gives the cat her space.

It’s very cool. I feel like we’ve hit a milestone in maturity with her. I had been wondering if it would ever be a natural, easy fetch and plain work without a lot of me having to watch her – the answer is yes, it is.

Good dog.

It is starting to come together!

Remember how I said I needed to work on outruns and take pens? Hmm.

So, following yesterday’s cattle runs, I took Rippa and Fury out to Stephanie’s for sheep this morning. I was SO tired. It was a late night accidentally and I could barely keep my eyes open. Perhaps that has to do with it.

When I got Rippa going, on new sheep, nonetheless (not our usual heavy ones – we usually have a rough go of it when I take CA along – which I did today - because my heavy sheep are occupied), things were pretty much close to perfect.

I decided to work on her outruns, but found that she was naturally turning her shoulder out and going out wide without me asking. If she turned in too much, I just had to lay her down and ask again and she’d go further out. If she was going too fast, I just had to ask her to be “easy” and she’s slow to a trot. There was not a single out of control moment. I was doing outruns from 50 meters away and I never do that.

When we did fetching, she balanced up super good and if she got too close, it just took a “no” for her to get out. The sheep actually lined out instead of bunching up because she was chilling out enough to let them naturally cruise along.

I credit this monumental leap in training to Shannon and Dustin (though mostly Shannon lately). They’ve been having me put a little more obedience on her – and ask for more than I usually would – when I work with them. The day before, Rippa was worried about going to a cow on the fence and buzzing, so we had to lay her down before she got close enough to really get in a mess and since the stakes were higher with the cattle, she was down with that. I think that she found that taking my commands kept her safe and helped her be calm and she carried that forward with the sheep today.

The balancing up on the fetch I also totally credit to a method she taught me where you lay the dog down and walk ahead of the sheep, letting them drift and not letting the dog get up until they need to get up because the sheep aren’t feeling the pressure. No commands, you just lay the dog back down if they get up too soon. Otherwise, the dog is allowed to get up and work, and as they start moving faster you slow them down with either a down or an “steady” and if they take it, work continues.

I’m trying it with Fury, who has had a very hard time balancing the sheep because of bad experiences. She works ducks and cattle fine (no, my 11 year old dog isn’t on cattle anymore), but sheep is issues because of my bad handling in the past. Once she gets that relaxation thing and the game, it should go well, too. Pretty neat.

The other thing we “worked” on was take pens. I don’t have a really good take pen setup at any place. The ducks have a full trial setup now, but it’s hard to practice take pen skills on ducks because the are different from other stock and the take pen is so small. That said, we have inadvertantly been doing that because the ducks like to mash in the corner where the door to their enclosure is, so both dogs have learned to be patient and how to get them out of that corner.

Rippa’s been doing pen work via sorting her sheep out at Stephanie’s but it’s a smaller, weirder setup than what you’ll find at a trial. I figured it was good enough to try it today, so I did.

The first go, the sheep got packed into the back of the pen (it’s not square, more like wide on one side and narrow on the other) and Rippa couldn’t get enough space to get around them. Instead of telling her what to do, I let her sort it out. The sheep would stamp at her, and after trying a couple things, she went outside the pen, got into a bow and gave them ugly face and a little bark and they made space. When I got her back in the pen, they came out and she was nose-to-sheep leg, calmly waiting for them to file out. We did it three times before I was satisfied we had that dialed and. . . that was that.

Sometimes I feel like I’ll never get there – so much power and drive and so little perfection on my part and then my dog goes and shows me she’s getting it. It’s one day and she will likely get worse before she gets consistent, but it’s in there. We got this.

Psyched!

Going to work ducks tomorrow and sell my obnoxious call duck and one runner that just refuses to work. Next week we are off – the huz and I are going to do some epic canyoneering and climbing in Yosemite. Give the dogs plenty of time to think about this awesome week.

Notes from the Kathy Warren Clinic

I’m tempted to write my own thoughts from this week and the last few works, but I’ll never get this down if I do that.

Going to this clinic was sort of like going to lessons with her with mostly fresh eyes. Rather than having an ongoing weekly visit, I don’t think Kathy has seen Rippa and I together for over a year. I am so used to working on my own now that taking the clinic made me see the best use for it in a different way. I used to go to classes and really pay attention to everything, but after a while you look, you don’t focus, and you just do what she tells you. This round – knowing that this was a limited time thing to get her opinions and thoughts – I brought the notebook and tried to watch every dog work, asking questions as much as I could. Moreover, I paid more attention to the advanced dogs workings, as I’m about where I left off with Fury when we stopped training her consistently.

Because of this, and because I don’t have a better way to do it – I’m going to lump the different thoughts into categories. You can read them all, or you can look for what suits you best.

These are my notes – some things are direct from Kathy, but assume it’s my memory of them, not necessarily what she is actually saying. I don’t do that kind of skilled transcription.

General Thoughts

• If you raise your dog right, and don’t spoil them, they’ll work better for you. This means that kenneling them and not living with them, letting them be in your bed, etc is part of that. Obviously you have to make concessions based on what you want the dog for (a friend or a working dog), but it’s much easier to train if you have that kind of relationship.
• Do not trial until you do what you do at home in a trial (I had a terrible first work because I didn’t just start how I do at Stephanie’s or the Woods, or even on my ducks – I tried to do something else). That means, if you’re expected to pick stock up a certain way to start – you better be able to do that, without much thought.
• When training – ask your dog for something, back it up, then test to see if they need the backup the second time. If they do, it’s time to go back to basics until you can test and get consistent success.
• Doing the kind of things you want your dog to do with just you and the stock is helpful – if you don’t know where to place yourself, how will you know where to place the dog? (I think this is something I really appreciate from being able to work without anyone watching – I’m really getting this part down because I have no help.)
• Something I really appreciate about Kathy’s “culture” during lessons – you pretty much aren’t allowed to tell students what you think because Kathy controls those conversations. It cuts down on ignorant yapping and cross talk. I have had problems with this going to other people for lessons – I want to hear from the person I’m taking instruction from only. My temperament does not handle multiple opinions at once. I find most of those opinions aren’t that valid, either – you need to look at what you want from who you want to figure out where to take it.
• When working dogs, don’t have a lot of stops if you can help it – flow makes it all a lot easier.  It creates bad working habits and doggy emotions. (I’ve been asking for a lot of stops because I want that control. Oops.)
• Be aware of what you look like to strange stock. (I was wearing a skirt during one of the works and the sheep did NOT like it.)
• If you’re running backward, you’re doing it wrong. The dog should be giving pressure.
• People seemed to be letting their dogs get up too fast after handlers hit them with a “stay.” Make the dogs stay for at least 5 seconds if you do it or they’ll cheat you.
• Over exaggerate everything and you’ll have more consistent results and better trialing because it will degrade under stress or relaxation.
• Keep the stick low when you use it – make sure that the dog and sheep, which are two foot high, can see it; it’s not for you.
• If you’re going to be keeping a flock or herd, remember to keep light, medium, and advanced sets – especially if you give lessons. Heavy and extremely light sheep can work, but if you’ve got an intermediate dog that needs something in between, you’re in trouble, and mixing heavy and light will just make really frustrating work as one stays and one leaves.
• Light sheep just need a ton of space – half an arena at times. You have to work to get a dog’s confidence to allow that to happen.
• WATCH YOUR STOCK – more than the dog, even, if you can. You’re leaning, you’re getting bad timing, and you’re asking for the wrong things because you are not watching your stock.
• Don’t cheat yourself – work on fixing what’s not right before you move on to new challenges. It’s okay to go backward, too.
• Don’t let your “down” erode into a stay if you can help it. Use different commands.
• Some dogs need boots for the clinics – these are usually the ones that live on urban footing – carpet, concrete, grass. It’s the dry, hard ground that gets them because they aren’t calloused up enough.
• The “Steady” command can only be given if the dog has time to slow down and steady. Don’t give it if it has to slow down and stop (or turn to get out) unless you’re training it.
• A good way to learn whistles? Record yourself making the sounds and then practice along. Make up your own sounds.
• Duck management – keep pools and food out in the working area so it’s fun to go out to.
• Proof your dog a lot on the obedience stuff – if “stay” really means stay, they won’t move even if they’re getting stepped on. But then let them think when you’re working or you can get into trouble with that.
• Outruns: I’ve been crutching on keeping Rippa close so I can have her turn her shoulder and run around. Keep her far away and stay close to the sheep – if she doesn’t turn her shoulder when you ask for it, you have plenty of time to get to her to correct it until she does.

Starting Young Dogs

• When you first start a keen dog – you’re really only worried about keeping them off the stock and learning “out” and how to work the flight zone. If the dog learns to balance him/herself with you and the stock from the get go – that’s all you want. Don’t ask for fetching or being perfect on both sides until they understand to stay off the stock. (After watching a dog this week, though, I wonder what happens if you have a sticky dog – no sticky dogs between the BCs and Aussies this weekend.)
• Watch the head of your dog – they’ll hold it higher when they’re not thinking “biting” thoughts. They will lower it when they go in for a challenge – be there as soon as you see it. You want to keep the dog thinking “calm” thoughts.
• Teaching flanks is easy – just label it when it happens. It’s the square corners and the “out” that are hard. People get excited about the flank commands and don’t spend enough time on the hard stuff.
• Read the dog’s personality – be ready to deal with bad habits and instincts so it doesn’t let it start. If the dog is wild-minded, work at keeping them calm. If they are sticky, move a lot. Etc. Whatever is in there to start will be in there later, so better not to let it come out until it’s controllable by the dog’s intellect and handler’s skill.

Driving Tips:

• Don’t start driving until you can have the sheep parked in front of the handler. Get that “there” command by walking backward with the dog at the top when you give it.
• Handy drawing – I wasn’t doing it right so Kathy physically made me work her like a dog with the stick until I got the body english right. Here’s my notes on that.
• 
• STAY OUT OF THE DOG’S WAY. People have trouble with this – I feel like I don’t, but I probably do.  Plan the draw of the sheep when you give your flanks and “there.” Turn and go with the dog to hold them out. All you need to start is following with you getting out of the way and stopping them when they get to head (either a stop or a fetch flank command)
• Handy picture:
• To start, you’ll be close to the stock as in #2, but when you stick a stick out, the dog has to go around you and you have to change directions a lot to get the dog and you used to driving.
• As you get more advanced, you’ll want to be ahead of the dog’s path, out of the influence of the sheep, and when you stick the stick out, the dog has space to get the flank and stay driving (as in #1)
• If you’re too close, you’ll just feed sheep or force a fetch (as in #3)
• On the drive, you want to stay in front of the dog and out of the way of the sheep’s flight zone so you can fix the outside flank. Logic makes me think you should be behind the dog, but being in front of the dog allows you to draw him to you and then give a “there” rather than the dog do an outrun around you. (see figures 2 and 3)
• If there’s a lean to your dog, fix with a short flank command.
• The next steps are the following – with Kathy’s classic drawings:
1. Verbally, without body english or stick work, get the dog to balance up with a flight zone around the sheep for you and her.
2. Start a drive, but only expect about two steps, then end it with a stop or a flank fetch command.
3. Now it’s time to stop the lean  of the dog (who wants to go to head) with flank commands by watching where you go and helping the dog get it.
4. To start, there will be big flanks that start and stop the drive until the dog fixes herself with no flank commands.

More Advanced Stuff:

• Even if it looks nice, never let the dog cheat the fence line on a take pen.
• As dogs get more advanced, “Out” means “Just relieve pressure” and you let the dog make the call how (turning out of flight zone, slowing down, which direction to turn, etc)
• “There” should literally mean “bring her to the hole in front of you, not to me, wherever I am.” I wonder if it’s helpful to practice using the command with gates and panels to help the dog understand the point of that.
• Teaching shedding
• Start with a person doing the shedding and just let the dog hold the sheep on their end, like a wall, the fine tuning comes from the person.
• Two steps is all it should take to create the division, then call the dog to you. Then let the dog put pressure on them to separate them, but it will fry their brains to let them do that. Have them hold only one group, but do it nicely.
• It’s tempting to drill the heck out of advanced dogs and fine tune them, but remember that you also need to work on things to relax them or that fine tuning will amp them up – do NOT over train. if your dog is doing great, let it be fun! Think of advanced training as times tables. It starts to REALLY suck if you keep forcing the issue.

Getting to the fun training (at least for me)

Didn’t have cattle this week, which was okay, but slightly disappointing, because after watching the video, I want another go at it. And I will have it next week . . . so no whining, right? Opportunities abound.

It’s been a fun ag week for me. The husband and I went out to pick out our replacement hens – this year I just went for the prettiest ones because me going for good layers hasn’t worked out so well (one died, one went broody, and two quit laying).

Here are the little guys:

Today I took the girls out to Stephanie’s to work on stuff. I have my Kathy Warren clinic weekend next weekend (and I will bring both dogs since the huz is away working during that same time period) and there’s some goals I have before I show up: improve that outrun, and get Rippa ready to learn to drive with her. I haven’t gotten this far with Fury so I think having Kathy teach me to do it would be the best use of this clinic.

Here’s the things I think I need to be able to do for Kathy to do it:

1. Be able to pull your dog off the top and circle off-balance without affecting the sheep. Check (mostly – sometimes she’s a little tight and they drift, but nothing big).

2. Be able to down your dog at anywhere around that off-balance circle. Check (mostly – Rippa isn’t an instant downer, she’ll take a couple steps before she stops).

So this lesson was making sure I had that part down. We used a small flock (only 3 sheep) and worked on Rippa’s obedience in taking the down and getting out.

I’m sensitive that she gets pretty bored with this kind of training so we did some fetching, and then I worked on that outrun. She still obviously doesn’t “get” that she should stay out to gather them if I’m not there to help her – and taking people’s advice, I have started to obedience it a bit. It’s funny, because people generally when they tell me to do this say that I’m teaching the dog to think rather than use obedience, but I’d say using commands is obedience. Relative perspective?

I took a video of me doing this. You’ll notice two things: 1 – I don’t yell NEARLY like I used to. I love being calm and happy. Stockdogging is zen! 2 – Snuffly me – a combination of having a cold and having allergies made me the sick kid. Sorry for all that sniffle.

It was a nice, quiet stockdog day. Toward the end, to make things interesting, I worked on penning and Stephanie’s chute-panel. We need more work there. Rippa has no idea whether to follow them through the chute (which makes them panic and her lose control) or to stay on the outside and hold them. The answer is neither. We’ll figure it out.

We  got in her really tight sorting pen today to move sheep out for Fury and I was really impressed. She didn’t take any pot shots, hit legs gently to move them, and generally the sheep stayed super calm. Fun times.

And then it was Fury’s turn. As I said, I don’t expect a lot from her right now. She hasn’t worked in like five years. She takes her flanks and downs and it’s just time to teach her how to balance to me gently and kindly. I had to video this because the way these two dogs work are night and day.

Rippa is upright upright upright and tight working. Fury has more eye and wider working. You can guess which dog the border collie person likes. I think Rippa works more like her dad, but the more I do this, the more I appreciate Fury’s natural style, too. I hope it’s in Rippa somewhere because it would be nice to have a blend of the two in future generations.

There’s not much to the video, I’m sorry, but I was just really happy at how calm everything is, even with Fury bear. I’m again so blessed to be able to try training her again after everything else. So blessed for that foundation and blessed that my eleven year old dog has plenty of go-juice left.

The time honored dip-in-a-stock-tank tradition.

And then we headed out to visit the ducks at the Best Family Farm. Jennifer has been so cool about them – she takes them out to leg them up for me, I left her my stock flag, and they pop pretty easily out of their pen and into the field now without a lot of work. One of them has a messed up foot, but it’s easy to sort her/him out and leave it behind to work the others.

I decided that they could handle some short works with Rippa and so, I did. She did quite awesome – taking her commands to stay off them and drive them, fetching them thoughtfully . . .

But then when she gets too close she gets all kinda panicked about why they don’t move off her and starts kind of nipping on them trying to stop them. It’s okay. With time she’ll learn to take the pressure off. V, Jennifer’s daughter, wanted to see what their dog did (he’s half BC/half lab) so after a 20 minute ducky break in their posh duck waterfall:

I let Obi give it a go. He’s funny. His border collie sense is like, “Go to head and stop.” He’s fabulous at that. I worked at getting him unstuck but there’s not a lot clicking for him yet. I have a feeling in time, he’ll be kinda fun to work on the ducks, but definitely missing a couple instinctual pieces that I’ll need to help him with.

But yeah, le sigh, very good stockdoggy day.

Oh, and I finally figured out how to podcast today. I’ll be posting interviews from breed greats in the future, but for now, the first one’s mostly about me.

Cattle video and being watched

Most people, I think, only post shining star videos of their dogs, but let’s be realistic. Nobody gets any good without failing and sucking, first.

Not that what I’m about to show you is fail and suck, but it’s not “Wow, THAT is a great cow dog and handler pair.” Which is the exact point.

1. When I work under someone else, even if I’m not worried about them, I handle like crap. I worked Rippa on sheep today and everything that I “learned” yesterday I found myself naturally doing today. I know better, but if someone’s watching me, I seem to fall apart. Going to be hell when I trial, but a good way to work on myself.

2. It’s as much about handling cattle as it is the dog. The clips I show you I purposely selected to show you – the first set up is bad and it doesn’t go well. The second is right and it goes fine.

Videoing is so good – I can totally see how much I need to shut up (I thought it while I was out there – my default losing control mode is yapping, that’s why I joined Toastmasters, to get it under control) and where my handling is really lacking. I’m asking for too much from Rippa for how I’m setting her up. She’s been on cattle once at Kathy’s and at a clinic last summer after not working for weeks, and now this, I think, is our third time out since then. It’s pretty good – I’d say.

Also, the way I walk in this video creeps me out. I’m having my physical therapist look at it – hmm.

Anyway, enjoy!

I also took the dogs out today for sheep – Rippa did nicely, as usual, and Fury did, too. Both managed to get loose during the other’s run and come join me in the field, but neither messed with the sheep when it happened, so that was happy. They are whining, crazy fools when the other works, but I figure they’ll get used to it eventually . . . I can’t correct and work at the same time.

Fury got a short work because she’d pick the sheep up and then because she doesn’t know how to balance well, we’d do a lot of hard running in record heat – not good for anybody, sheep or dog. I had really wanted to get her feeling settled, but she was taking pressure of the stick really well and not pulling anything cheap so I thought that was enough for her first formal lesson back. She put them away nicely, too. She is just ALL GO JUICE compared to Rippa being more tentative about new things. It should be fun working two very different dogs with power at the same time.

Second lesson on cattle at the Woods’

This afternoon, I loaded Rippa up and we paid Shannon and Dustin Wood’s little spread in Atascadero, pretty much on the same road I use to get to Stephanie’s sheep rentals, just the opposite direction. Highway 41 is the big win in stockdog land.

I’m still feeling out how to approach the Woods’ lessons. They’re pretty open to me just doing my thing, but also super psyched to help me out and I’m trying to learn when to do my thing and when to take their advice – my thought is generally to listen to what they have to say, give it a try a couple times and I or the dog aren’t getting it, to go to what we know and ponder it. I think it’s working.

For example, Dustin had just built a round pen on his property (a dang fine one, by the way – post-holes dug and strung tight) and he says since they put it up, they’ve been using it every day. They like to warm their dogs up on it with their goats before putting them on cattle, and work on fundamentals.

Rippa and I haven’t been in a round pen in forever because of how Stephanie’s set up is, so we gave it a go, trying some outrun training handling advice but not getting so far so I went back to what she and I know well.  Basically, again, is that the message is, is that I’ve been lazy.

With Fury, who naturally took her outruns pretty easy from what I remember, I never really had to worry about the finesse of starting them (for example, laying them down with their shoulder to the stock so they’re facing the way you want them to run), and so with Rippa, who I had had so much trouble starting in the first place, I have been letting just laydown facing them. No more. The Woods got on me about consistently asking for it and it would come. Good. Thing #1 to work on. Okay.

I should also note that working with them, with their dogs, I feel like the laziest trainer ever – their dogs take commands. Rippa takes the suggestion and I have to handle her harder. Partly, Rippa’s never been fast on the response during stock and I was happy to get what I got, and partly I am being lazy. There’s no reason I can’t get the same level of obedience out of her at this point, so I need to start working on my expectations of her trained behaviors. She’ll take ten feet to down, five feet to stop, and a while to “get back” or take her flanks. I need it now and I need to remember to make sure I get it now. It will help her outruns, too, if I an get her to stop and take her flanks. Thing #2 to work on.

Shannon talks to me about how I really need to train Rippa to respect the stick. She shows me with her own dog on a leash how if she points the stick at her dog (off stock), she’ll immediately turn her shoulder and try to get out of her space. I take the stick and poke at my dog, who looks inquisitively. We laugh. This is a really big point to me because when I worked both my dogs, I saw the stick as the enforcer and direction giver, and both Stephanie and the Woods see it as a little something more. I’m not sure I’ve seen Kathy Warren do the kind of stick ground work my BC people have suggested, but I may just not have been “seeing it” back when I was regularly taking lessons. Either way, thing #3 to work on.

We then moved into the cattle. They’d recently lost one of their Holstein heifers so picked up some replacement beef calves at the sale. Dustin said they hadn’t really been worked or dog broke yet so if we had to separate them out, he would. Well, no worries there. Rippa went right to them this time and got to work and they stayed just fine with the dairy cattle, with one red heifer seeming to always get herself out and chased back in – but I’d also say that she was also doing that because Rippa was too tight and pushing her out to start.

I started Rippa by just having her walk up their heels to keep her easy and cranked down (because Rippa is PSYCHED to actually WORK CATTLE) and once she started lifting them off the fence, we started the real training. The Woods’ have a lot of panels set up in their arena for finite obstacle work and to use to help teach the dogs to work in that kind of pressure, so I was able to use the panel to send Rippa out wider than I could without them. Once she figured that trick out, we had things pretty much dialed to lift them and fetch them to me. 

Despite me starting her at the heels, Shannon observed that I should send her to the heads, and so I did, pushing her back after they turned. The one time I didn’t was the one time the fetch didn’t work out, so I learned a really good lesson there for my dog – despite her early starts being more heel work, she’s got big head instinct and to let her use that to feel in control.

The other thing that the Woods taught me was something I definitely wouldn’t have thought about . . . what happens when your group divides? In the beginning and occasionally toward the end of the lessons, one or two of the cattle would break off. This blows Rippa’s mind because she has a really strong sense of group but she’s also a bit insecure about working without me at a distance on the cattle (and I mentioned this is an issue on bigger distances with  the sheep, too). She doesn’t know whether to come into me with the lots of cattle or to go get the ones she wants to. So Dustin told me, hey, if she has a group handled, you go to the other one. Doing that makes her feel secure and she’ll think better and just bring the cattle over, which she did. In the same vein, if I have a group handled and one lone cow, if I want her to bring that cow to the group, just walk up to the cow without saying anything to her and she’ll go pick it up and then I can walk back to the group. Generally you want to follow the “bring the many to the one” rule I like to live by, but if you have a relatively easy straggler, man, that works so well.

Well, it works so well if your dog has the instinct and power to do it, which, hey, sparkle, mine does.

When we finished up, Dustin was very effusive about her, “She did really, really, really, good. That was really nice. By the end there she was getting them out of the corner, biting them where she should be, and 100% better than the first time in there today and way better than last time you were here.”
That means a lot coming from them, as they’ve got some very, very fine dogs and their handling is beautiful, quiet, and confident.

Rippa’s improvement is pretty in keeping with how it’s been with her. Once she gets it (or I do), she gets it pretty thoroughly. Having done what we did in there with half unbroke calves and only our second time on cattle in almost a year . . . I can confidently say we’d get through an ASCA started course, no problem. Maybe not get the highest score out there yet, but like her mother, she’s definitely more a cow dog. All that power and grip she wants to use on the sheep and goats stops being quite as stress-gratuitous on cattle and she settles down really easy and reads her stock.

No problems walking up on their heads if the cattle we standing, lifting out of corners patiently, lifting off of fence panels. It was pretty dang awesome.

And it looks like I have a standing weekly date with them if we’re both available. Can’t wait to learn more. Better get started on that ground work.

Back to Fundamentals . . . on both dogs?

So today, I went out  to Stephanie’s with the goal of working on Rippa’s fundamentals. I sorted out the heavier sheep and basically worked on her flank commands and getting her to both take her out and downs faster. And, of course, her outruns. I had posted this blog last week and Carol McLaughlin suggested I basically just do more fundamentals work with her and take smaller baby steps, which sounded about right so here I am.

We entered the arena really calmly and got ourselves set up nice for the outrun practice. I started facing her with the sheep behind and calling flanks and looking for her to turn her shoulder out to me and make a wide circle. When she did, I got next to her and did the same. Then I went behind her and had her come around me. It works. I tested it by going behind her and sending her but fail. It’s clearly just going to take some mileage there, but I could see the gears turning and I think I’ll have it where I want by the end of the month.

Then we just did stuff like I described above – simple, easy things with heavy sheep so I could easily get after her without losing them and without worrying so much about my handling and timing.  When we were tired, I put them up in a small pen and then got out the lambs.

The lambs are soooooooooo squirrelly that I wanted to take what she got from the early lesson about taking my commands and such and use it here to show her that when they freak, it’s not as useful to freak her self, either. It worked pretty well, but man, Rippa really has to charge those lambs to stay in contact and I have to work on my end because they’re pretty scared of me. Lamb work doesn’t last long because the little guys just give themselves a ton of running to do.

So, Rippa put them back up and went to water. I was going to work her again with the heavy to leave on that note but the huz had convinced me to bring Fury and I wanted to see if what I saw last time was the same. I figured five minutes off some outruns and balance work and putting them away would show me what I had.

Sure enough, like last time, Fury still has her nice outruns, takes her flanks, and works wide. She downs really easy, too.  She just comes in way too hard if I try to do balance work on her. I had started out with the big stick (I don’t use it much with Rippa any more because it’s made me get better at handling to use my body), but I could clearly see that Fury was so used to fighting me and my job was to show her that I wasn’t here to do that anymore, so small stick it was.

That made her relax a lot more. I didn’t say anything to her when she came in too tight and fast, I just kind of got out of the sheep’s way and pushed Fury around. She was getting it after a few minutes and I daresay in a few sessions I might be able to pick up where we left off and get that Started Sheep leg I need.

The key was giving her tons of space to not feel constricted and me not being hyped up about how she was dealing. It was just basically me watching where Fury gets worried and doing my best to show her she has nothing to fear. I’m actually really, really impressed with her. She’s so much more responsive to me than Rippa is – Rippa’s more a chore dog to Fury’s ability to finesse when she calms herself down.

So, we’ll see if Stephanie is up for having me rent sheep for a second dog. We talked about it a bit last time I saw her and it seemed like it wouldn’t be an issue.  More $$ for me, but I’ll feel a lot of satisfaction being able to both let Fury do something she LOVES to do and also being able to come back from the bad place we ended things. How many people have the chance to take their first “broken” dog and go back and make it right? That’s a real opportunity.

And what happens on Wednesday? Cattle!

Sheep looking good (on video), duckies getting ready!

Today the huz and I dropped by Stephanie’s to rent some sheep for a bit and then head out to the Best Family Farm to finish up the “Duck Fortress” (it cannot be called a “coop”).

As I have said before, training just isn’t linear, is it? Last work I had – we only had lambs again because I was with CA Sharp and she gets the heavy sheep for lessons while I rent unattended. I was thinking about doing a farm trial at the end of May, but it was so ugly that I really thought better of it. Plus, Kathy was judging.

If you haven’t had to be judged by your mentor, you won’t get what I’m saying when I felt sick thinking about it. You want to do your mentor proud, your dog proud, etc, so there’s a lot of pressure. One person I know who totally gets how I feel is Trish Alexander, so I called her up and she convinced me to wait until *I* felt ready despite everyone telling me to trial now when I’m out at sheep. Them telling me got me off my butt and getting ducks and a cattle situation, but I still want Rippa’s outruns better – and I want her to work as well on lighter sheep as she does on heavy sheep.

We’re at a weird stage now where working heavy sheep bores the crap out of her so I do a lot of chore work, interspersed with tweaks to work on stuff, to start her out mellow and then add lambs later so she’s working a larger group and having to pay attention.

It went so well today – so quiet and nice on both our parts that even though the huz doesn’t like videoing, I ask him to. I’d just had a slam dunk penning job and thought I’d video what I was doing just then to show you, and also get an idea of how I look from the third person.

The pen work is not a slam dunk because I didn’t set it up right (lazy, so lazy), but I knew she’d get it done if I just helped her, and she did. We haven’t really practiced penning. Rippa is just really good at these sorts of jobs. I think we’d done it twice before and both other times it looked this nice if not nicer. She even knows to go around to the other side of the pen to push them out – and in this case the sheep didn’t come in and I asked her to “get em” and she totally knew what I meant.

The handling after the pen work isn’t great on my part, either. My stickwork and body language aren’t helping things.

If I’m not getting what I want out of Rippa, it’s because, again, I’m lazy, lazy, lazy.

She was pretty over these sheep so I added in the lambs again, but as I was, Fury came over unattended. I guess Y had her off leash and she’d gone to the bathroom and he was occupied with cleaning it up. Fury hasn’t been on sheep in a very, very long time. She popped in unhurriedly, and I downed Rippa because I knew I’d have to handle Fury on her own here to keep it calm. Sure enough, Fury does her bat-out-of-hell method of going up to the sheep and then picking them up and bringing them to me, but it was so nice! And she was so wide as she started getting into me! I popped her on the head with the stick to get her out, and she took it – going really wide and suddenly being very biddable.

She still has that “RUN AS HARD AS YOU CAN” thing that I accidentally taught her years ago, but I felt totally in control of what was happening and that I could totally handle her and fix it with time. I don’t know if I will or not – I’ll need to talk to Stephanie about that. But . . . it was interesting, it was SO CLEAR that Fury was so much more comfortable in the arena compared to when we had her stuck in the duck pen back when I was doing lessons with her. It seems like if I had just got her into the arena and then relaxed, I could have fixed it pretty quick.

Of course, I’ve had a lot of miles on me with Rippa since then and have learned to CALM DOWN a lot more, so I am quite sure that’s really the element that was missing. It was pretty sweet, however, to know that I’d come along far enough that I felt like I was easily able to handle Fury. I was tempted to just use her to put them up but not wanting to look a gift horse in the mouth, I called her in and handed her off to the huz and finished working Rippa.

It was  a pleasant surprise all around, even though, you know, oops for letting Fury get in there in the first place.

And then we went to duckies.

It was time for their first grass and sunlight so huz and I set to fixing up the fortress for them. And man, they loved it, snapping at the weeds and grass.

The dogs were pretty excited.

Fury got a tiny round of working them before we went home. I’m not really sure when you can start working them for real, but I figure I’ll wait until they at least look adult-ish. I think three months is the magic number? Will do research. They’re currently three weeks.

The fortress:

Duckies coming and taking a step back to see the progress

Well, me taking a cue from everyone who’s been telling me I’m not handling my best definitely helped. Rippa is just killing it on stock these days. Every single lesson is a leap forward for us in one way or another.

I think I told you that CA Sharp sometimes comes with me to start her dog  in the round pen with Stephanie while I train mine in the field. Well, last time, Stephanie asked if I could handle sorting off the sheep CA needed and, well, duh.

Rippa is a most excellent pen work dog. Calm, controlled, takes her commands, totally gets what I need. Makes me think that Farm Trials should be our forte’.

Anyway, once we sort off the heavy sheep for Kira (CA’s dog), I think, you know, it’s not like the sheep are going to run for the hills, I bet I can use Rippa to take them from the arena to the round pen.

And you know what? I can. How we did it also kind of settles in my mind that Rippa is a strong driving dog. I haven’t trained her formally to drive, but she tends to do it in situations like this – we pushed them through the gate and Rippa got them bent the right way, away from the draw of the rest of the sheep, without my help and ahead of me, so I just followed and warned her to ease up periodically.

I think the job would have totally gone perfectly except 1: CA had her dog there, and had to open the gate and the sheep were like, “Noooooo!” and me, being a stupid handler. I pulled out my phone to get a video to show you how sexy our chore work was and me not paying attention to the dog situation ahead and help Rippa out made me lose the sheep. They ran into Stephanie’s barn and it was more than a little complicated to get them out. As I’ve said, the “flow” of her setup is less than ideal, but it also makes it pretty fun to try to figure out how to handle those situations.

I was proud of me for knowing how much pressure I could put on dog and sheep at the right times and it was pretty fun and rewarding.

Stuck with spazzy lambs, we had a hard time getting started but Rippa is getting it – her outrun is widening and she’s staying off them when she’s fetching. Thinking about past times I’ve felt like we might not be able to even work in the arena with the heavy sheep bouncing all around, I’m feeling really good about it all.

And then duckies come in the mail next week and we start that adventure! Even Fury will get to work them.

I am so confident in Rippa’s talent at this point that I think it’s time to invest in all her health clearances. I still don’t know if we’ll breed her, much less to who, but good to know at this stage if it’s even a thing. I don’t expect any issues to come back, her lines seem really healthy from my experience and conversations. Exactly what I want.

I definitely know a goal of my program is to capitalize on that calm, quiet control. I’ve seen Aussies at finals be heeling fools for no good reason and dogs rodeoing cattle for the fun of it (which, totally, Rippa does), but after having seen the red border collies at the Woods’ house absolutely kill it, my program has to absolutely be based on confident power rather than showy power.

Rippa started out a little tentative on cattle, but she’s grown into herself now and I don’t see any hesitation at all to do what she needs to do. Fury started out all fire and power but never added the calmness to it instinctually that I’ve seen Rippa demonstrate – with more experience, she should be a great dog. One I’ll be able to take to cattlemen in the area and show them what an Aussie can do.

I hope.  Could be kennel blindness, too, but we’ll see soon enough.

On another note, I’m taking the kids to an agility/obedience trial next weekend. The real point is to finish Fury’s CD. Rippa might do it, but not with a very high score. She can either be totally on or totally distracted. Today she was sure she didn’t know what “Stand” meant, much less that she should sit when heeling. Both dogs weren’t awesome at agility, either. Fury is a lot slower these days – not because she’s getting older, I think she just doesn’t care and my handling’s gotten bad with no practice (which she always gets mad at me for).  I think I might stop kidding myself that I’m into all the venues because I have no problem driving an hour round trip twice a week (I’d do more if I didn’t have to work) but can’t bring myself to spend 20 minutes training them.

Oh well, wish us luck anyway!

Video goodness and is it really time to trial?

So, today I had the husband in tow for training. I thought I was going to be on my own (no Stephanie, even) so it would be a good, mellow time for huz to learn to see what I need him to (stuff you’ll see in the video – handling things) and tell me I am doing that from time to time.

No such luck. Another gal was there with her two dogs, and Stephanie had been working one of hers when I arrived.

We really only have one set of lesson sheep right now as the others are lambs or lambing, so by the time I was up, the sheep had been worked at least three times. I was nervous about this because I don’t like overdoing it with them, and there was a baby lamb in there. Steph just told me to pull the lamb out if we had troubles.

The previous lesson person had left the sheep in the middle of the arena, so my usual system of “sort sheep into the arena and then get them set up” wasn’t in play.

Oh, side note . . . here’s the area I sort out of:

I think you should give me props for being able to use a young dog and have her go around that thing and set them up on the gate there in the far right and sort out three or four sheep out of twenty.

Let’s have it. Now.

Okay, THANK YOU.

Anyway, so they are there in the middle of the arena, and as I told you before, these sheep don’t like to stay put. Rippa doesn’t have a beautiful big, wide outrun on her, so I have a choice to just send her and let her get them her way or try to set up a nice outrun.

Stephanie and my husband were both there, along with someone I’ve known for years from working at Kathy’s. Which do you think I picked? The latter. Because I wanted to show that I was well behaved, not because it was best for us.

As good ol’ Norm Andrews would have said, “It should have worked!” But it didn’t. So ugly. Me chasing dog because I can’t get to the sheep in the arena, sheep running full out for the gate. I pick up my dog and Stephanie is like, “You need to get over the fact that I’m here. This is going to happen at trials.” You think? Yeah, I do.

I get so hung up on what I think other people should see that I make bad choices sometimes. Twice, I will point out, twice. Finally, the second time, I let Rippa just get them her way (powerful, straight, and fast) and Stephanie’s like, “Don’t let her kill them by running them into the fence!” and I yell back, “She’ll balance up when she gets up there!” Which she does, get’s out, runs them up to me, and then eases off when the sheep are in contact with me. It’s totally fine for ranch and chore work, but not so much for trials. Going to take time to get that right, and it’s okay.

But that little lamb is not keeping up so, in front of everyone, I’ve got to sort her off into a side holding pen (you’ll see it in the video). Stephanie’s like, “You want me to?” No, I say. Rippa is an excellent penning dog.

And so I ask her to walk up, lie down and try it. The older sheep take the open gate bait, but not the baby one. Steph says I need to his Rips with a “way to” and push them up more.

”I can’t yet. She won’t take it.”

”She will.”

”Way to.”

What do you think she does?

By golly, that dog does a beautiful baby Way To and puts herself in exactly the right spot and I get that baby lamb in the pen with no stress and go right back to work.

So proud. She is SUCH a nice dog. I am really proud of her. I get more and more proud the further along we get.

So then we fool around on the hill and I work on that “out” round  me thing I talked about in the last entry. This eventually bores the crap out of Rippa so I have to watch it.

It’s at this point that hubs  decides to shoot some blurry footage, so now you get video!

Anyhow, I get out of the arena and Stephanie asks me when the next trial is. “Not yet,” I say. “You need to trial to get over some of your being nervous about me. Besides, you’re ready. That dog could win in started.”

Sparkle. But also not. I try to protest as Stephanie says, “Your problem is you – all of that, it’s you. She’s a nice dog.”

”I know, I know.” Then my huz chimes in to agree.

”Just enter.”

”It’s expensive.”

”You two make enough money to trial. What, it’s $150.”

”But I want to do all three stock, that’s not cheap,” I look at my husband in protest. He’s quite supportive of this stuff and doesn’t care, despite other pressing financial issues.

“Heck, she could probably qualify in Open right now.”

”But I don’t have a drive on her.”

“You could soon.”

Anyhow, as much as I protest, hearing it from the huz and Stephanie, I have to acknowledge how scared I am to actually trial. I don’t get it for any other dog venue or anything . . . but this is stone cold serious time. People will judge me if it goes badly or I handle badly. People already liberally judge me and my dog to my face and I hate it. If I do this, the dog needs to have the best chance at success she can.

So, here’s the plan: I get my ducks and I get Rippa a baby drive. I get at least one lesson on cattle from someone so I can tune her up on them. Then I will trial.  Okay?

Like, maybe fall.

Here’s a photo of sheep the huz took:

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.

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.

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.

The Tipping Point (AKA we hit the balance point)

I had two sheep rentals last week but didn’t think writing EVERY SINGLE LESSON down was anything anyone (including me) wants to read, though I do want to chronicle exactly how much time it does take me to get a realistic idea of how long it takes.

One thing that’s hugely different in my ability to make big leaps and bounds in training is not being in a 20-minute lesson scenario. Granted, lessons were shorter with Kathy partly because Rippa was a baby dog and didn’t have much attention span. As time has gone on, she can handle working for much longer (I haven’t pushed to see where that line is), and our lessons range from 45 minutes to an hour – not me timing it, just me kind of getting a feel for how the sheep and the dog are doing (and me – I’ve called it much earlier on myself when I was stressed out and not getting what I wanted out of the lesson).

I’ve also calmed down a lot since I started going to Stephanie’s, and since I was working Rippa in general. Stephanie kept telling me I needed to let her make mistakes and after enough times where nothing horrible happened, I was able to do all my little mental games to calm myself down and now I think I’m pretty dang mellow when I work her. At least, you know, for me.

Anyhow, last week we went back to the round pen because I didn’t want to go into the arena and have to work on fundamentals while I worked on the different challenges of the bigger space. I want Rippa to be able to balance the sheep with me so that I can cruise around and not worry about losing sheep, and I want Rippa to have a decent gather and understand her flanks. We got both this week.

She still starts out pretty hot on the gathers, which to me just shows I don’t have enough mileage with us to trust her yet without more help. I’ll continue to toe the line between holding her “paw” and letting her figure it out, though, in the arena even, because I think she and I have a pretty good understanding about how this is supposed to go and what makes us both happy seems to have aligned.

I only had three sheep the last lesson and two lambs so they were a lot lighter and it took a good half hour of working to get everyone to settle out. I was a little disappointed because it didn’t look like I’d be able to progress much with these sheep (but that’s fine, Rippa gets to learn to work different types this way), but it ended up working fine.

And then it happened. For the first time in my stockdogging career, I got my dog to balance when fetching. Fury could do flanks really well and work away from me, but the key issue with us was that when she got in contact with me, or close to it, I taught her essentially to dive past them. We could never really take a walk with sheep or do much other than drive or distance fetch because of this, at least in the end.

I was wondering how/when that would ever happen, and so I was like, “I wonder if I can figure this out” – so, the same way that I am teaching the flanks (calling it out, signaling, and then making it happen), I started warning her I would stop with “stay” and body language that stopped the sheep as well as the dog, and slowly started playing with not saying “stay.”

And then it happened, I turned around, walked a bit, stopped, and the sheep stopped. Then I started, and the sheep started. Rinse, repeat. Rippa was in back there balancing the sheep to me.

So, at this point I was like, “I should film this to show the troops” so here’s a video of it. Of course, I had to laugh because after many takes, I realized that filming the dog through us all off and she wouldn’t do it if I tried to walk and hold the phone. So . . . in the clip, you’ll see me start it  and be able to stop the sheep, but when I show you Rippa, it falls a bit apart.

You can see I know I’m on camera because I ask Rippa to “go by, please.” Yeah – you can see that I am working on my lovingkindness taking over my stress, but that’s a little much. But hey, she did it, right?

On another note, I think this work has made Rippa defect from my husband’s dog to mine. She’s a lot more loyal and underfoot these days, to his chagrin. Both dogs now sleep on the bed sandwiching me so they can touch me with their backs and husband gets paws.

I will also note that dogs sleeping in bed was husband’s idea, so serves him right.

Arena Video Footage–I need to calm down

Thinking I was going to fly to Canada today, it turns out I’m going on Thursday. So, I thought, why not one more lesson in the arena? There was some neat stuff I saw here that people learning about this might like to see so I roped my husband into video taping it for me. Boy howdy, did I need to see the tape. I am really lucky I have tough dogs, guys. I need dogs who keep going even though I’m being hard on them, because I really, really need to work on that.

As I said, last time was the first time in the big arena for us and she showed me a lot of really neat stuff, but I was having a hard time with outruns and such. Watching the video, I’m pretty sure someone needs to put a shock collar on me. I am so freaked out that the dog is going to be bad, I don’t set her up to be good.

Case in point – when I start her, I start her maybe twenty feet from the sheep in an arena. Watching the video, she’s totally being responsive to me, but she’s excited to go and I’m worried so I don’t send her, and we amp up. It’s not until I get way back and give everyone space that everything goes mostly well for newbs in an arena. Watching Rippa like this reminds me this is how Fury used to be before I put too much pressure on her when she came into contact with me. Sigh.

Anyway, things I am learning from working in the arena: I need to take advantage of that space because Rippa and I both ease off if we give eachother room to make mistakes without being harsh. With the sheep close in on the initial outruns, they have a whole arena to run at, so they do, and I’m making Rippa work close under real pressure from me instead of JUST GO. So I need to JUST go when we start and stop stressing if it’s not perfect. This is the stage where Rippa and I have to learn to read our sheep and control them without fencelines, not worry about perfection.

So, here’s the video. It’s pretty long but it’s because I wanted to include a couple things: how hard I start Rippa and where it’s really obviously I need to stop doing that. Working on teaching her to pick the sheep up off the fence and bring them to me without too much help – you’ll see her fail a couple times, and do her customary “shut down” I talk about, but then it gets it together. And then, in the end, we have a nice lift off the fence and I take the sheep for a jog. I don’t know why I felt like jogging, but I did, and she kept them balanced even then.

I did take the time to start a little drive on her that doesn’t show. I’d noticed that she was really taking commands from me so a little “it’s okay to drive the sheep” in there wouldn’t fry her. It lasted like two minutes. I decided I shouldn’t add too much new stuff. Now that I’m getting used to being my own guide, I’m quite liking how it’s making me feel. I sense myself relaxing into everything I’ve learned over the years and finally taking ownership of it.

So now I really am off for a month and we’ll come back on work on my crappy starts on sheep and just letting Rippa learn to handle her sheep (including that damned red one that flips out all the time).  Oh and the #1 thing: Trust your dog, Kristin . . . TRUST YOUR DOG. It’s when you’re a jerk that she freaks out.

Playing with the Big Kids: We Move to the Arena

I try to write every time we get on stock because it helps me solidify thoughts and feelings, and it’s pretty realistic to look at the archives and see how much work/how many sessions have gone into this. I skipped a work on Friday.

After the nice session we had in the round pen, I decided it was probably time to move to the arena to give her more to do, work on outruns, and not let the small enclosure become a crutch for us. I thought it was a good time to take a lesson with Stephanie to transition, so signed up for one. Her style is very different in some ways, but the changes she’s encouraged have made a world of difference in our partnership so I think it’s a good idea to have her involved when I feel ready for it.

When I showed up, she had sheep in the round pen for me and not in the arena like I wanted, but I went with it. She said she’d seen me using the flag wrong and wanted to fix it. “You were moving into Rippa – but with the flag, you have to move away. And you can’t use it too much or it will become a crutch.”

So, back to the stick. That went fine, but she started throwing lots of new things at us – she critiqued how I started my outruns, and after a bit of confusion which riled me and the sheep and the dog up, I had to stop and find out what exactly she wanted. What she wanted was completely the opposite of how I’ve learned to teach outruns (go between the sheep and the dog, then transition to slingshots, then move further and further), but was more about trusting the dog to learn to pick the sheep up while it makes mistakes. I kept trying to do it, but it was really, really difficult. Eventually I figured out a hybrid of the two that worked for us all – which is that instead of slingshotting, I walk in the direction I’m going to send Rippa and then send her. It keeps her out wide when she starts.

Then Stephanie started trying to make me send Rippa on her flanks but I know that we’ve spent time just trying to get easy flanks and she really doesn’t take flank commands yet, nor do I expect her to. So Stephanie was like, “Well, then, lie her down if she doesn’t take them and make her.”

It was just a lot of change for both of us, and my handling started to fall apart and then Rippa stopped covering her sheep, and then . . . I admit . . . I started crying. I haven’t cried doing stockdog stuff (at least during a lesson) that I know of ever, so I thought it was a good sign that I was comfortable with Stephanie’s reaction to the crying to allow it, while also being just REALLY frustrated.

Everyone tells me that Rippa is stubborn or spoiled, but I do know my dog and I’ve been training dogs for years so when I say I know how she learns and “make excuses for it” I really feel I do know. When Rippa shuts down, she does it because she doesn’t know what to do at all. Stephanie was like, “Just make her do it” but my inclination was to just go back to what we knew to reinforce us both. It’s frustrating taking lessons from people when you have your own idea about how things work. I need to work on one thing at at a time, and I think Stephanie may be a bit eager to have me improve in leaps and bounds and thinks I can take it, but I can’t. And I cried.

So we took a break and she moved me into the arena and said to just do what I normally do and forget everything she said, and we did. And we did pretty well. Rippa behaved well and you could see her learning how to manage the sheep in a larger arena, but definitely we had work to do.

And so here we are today. I am taking off for an entire month of travels next week, and I was pretty booked but I wanted one more lesson in the arena before we took the time off so she could think on it (yeah, I do think they do, because they seem to always come back a little better after time off).

So, I just rented sheep. I brought the flag and the short stick and here we were. Rippa has some eye to her, and some power, so we spent the first couple minutes just following the sheep to let them settle after we went into the arena. I started out with the flag because I have no confidence (see me thinking hindsight here) and she picked them up a little sloppy, so that was what we worked on. As soon as it was nice, we started trucking around the arena (the goal for a bit here is mileage and letting Rippa learn how to balance to her sheep in this environment with minimal “training” from me for a while), but she got too close in so I started trying to push her with the flag. And then I remembered what Steph said about the flag and put it back, picking up the stick.

And from there, things went well. I used her method of starting the out runs and then trying to take walks into the arena. Rippa would do really good, then put some pressure and lose her sheep, come back and get them, etc. Eventually she started to settle and handle things a lot more evenly – without much guidance from me except some stick and pressure and then, more importantly, taking it off. She was like, “Why yes, sheep can walk” which was pretty awesome.

We’d get about halfway and then this one particular sheep would peel off and return “home” to the gates and I would take the opportunity to leave the parked sheep and encourage her to “look back” and get the sheep. She built up her confidence on this task and by the third time, she wasn’t carefully following her and looking back at me, but charging after her to stop her and then backing off as she turned and headed back up to my other flock.

She also started doing distance gatherings with me far away – slow, easy approaches, I could see her “outing” herself along the fence and really reading her sheep. She’d take it slow and easy with me a 100 meters out and seeing which way they leaned, fixing it, and bringing them to me. Once they got to me, she’d balance up and we’d take a walk. Eventually she’d push too hard, and we’d have to start cleaning it up again, but I think probably just mileage and confidence will help there.

I started trying to do Stephanie’s out-run flank “down” thing that I talked about above for a bit, but decided this was way too much new stuff and to leave it be.

I saw some really good stuff today. Calm, thinking, and I think she’s going to have an easier time learning the drive than most dogs I’ve seen start because of this. I remember when we first started and Trish made a comment after working her that she was a “finals-quality" dog that really got me motivated but I haven’t really felt that way about her until today.

All that battling and her going hard and all I needed to do was take the pressure off and she’s gathering sheep up half a field away without ever doing it before like it’s old hat. Her stopping and listening to my commands without me having to yell. Me just being pretty sure that no one is going to get harassed and injured enough for me to just stand there and watch what happens.

We’ve both come a long way in this. I was terrified to do anything on my own without someone “who knew” watching me, but I am starting to really feel that I do know, especially when it comes to my dog, how to do this.

I don’t think we’ll make it to finals – I just don’t have the years of experience trialing, and I honestly don’t love the trial atmosphere and never really have, so I probably won’t get the experience you need. Like that book I was really excited about says, to be a champion takes real sacrifice and I’m not motivated to do that.

But I hope when I’m ready to go for this, that we do well.