It’s Time to Trial (well, kinda of)

I only say this because I could trial tomorrow, but it’s not looking like I’ll actually MAKE a trial until after the new year. So, don’t get excited.

I last left you pretty frustrated but trying to make the most of it with Rippa. I keep saying it’s not linear but we so want it to be! Rippa refusing to work ducks and turning off on Stephanie’s sheep made me take a step back and re evaluate my goals, my dog, and, most importantly, my beliefs.

You don’t get into dog training unless you’re a control freak in one way or another, and that can make it really hard to believe in something because EVERYONE believes in something and if you’re not lock-step behind them, you’re going to have some trouble with it.

As I get older and get better at being me (aka, living in my own skin), I’m doing a lot better on the realizing this earlier and making calls. Same with Rippa. After talking to Joey Judd about what his dogs were/are like, I have to remember that it was never my goal to have perfect trial dogs. There are plenty of those. I don’t need perfect family dogs. There are scads of those. What I need is a dog that I can say to a rancher – this dog will take minimal training and help you. These things can include the others, but they don’t have to.

And so, I backed off all the fine tuning stuff, no circling around the stock and me to set up drives, no hard flank work, none of it. Just fetching and setting up chores. And, taking advantage of the fact that I have all the time in the world, not letting the dogs actually work.

Rippa hasn’t been on ducks for a while now, but she’s got to watch Fury do it and it’s driving her nuts. Good. Be bummed about missing out. We’re taking a break because I’m deep in my work season right now anyway, but when I go out again, it will be to torture Rippa by working Fury again. Muahahaha.

I realized I had some holes in Rippa’s training and have started taking Stephanie’s sheep out to a big alley way to work on driving, control, etc in tight spaces. She is learning that she can drive easy and still control (rather than chase because they’re running away) and she can’t get out wide enough to go to their heads at a full run, but she’s able to do it in the narrow chute if she approaches slowly and easily. I’m keeping sessions short and positive and Rippa is happy.

Sooooo happy. She’s tired.

We’ve been working on obstacle stuff with Shannon’s help, too. She’s learning that non-takepen/holding pen obstacles don’t mean she has to lose her stock and she’s figuring out to make that happen, as well as negotiate obstacles in general (aka, in her way). Shannon and Dustin’s setup is a lot tighter than Stephanie’s because their training goals are different. I really like the balance because we can work on distance and outruns at Stephanie’s and work on all the nitty gritty stuff at the Woods and come up with  a balance.

Rippa’s mom Fury is coming along, too. Today I actually had a thought that I might be able to finish her WTCh in her old age if I pick my cattle well. (I don’t need her getting hurt to do it.) We’ve been working short sessions with her on sheep and she’s learning to balance and that I hold my end now.  The difference between when she started with Stephanie's sheep to today is night and day. I’m definitely going to finish her started sheep title (she needs a leg) and ducks when I’m ready to go out there. It’ll take more mellow control on her part to get to open, but I’m feeling like its possible. Stephanie thinks it’s much to do with her getting older, and that might be it, but I like to not think like that. Fury isn’t much different at almost 12 as she was at 4 in temperament or physical ability – I’ve noticed it’s harder for her to climb stuff, but she still does it – what’s changing is MY attitude and MY handling more than her aging.

One of the things I’ve started doing before working is taking my time with that. I lay the dog down outside the gate and give flanks until they stop thinking STOCK STOCK and start listening to my commands. When they ease up and take them, I go to the gate, drop them, and walk in, leaving them. I might move the stock around a bit until the dog eases up and lets it be my job before I let the dog in. This is working brilliantly to get soft, easy starts at the first go.

So, no, it’s not linear. I went back to basics with Fury and Rippa, but it’s going well and I’m getting more out of them both. Fun fact: I was a college professor for almost a decade and occasionally I would substitute for junior high and high school. What I taught at the college level was the SAME thing being taught in lower levels.

It’s not linear. We learn, we use, we stop using, we forget. One must always go back and work on the basics to get advanced work, even if it’s just a tune up. ESPECIALLY if you don’t use it very often or consistently.

The Naked Fury

Shut up and Rippa is not a border collie

At the end of my session yesterday, Dustin asked me what I’d learned, and I told him, “Shut up and Rippa is not a border collie.” Hence the title. (I think I told him that.)

Last week we took a break because she’s been acting kind of weird and wanting to quit, which I attribute to coming into heat. She is out of it now that I can tell but still a little sucky-uppy so when I went to sheep and ducks this week, I kept our sessions short. Watching her work the ducks, it occurred to me that her outruns aren’t actually bad anymore. She goes at it with appropriate speed – but still a lot straighter than a pretty arc to lift them. But it still works. Whatever she’s doing doesn’t affect the stock until she gets closer and she’s still controlling bringing them to me as if she were making pretty arcs.

Working sheep, I tried it again – we were fetching across the entire field (it’s got to be a two-acre field) and she would start out with her shoulder wide, but then turn in and go straight. But instead of making the sheep move off, they still sat there until she got close enough to get behind them and fetch them. My thought is this: she’s learned how to read her sheep (these sheep are pretty light, too), and she isn’t wasting energy on pretty arcs if she doesn’t need to. I think I’ve done a decent job showing her what I want with flanks and she’s taking over the job now.

It does NOT look like what Shannon and Dustin’s dogs do in a number of ways:

1 – it’s not that fast. She goes in at a walk or trot to do it, so that’s probably why she doesn’t need to arc.

2 – She’s not “snappy” or “precise” like how their dogs and Fury works. She responds, but she does it in time and she’s loose eyed enough that you don’t even know if she’s really trying to do anything or not, but it happens.  She’s less interested in responding to me than to just getting the job done (and I will tell you, I make a lot of bad calls on commands and I talk a lot).

3 – the super big arc out of contact with the stock isn’t there, but, like I said, that might be directly related to #1.

Basically, what it looks like to me is that as Rippa gets more experience with the stock and she feels less adrenaline about the job, she’s slowing down and thinking and she’s understanding what she’s supposed to do and doing it.

We tried, on sheep, to get a batch of them out of the field and into the round pen so I could work on Fury’s issues, but it wasn’t happening. The sheep were just too boogered. They seem a lot more flighty than they used to be, maybe because there are more and even when I sort out my faithful ones, they’re a little sour to things or feeding off the herd mentality which is lighter. It was a new chore for Rippa so she didn’t really ‘get it’ and I feel like it’ll take time for her to take over that job confidently. Nice thing, though, is I know how sheep work enough to know that taking on that task when Stephanie wasn’t around would be fine. They weren’t going to get lost if we failed. Sheep magnetize to what they know like all herd animals, so if they ran away, I was sure to find them by a pen somewhere and they were happy to run home when I gave up.

I pulled out Booger Ram (I’m sure Steph has a name for him) to work with the heavy sheep and while I was working Fury he was getting impatient with her tendency to dive bomb and started fighting rather than moving. Fury was worried less about him than the light sheep trying to escape so she never had to fight him (I don’t really want her too, since she’s 11 1/2 and I would like to keep her injury free and her remaining teeth in her head), but that meant Rippa got another work.

Booger Ram tried it on Rippa again and she was awesome. Calm walk up again, waiting for me to tell her what to do while he stamped at her, and when I said, “Hit him!” she was like, “you betcha!” Great direct hits on the poll, commitment, and then backing off like he needed to get the point. Here’s a photo after her work, knowing she’s a stud now.

I think working ducks really helped with that stuff. Both Fury and Rippa are more apt to back up on stock (ducks or sheep or cows) than they were because the ducks don’t just run faster if you put more pressure on them: they stop. There were times that the sheep would stop because they’d had enough of running, and both dogs backed up until the sheep moved again. Useful stuff, that!

Yesterday, Dustin started me out on  a new flock of goats and I told him I think I yell at Rippa too much because she’s doing the job even if it’s not how I want it to look and he agreed, so I tried really hard not to do anything but handle with body language. We had to put a line on her because the goats didn’t want to flock and they were REALLY exciting, which then brought down her excitement and by the end she was working slow and methodical and teaching them to fetch to me. It was awesome.

We went up to cows in the obstacle pen and she went and got them off the hill for me without any trouble, but I put the line back on her and she kind of lost her interest in it. I don’t know if it’s from last session when Dustin popped her on a line and she screamed and is now not so sure about whether or not she trusts him or what but she wasn’t really super awesome. Holes. It’s cool. She’ll come back. Good stuff everywhere else.

So, shut up, and your dog’s not a border collie. I finally get what that last bit means and why you have to be careful about border collie trainers. They probably also want your dog to work like a border collie. Dustin and Shannon are awesome about letting my dog be my dog and working her for what she is, not what they want, etc. I think it’s really building an all around stockdog.

And all of these different experiences on stock and the kinds of advances we’re making is really showing me how little you can tell about a dog if all it does is train for trialing. A real useful ranch hand or chore dog needs experience to get it down and not every dog has all the heart and go juice to back up the experience.  It’s one thing to take stock around an arena in under 15 minutes, and it’s another thing to work all day on stock that doesn’t know what the program is.

Super grateful to how things are working out. I’d say Kathy retiring has actually been one of the best things to happen to me in my stockdog career (after getting my foundation learning from Kathy) because I was so dependent on the experiences she was providing (and so dependent on doing what she said rather than feeling it and learning it myself) that I wouldn’t have had all of the ones I’m having now.

I’m not sure if I’ll be able to trial this fall because my schedule is insane, but I don’t really care. I’m putting in the time to learn all this and it’ll pay off with really knowing my dog and knowing what to look for in a stud if I decide to breed her because I’ve got the whole picture of what she is and whether she’s what I want to see for my goals.

Anywho, it’s cool.

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.

Curt Pate Part 2: The notes

You can read part 1 here.

Dustin Wood uses his horse’s butt as a wing (as mentioned below).

Mr. Pate’s cattle clinic was one of the best clinics I’ve been to for a number of reasons:

1. It was ridiculously cheap.
2. I understood the stock more clearly than I ever have. We always focus on our dogs and the stock aren’t really as much of the equation. They should be. This clinic helped me get there.
3. The first hour or so, I basically felt like I had a lot of work to do (especially if I want to trial on horseback . . . those horses take a LOT of work).
4. Some things that I’ve been feeling out but not told got solidified. I think I’m definitely at the beginning stages of mastering this stuff in that I can see things, and I can also see things I don’t know.

Curt started his clinic with everybody on horseback as he lectured about what he did, and then he took to doing warmups with the horses. I thought this was great. I’m sure everyone was wanting to get to the good stuff (moving cattle), but reality is a good check. Is YOUR team fired up?

General Thoughts

Think of this as smooth stockmanship – that’s how he thinks of low-stress stockmanship. No hurky jerky. Things just flow. Look for it. Stay ahead of the action – if you have problems, you’ve acted too late. Look way ahead, not right in the thick of the business at the moment.

Curt didn’t have a lot of money back when he started, so he made a deal with himself: he could attend one clinic and never go back. It was his job to get the most out of it he could. I  LOVE this. Most clinics, people just kind of treat them like a lot of lessons back to back. Kathy Warren had remarked last clinic that I was good for keeping my journal and she wished people were writing more things down (that’s partly why I do this public blog, so it’s down for everyone). If you paid attention and asked the right questions, why do you need to go back? You learned it. Apply it.

When in doubt – keep things simple and easy. Your equipment doesn’t matter (and don’t use equipment until you manage the basics (this means sticks, spurs, etc). Your handling of the animals matters.

He has a rule about the horseback clinic: your horse can’t get into a lope (or gallop). If you need to – you’re too late.  Keep everything under control. I loved this because Kathy is always reminding me that I need to not run – if I’m running, I’m wrong. I’m athletic enough to run, but keep it under control. Running – it’s out of control.

Good stockmanship means you’re 100% self aware at all times.

When you put a command on and the pressure on, release for the START of the movement, not for the movement itself. Remember that bad stuff happens because you’re late. (Great advice for dog handling, too.)

** Movement creates movement** This is the cardinal rule of livestock. Always keep moving – they see movement better than contrasts. Keep their mind on you  and they won’t have time to see other things.  This is what goes on when a dog runs to other stock in another pen – their mind isn’t on the stock you’re working for one reason or another. Keep their mind.

Horseback Thoughts

1. Smooth horses – work to have a horse that transitions with its gait smoothly, that can get to business and then calm. That can just stand there calmly. He says he doesn’t like “cowy” horses because they’re hyped on adrenaline. Better if they’re just doing what you ask without adding more energy. (I have always felt about this with Fury in agility – seems like the same applies to stockdogs – you get in trouble when the dog gets amped. Look for dogs that can return to calm when the challenge isn’t needed.)

2. Do a little exercise where you have the horse move ONE foot forward and one foot back. Those tiny steps are important. (Same as with advanced stockdog work.) You want a responsive horse (and dog).

3. It’s the human presence that matters on the horse (or the dog presence). They look for predatory movement – a drone can’t work a herd of cattle.

4. The cattle will feel pressure of the horse like a dog does – a cowy horse will put more pressure on them because it’s watching them.

5. When you get into an arena, everyone rides clockwise – don’t do it – be ambidextrous with everything. Ride with both hands in both directions.

6. Your horse should have 3 slow gaits: a lively walk where the horse has its ears up and is watching something, a slow walk that’s straight (this part is hard), and a straight back up. (Sounds good for dogs, too, but that straight backup is something else . . . ) Don’t ride horses next to rails because they crutch on it for going straight – pick something in the distance and have them go straight to it.

Turning a cow? Back up out of the flight zone and turn into it – work those angles. Don’t go straight to a cow, think about what it sees.

Horses (and dogs) should give to you

- Get them with a soft feel. You can pull on a horse and give to pressure? He doesn’t want that. What he wants is reins short and just the small fingers of your hand tighten – that’s the soft feel. Set neck is just pretty, not function.

- If the horse is rolling its bit while you work on drills, that’s good – it means he’s thinking. You want a thinking horse. But pay attention to how amped it gets, a horse amped will amp cattle – that’s not smooth handling. (Same with dogs.)

- Pay attention to your horse – they have a really hard time with more than one thing. Don’t pull the reigns and kick with the legs – one or the other. You should be able to rock your horse’s weight gently by just using one or the other. Just the saddlehorn will move.

Don’t just worry about your horse – worry about you: are you approaching straight on, from the side, looking at your stock or not. This all matters. (Or wearing a skirt. Never again.)

Your horse should be able to go forward and turn into the flight zone as well as go back and turn out of it. Same with dogs, I’d say.

You should never have to turn more than 180 degrees on a horse. Spinning is silly. Get good at 1/4 turns that stay in place, both backward and forward.

- Draw a line and take a 1/4 turn in a circle.

- The horse should turn straight rather than bend

Smooth stockmanship is precise: you can put your partner exactly where they need to be.

Cattle Handling

When you do a take pen, you can do as little as you need to – you don’t have to go to the back of the pen. (He goes halfway in and stands there – it creates leader cow flow and the rest follow calmly.)

Driving: the farther behind the cattle you are, the more out of control you are. A dog just walking up isn’t doing much other than following the drift: he should be wearing a little – working the sides where the cows can see them. A dog that works wide allows for the animal to not have to turn and look for the dog when it’s behind it: helps in keeping the cattle calm. We try to work dogs and horse and ourselves in a straight line but it’s not natural to on stock.

If a cow moves away from pressure on one side, it will look on the other side to see if there’s pressure there. (The fatter a cow gets, the less flex they have to look.)

The way to change a cow’s mind is to get their attention – that’s all. If a cow is eating, all you need to do is come into their field of vision and change their mind about food and put attention on you. they’ll look up and see their buddies moving and move, too. You pick up a group by picking up the leaders and the others will follow so long as they are watching the leaders.

If a cow is trying to get by you, you need to ride/run up next to them, and then fall back. The cow will look back at you and you can then step in to turn them. (Lots of self control needed here for everyone.)

If you ride with the cattle (aka parallel drive), it will keep their mind on you and you won’t need as much dog or cow. In a parallel drive, turn your chest away to take pressure off.

Are the cattle in a corner? Walk in, find the balance point until one turns in, then back out. Readjust, always looking for that balance point and walk out, working that side. If you get too excited and too close, the cattle will stop to look at you and it will stop the flow, resulting in less smooth, clean movement.

You can’t move cattle looking in different directions. Get them to look the same direction and they’ll naturally drift in that direction.

Should you make noise? If you have to, but too much noise will cause them to turn and look back at the noise: stopping flow. Don’t yell.

What if cattle are “trotty” (or light, as I have used to describe them)?

You might have to get aggressive with them to teach them to take the pressure, but always be able to pull out of it (again, need a dog that calms down and gets out when it’s not needed). It’s just like handling dogs, or horses. Get after bad behavior and then don’t nag or over correct after. Some people think they have what they takes to do this, but they don’t and they can’t control their emotions (and some dogs). If the cattle don’t get it, you can push more. He used to push and release but he says it doesn’t work. Push and half-release. That can work.  Though, when you first start working stock, it’s a good idea to release all of it until you know you can do more. It’s finite work.

Do you want to line cattle out? Work the leader. The rest will follow.

You can draw stock into you without someone at the top of the arc. Get in front of the eye, and then pull back and they will look and draw you – changing the mindset of the direction they were going. Don’t use eye – eye will cause them to turn. This is called “hooking the eye.”

Watch the lead cattle, but if you focus too much on them, the others see you coming up and will stall out.

You can stop cattle/sheep from panicking with wearing – they will see what’s going on.

You can use a horse’s butt as a wing if you’re working panels: use the head and it will be too much pressure for the stock to pass.

Sorting stock for a run? Go in and look for the stock that feel your presence most (turn their heads away from you) – those are the ones that will work great.

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.

Today was a good day: nice outruns, calling off the top

Last sheep rental, I wasn’t feeling so good about things. I was really frustrated with Rippa’s outruns – it seemed like she just didn’t want to come in easy on them but dive right in, and that once she did that, she didn’t want to bring them to me – she’d just kind of coast along behind them and the natural size of the pen brought the sheep to me. I was feeling kind of down after all the progress we made.

Today I did two things really differently: I brought the husband (who video taped me), and I remembered the green flag that Stephanie kept telling me to try using. I didn’t think my dogs respect it so I never really used it, but so far, everything Stephanie has told me to do has been right, so might as well try this.

It also helped running across this article Terry Martin did for Ranch Dog Trainer: The Aussie Style and Outrun. Reading this article made me feel less like a failure. Why couldn’t I get Rippa to just get out and get around? Because it’s NORMAL for her to want to dive in and then get them. She’s doing what her instincts say.

And it made sense why our last session was a downer for me – I spent most of it really trying to obedience her to the outrun – I wanted her to turn out away from me and the sheep and then go in. That’s not going to work.

So this session, I decided to quit doing that and go back to slingshot outurns, thanks to another article I found on Working Aussie Source: Fixing the Outrun.  And based off the instructions there, with the flag as an extra powerful visual that a stick (even with a bottle on it) can’t compare to . . . we got this:

The video covers a lot of random stuff I’m doing – the outrun work, just giving her mileage on sheep with me leading, and then some calling off the top work. This is the baby step toward teaching her to drive the Kathy Warren method. Stephanie, as I said before, has a different way, but I have seen enough dogs start with KW’s method, I am going to do that first, because I understand it best.

I think next time we go out (tomorrow), I’ll take a lesson with Stephanie and we’ll go to the arena. At this point I really want to work on that gather/outrun and get some mileage walking around. We’ll go back to the calling off when I feel like I have those two things under control with less fence pressure. Wish me luck!

(Oh, and PS? The mouth breathing? It’s because it’s cold and I have allergies that make me snuffy. Problem solved.)

Minding your Breath

Well, this lesson went really well. We took everything I gained from Monday’s class, applied it consistently, and I had myself a lovely fetching dog.

It went so well that I felt comfortable taking phone videos while getting mileage on Rippa.

Basically, as I said, I had a couple goals for this lesson: keep teaching her how to pick sheep up nicely, keep myself calm, and work on her flat go-by. We did all of that.

This time, I started Rippa by putting her in the round pen and just hanging out with her, hoping she wouldn’t just get this emotional charge if she learned that entering the pen didn’t mean going to work right away (again, a nice thing about sheep rental and not lessons).

Unfortunately, this is what she did for fifteen minutes:

This, friends, is not a relaxed dog pose. Had I taken a video, you’d also see that she is shivering a little. That specific pose is what I call the “Don’t make me leave, I am just a torso with no feet” pose.

She learned it from her mom:

This is to let us know that now that they are in the driveway, it’s a good decision to take us along for a ride or walk, but they can’t go back in the house because, clearly, they have no legs.

Anyhow, so that was not the most effective plan to teach her to be chill. I’m not sure if I’ll keep doing it in hopes she calms down eventually, but whatever.

So, I started by getting Rippa to “out” and turn away from me in the direction she wanted to go toward the sheep to get them and that resulted in a nice, wide, and easy outrun, where I would have her balance the sheep up and just stop. Rinse, repeat.

Her go by side is harder for her, both in the “get out” phase and when she picks them up. This is because since it is harder for her, I tend to put more pressure on her, which stresses her out. This, in turn, makes her charge the sheep harder than she should, which freaks the sheep out, and then it makes her harder to cover the go-by side and point them toward me.  We did a couple drills and then worked on plain fetching and back to that again and by the end of the lesson, stuff was looking pretty good. I am pretty confident that she can keep control of her sheep if she’s not got the pen holding them in at this point, though she does occasionally get too close and that causes the sheep to spaz and her to want to grip. Just mileage, I think.

So, we did some mileage and then to see if I could get her go-by side less flat (and start teaching her a drive), I started having her do outruns around me. Strangely, I had an easier time of getting her to run around me on the go-by side than on the way-to side. She was clearly confused, but she would get up at the top and turn in at 12:00 nicely, so that’s looking good.

At some point, I felt like everything was going casually enough that I could video some of it to talk to you about, so here’s the video:

Perhaps the first thing you’ll notice (at least I did), is that I appear to be a mouth breather when I’m working stock. This is an interesting phenomenon to me because I’m not a mouth breather and walking backward like this should not make me tired enough that I need to open my mouth. I am SERIOUSLY going to start wearing a heart rate monitor because if I’m that winded, I’m either doing it wrong or I’m stressing out for no reason.

Next, my timing on commands is kind of off but she’s going off my body language so I let it be because that’s my problem to fix, not hers. She’s absolutely right.

I’d really prefer to be quiet when I do stuff like this, but Stephanie notes that Rippa needs to learn her commands at this stage and to label it as much as I can without having too many expectations, and I think that’s fair.

Toward the end of the lesson, I took the pressure off her and just had her play follow the leader with  the sheep, which she did marvelously with no oversight needed from me.

Now we just need to get that outrun solid so that I can feel comfortable that she’ll control and cover in the arena and it will be time to give that a go again. I think it’s a couple weeks of training out, though, but I feel really good about where we started and where we are today. A lot of that is thanks to Stephanie having a really good outlook about everything and me learning to not panic if stuff doesn’t go well on her sheep.

That breath thing does bother me though. Part of the practice of meditation can be watching your breath. So your breathing goes, so your mind goes. If I have a hard time being calm, that heavy breathing is a sure sign of me not being calm.

So, goal next week is to knock off the mouth breathing.

W Lazy J Cattle Camp

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

I wanted to go for a few reasons:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Initial Impressions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusions

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

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

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

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

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

vs

Photos courtesy Stef Player and Yishai Horowitz

Day 4 – Oh, Chute

Well, the morning started out with rain. And lightning. And thunder. Which, you know, doesn’t happen too often here on the coast of California.  It’s 5:30 am and it’s definitely coming down out there. I’m worried about my little Cochin chickens – they have a dogloo to live in but we haven’t covered the whole enclosure yet and they have feathery feet, which, when they get wet, makes the little guys cold. I’m on the Internet looking at radar and thinking about how I’m slated to go walk around in the very hills where the lightning strikes and how I’m just not feeling all that awesome and maybe I should just go back to bed. I send Kathy and email and tell her I’ll wait until the lightning/rain stops. She emails back and tells me it never started where the ranch is at. Well, okay. Drink a protein shake and get in the car.

The last few days haven’t been very good ones for me in general. This camp fell during some bad mojo with my personal life and I’m not getting too much sleep and not too happy. Don’t worry about it, I’ll get over it.

But I get there, find Marilee and Carol out with their dogs in the back and join them. When it’s my turn (I’m not that late), we see a repeat performance of the last time. I’m really flipping excited about how easy miss Rippa is being, especially when Carol’s dog gets excited and loses control of her sheep and Marilee’s dog has to get them. Par for the course, but so far I am excited that this hasn’t happened to me. I’ve watched it happen over and over and it feels nice to not worry about that – yet. I’m sure when we’re learning to drive and not just fetching things will change.

So we all regroup and we’re sitting there and the first thing Kathy says is, “You need to fix your blog.” Okay, so maybe you don’t get this from me, maybe you do, but I have this stupid complex about being called out. Even if it’s not bad, I get all horribly guilty, feel awful, and want to go hide in a hole. The dumb thing is, even if I’m not doing anything wrong and I know it, I still feel that way. And the dumbest thing about that? I’m also totally the person that puts it all out there because I believe in being a voice when others are silent. I give people a reason to find faults because I put the whole story out there. Peeople like me should shut up and just keep their head down, but I can’t. You can see that I am a headcase. Oh well, you’re reading this so you like it. Anyway, being called out totally made me get all teary thanks to being already a bit of a head case the last couple days anyway. Stupid. I hope when I’m sixty I finally stop caring so much.

Basically, here’s what she wanted me to fix, and I did but I want you following along to know it too:

• The person that commented that her famous Fred started out weak on heads is dead wrong. In fact, when she was making the choice between him and another, he saw him go head-on (as a puppy) after a sheep (I think a ram) and that was that. Anyone who’s ever started puppies and seen that kind of confidence knows what I mean. Most are a little wary of big guys stepping up against them. And that I should never listen to hearsay.
• That Kathy never said I ruined Fury – I am the one that says I ruined her. She says that I started her wrong. I guess in my mind, it’s the same thing. Though, you know, that’s not true, either. Kathy’s always been patient with me about trying to get Fury to come back from all the bad habits I gave her. And she definitely has no problem telling someone that she has a lost cause on her hands. Me retiring Fury was my decision. I may start her up again when the goat thing works itself out as the miles she needs are free and she’s slowing down in her old age. Maybe not. But there is a lot of cool stuff about Fury that we got her to do, too.
• And finally, that I forgot the most important comment Kathy made about Rippa on cattle, that “She’s coming, she’s coming!” As in she is coming along and will step up. I just need some patience.

So there you have it.  And, as usual, I have some thoughts that spring from this.

1. Starting your dog right is really, really key. I cannot tell you how many illuminations I’ve had about this clinic about that. It’s almost been a year since I started Rips with Kathy and I only go maybe four times a month, if that, and she improves by leaps and bounds every time. As Kathy always says, if you don’t give them bad habits, it’s not about fixing things, it’s about progression. Poor Fury was mostly about fixing. There are some really talented dogs at the clinic, but they don’t have the benefit of Kathy’s supervision for every single sheep outing stopping them from making handling mistakes and fixing issues before they come up. All I can say is that if you think you can do this on your own, or from reading this, you definitely are barking up the wrong tree.
2. Pick your mentors carefully. I am very, very lucky to have learning relationships with a lot of the breed’s greats because I was a precocious kid who loved email.

I am not particularly tight with anyone in Aussiedom for a number of reasons (one of the biggest being that I am simply not around enough for real relationship building), but Kathy has been an amazing mentor for me. Her chastising me for posting hearsay always reminds me that she sets a good example about keeping her mouth shut with things unless she really knows, and then she really only tells you if you need to know or could use the info. In Aussieland, there’s a lot of talking about other people, but for the most part, I’d say Kathy does a brilliant job of keeping it classy and reminding me that it’s the source you should go to. You never know the whole story.

This also was reinforced when this guy showed up randomly to drop some ducks off and sat with me a while watching people’s runs. He was telling me he was dissatisfied with his show-bred Aussie that didn’t have a lick of interest in stock and was interested in getting a real stockdog puppy to train in the spring, and asked what advice I had about finding the right one. So I told him about what I’d learned from mentors that the public doesn’t always say, that he should really think about what qualities he wants in a dog and what he wants to do with it, and really do the research. I told him about how I did it and his eyes bugged out. I laughed and told him I might be a little hardcore about research, and Aussies in general. If not for the right mentors, I would be such a mess right now.

So, I know I told you I’d lay off the video camera, but Kathy wanted to do chute work with everyone and I was like, “Ooooh, good learning moment for everyone.” I’m not going to say a ton about it right now, but I did annotate the video for your learning pleasure.

What you need to know about chute-sheep-dog management is that it’s all about setting the dog and sheep up for success – telling them where to be, getting out of the way, and holding up your end of things. It helps when your dog actually lays down when you tell her to. This session ended with Kathy telling me that I really need to put some kind of stand-stay on Rips because she is fighting the down. What’s annoying about this is that she downs quite nice off stop. So let the obedience training begin.

In other news, a lot of people were working on their driving skills with their dogs.  Driving (that is, not fetching, instead of bringing the sheep to you, the dog drives them away) is a whole other game. People have just as hard a time learning how to drive as their dogs do. I think I finally understand the training philosophy, but understanding and doing are two different animals.

Kathy’s method doesn’t use props (like ropes) or the fence as a crutch. You start learning the drive out in the wide open, which I think is pretty cool. It makes for a well-rounded, thinking dog.

And what’s it going to take for me to start learning to drive? I think the following elements need to be all in a row:

• A solid stop (ie, down, which I don’t have yet)
• Self control (check)
• Balance on the stock (check)
• “Steady” (ie, a command that slows the dog down when they lose self control, do not have)
• “There” (a command that tells your dog to turn into the stock and go straight, not wear back and forth – I think Rippa knows what this means, but not totally)
• Flank commands (“way to” and “go by” – working on it, but not there yet)

But that’s not all! Rippa is currently training on heavy sheep (ie, not too scared of her or me) and we need to get her on lighter sheep to work on that control. Why? I asked Kathy. One very good reason is that her method involves taking the person totally out of the picture. When you back away from heavy sheep, they will try to follow you and bend in your direction when pressured by the dog. With light sheep, they’re happy moving into open space because they don’t know the person is “shelter” from the dog.

So, we have some things to get “down” before we move on.

Starting a Dog on Cattle

So, as I have been writing, I’m attending a clinic that includes running your dogs on cattle. And, as the cycle simply is, pretty much everyone in camp right now has a young dog with limited or no exposure to cattle, so seeing everyone do their thing is really interesting to me.

How Kathy starts the dogs on them  -

First, it’s important that the cattle are as used to dogs as possible. They’ll group nicer, stay calm, and be less frightened of people (ie, smaller flight zone). These cattle are off the hill and then used for a trial the preceding weekend. There’s a reason that the advanced dogs go first in trials – to teach the cattle to mind dogs so by the time the started dogs get there, they’re less panicky.

Second, wide open spaces. It’s really a good idea to get your cattle out in a big space like an arena. Kathy uses a combination of a stick with a flag on it and her dogs to keep the cattle off the back fence (where home and safety are) so your dogs don’t get mashed up and smushed, and also to give them a chance to pick them up. The stick with a flag up also seems to freak the dogs out sometimes (it’s a bigger visual than the plain stick is), but it has a purpose. Anyway, like point number one, this is a safety thing.

With that said, man, watching young dogs start on cattle freaks me out. Some people intentionally won’t put their dogs on cattle because they worry about safety. I feel like I have cattle dogs so there is no reason to consider it an unnecessary risk, so I don’t get too freaked when they get into dangerous situations – but other dogs, I totally am on edge watching.

Anyway, the general approach to putting a new dog on cattle is this – set your cattle out in the middle of the arena and let the handler and dog follow them until the dog turns on. Then figure it out from there.

Most dogs, after a period of intimidation which involves running up to the cow and then running back to the handler, will slowly gain the confidence it takes to figure out they can move them. But I wouldn’t say “moving them” is a confidence shower in and of itself.

Most of the dogs, when they got confident moving them, started to yahoo a lot  -  heeling, then running to head and barking/feinting them to turn them around. But there was a lot of running and barking and unnecessary shots. Rippa was equally guilty of this, but still didn’t really have the confidence to head them. Some dogs never do. I think I covered headers and heelers earlier, so search that if you want to know why.

I was talking to Marilee about dogs bred for cattle and dogs not and I made the following observation about this, which I have pretty much considered truth after experiencing it in my own dogs. Very strong cattle dogs, when given the choice to fight or flight will pick fight. They will go in and do what it takes with a charging steer, but this also means that off stock, they are more likely to nip or be confrontational under pressure when other dogs would submit or avoid.

I actually got Rippa into trouble for that today. She and I were working in the pens and someone wanted to come through with her dog and watch. So there we are along the back panel, pretty close quarters – she and her dog, me, Rippa, and Kathy’s dog Denny. For the record, Rips has always been a little worried about other dogs – with time and socialization she’s mostly friendly, but if a dog runs up to her and intimidates her, she has no problem letting it know. Anyway, Denny is up in Rippa’s business so I make the mistake of trying to re-place her by laying her down between the two dogs, and Denny puts more pressure, Rippa looks at the gal’s dog, and he makes eye contact and leans toward her and it was just too much pressure for her so she lashed out at him for a second. I should have just read the situation and put her back by the front of the gate instead with us, but I was being dumb and novice. Now she is quite sure my dog wants to eat her dog when it was just a situation where my dog felt too much pressure and I wasn’t letting her get out of it by telling her to stay. My bad.

Anyway, it’s an interesting thing. Watching all these new dogs go from being intimidated and standing with their owners to charging the cattle, sometimes taking a hit, and going right back for more. But I also watched Kathy handle Teal on them – an experienced cattle dog who has to be about . . . 8 now? Anyway, confidence looks like Teal – she stands up right, no face, no lip and just looks at the cattle getting in her face. If she needs to, she’ll do something. And then when she’s fetching them in, she’ll sometimes take a cheap shot once in a while, but keep her balance and read her stock and you can tell she just thinks it’s fun. These biting dogs . . . they’re just as scared as the non-cattle dogs not making contact.

And then I wonder if anyone starts a young dog and they aren’t intimidated at first. Kathy used to bring out a trained dog to keep the cattle moving and give confidence to the younger dog (it’s in a lot of training books, including my favorite by Scott Lithgow),  but she’s since learned it can get the dogs hurt so she avoids it now.

And that was a divergence. Once the dog is going to head and moving the cattle, it’s time to ask for a fetch by pushing the dog back once it heads. And that is how you start a dog on cattle.