“The Dip”

On Sunday, the Woods invited the huz and I over for a “stockdog party” as I liked to call it. The idea of people just getting together, not for lessons, not formally, to just work dogs was so neat to me. People do that?

I wasn’t sure what it would entail, but what it was was a practice for the trials coming up. Dustin took me into the arena and showed me the course – take the cattle through the barrels in the middle of the arena, then flip them back through a Y chute and turn them back out to the middle, and then pen them in a tight, triangular pen with a small opening.

I really didn’t know how how to go about these things, because watching his first dog do it – he is way more finished than Rippa so Dustin walked me through it. It was a lot more obedience training than it was letting Rippa work, but it was good for both of us and we started figuring it out. Good for me to read the cattle better and good for Rippa to hold her line when I tell her to instead of anticipating.

I brought my camera, too, but it was hard to take good photos with such a tight course. The above is the Y chute, where you take the dog through the panel and then use yourself to redirect them.

It was very good to learn how to maneuver like that and Rippa had a good handle on things for the most part, though we need a lot more training in her feeling in control with the cattle before I want to trial. There’s one in April coming up that Shannon has encouraged me to try, but it’s right when I open my new climbing gym and I really, really want to hold off until I know I won’t embarrass Aussies everywhere – NCA doesn’t have beginner, it has Rancher (dogs that haven’t won anything), Open, and Pro. All of which are levels up from where I am. I can send Rippa to fetch cattle and everything, but it won’t be as clean and pretty as it was for most of the runs I’ve seen at these trials and people have feelings about Aussies that I don’t want to perpetuate. After all, I want spectators to think, “Wow, nice dog. I would consider an Aussie.”

But I decided that after that, I really needed to fix some of the stuff that we’ve got holes on because of various reasons.

Various reasons: my bad timing, my hysteria from learning how to handle badly, my not wanting to make strong points to Rippa because I didn’t want to be hysterical – all of which lead to Rippa not balancing very well and wanting to come in tight all the time.

So, I went to sheep yesterday and brought my camera along. For some reason the shots I did at Stephanie’s didn’t turn out, but it is BEAUTIFUL there.  We worked on three things: not cutting the top on her outruns, making her lay down way out when the sheep come on balance, and some pen work.

I feel like I have the first two handled, and Rippa was a champ. Just need to reinforce it. But the pen work? Sigh? Rippa is great at getting stock out of pens – even awkward ones. With everyone’s coaching about chilling, it worked and Rippa is super nice even in tight spaces. When is she NOT nice? When the sheep pass through the gate and head wherever they head in a hurry.

At this point, Rippa will shoot like a bat out of hell, generally end up in the middle to get to the heads and turn them around. But it’s not controlled and confident, and while sometimes it’s nice, sometimes it’s really, really not.

Today was that day.

When I left Stephanie’s, I pulled to the side of the road and had myself a little cry.

I just have so many questions about this whole thing: I know so very little and also so much compared to some. I know that Rippa’s a nice dog, not just because I think so, but people are always telling me when they see her, but this is not going smoothly along, it’s not easy, we get hurt along the way . . . and for what? I don’t think that stockdog training is kind to the animals we train on. It can be better than some, but at other times? The stock don’t deserve what the dogs can do to them sometimes. People are okay with it – they say that’s how we learn, but like . . . I have been at this for years now and I’m only discovering what I don’t know and I don’t know where to land on what is next. I do this thing where I post on the Internet about stuff (ha ha, here I am) and people smack me down sometimes even though I know that I’m not wrong and that the people who talk are spouting dogma without much to back it up. But I’m not much better, eh? So what is right? How do I know?

Finally, I was like, “Ugh, you’re already out here and you’re bummed, why not go for a lovely drive over to see Jennifer and the ducks? You don’t have to work them – in fact, you probably don’t want to. But it’s good to see friends and beautiful places.”

Good call. I told Jen how I was feeling and she told me to hop on her horse and ride up into the hills with her daughter, but I was like, “No . . . I am way out of whack and I shouldn’t be doing stuff with animals right now. The animals suffer.” Jen asked me, if that’s how I feel when I work, why am I doing it? And I was quick, “Because most of the time I feel amazing!” “Well then!”

So I headed down to the ducks, who were out in the pasture area eating up the tall grass, bugs, and other goodies. This is their first green spring and they love it!

I decided I owed the Fury at least a little working for watching dogs work on Sunday and Rippa today, so I set the arena up and sat down for a minute.

Stephanie and I were talking before I worked her sheep and she said two things to me that came to me as I was sitting there – I had complained to her about how I was feeling torn about everything.

1. She said she’d seen a photo recently where the dog’s getting pushed out with the stick and that makes the dog go in tighter rather than giving space and pressure.

2. She said that I know enough to make the right decisions.

#1 was certainly true during sheep (and cattle, when I get upset, Rippa goes in tighter), and since she had faith in me even though stuff didn’t go well that day, I could probably do this.

And so, I put the Fury on the ducks. She tends to run in really tight, especially on the Go-By side out of frustration with me and take it out on the stock, so instead of going to confront her and pushing her out, I tried Stephanie’s method and took pressure off of her that was coming from me. Bam. Worked like a charm. The Fury has not worked so well in a while.

I tried it with Rippa and again . . . bam. Like a charm.

And my day was now turned around.

I recently read a book called The Dip by Seth Godin – a book about when to quit. In it, he says, you should quit if you don’t think you’re going to be The Best in the World at something.

Okay, before I go further, I have zero idea what that means for me in this area. I don’t want to be The Best in the World at stockdog trialing, I know that. It would be cool to be that kind of trainer, but I don’t have to be. But I’m headed toward something, and we’ll see where that goes.

But, if you’re on the path to Best in the World, this is what it will look like:

So far, that’s pretty much what I feel like has happened. When I got The Fury, I peaked a bit, but then when it became obvious that I wasn’t going to get much further without a lot more mileage and she was probably “ruined” and the dip sank. Then I got Rippa and it was exciting, but when my stockdog options dried up, major low point. I think I’m at the crest upward, and it looks like once I get stuff dialed, according to Seth, it’s a short trip to the payoff.

But how the heck I’m supposed to keep the faith in myself, keep building my understanding of the bigger picture (it’s severely lacking – all vague right now – when I was training under Kathy, I grasped the mechanics of the training to its own end, but not of the bigger picture of the dog working in a ranch setting, and certainly not trialing), keep working on my handling skills while trying not to reinforce bad habits I’ve put into Rippa, and get Rippa feeling totally in control of the stock.

Dang, that’s a lot.

The hardest part is the amount of opinions on the subject. Everyone has one – and I was once sheltered by Kathy’s opinions only, but Stephanie has different ideas and Shannon has different ideas and Dustin and books and the Internet. I feel like I “get” Kathy’s ideas. I know “better” like Stephanie says. Kathy’s message has been transmitted, but I’m so damned open minded – I don’t want to be dogmatic about things, I want to be open to new ideas, but MAN, does that make life confusing.

And what do I do every time? Go back to what I learned from Kathy. I’m wondering if I should learn something from that. heh.

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.

A Dogless Stockdog Day

I volunteered to help Stephanie in the pens during her field trial yesterday. I just really like moving animals and interacting with them, and moreover, by the end of the day, I felt like I’d done something good for the world, and not in the way you’d suspect.

This was my first border collie field trial – every single person had a black and white dog (sometimes they had copper, too) and it was hard for me to tell them apart when working: oh, this one is short haired, this one has low ears, and that was about it. Mostly that’s because in field trials, I’m completely away from the action and all I mostly saw were people who were helping me and their dogs.

I’ve only heard about these trials in the context of “Aussies can’t do them” so it was interesting to see why. Frankly, I think the right Aussies could definitely do them, but it doesn’t highlight their strength, so I get it.  It looked like a lot of finite training going into the dogs and not so much functional. In ASCA stockdog trials, the dog has to get the sheep itself in some of the courses, pen them, get them through chutes, etc. It was interesting watching these insane outruns where the dog didn’t see the sheep at all and needed the owner to tell them when to move (one dog came over to my pens, saw sheep, but heard the command to keep looking and took off across an entirely separate field and it took 20 min for him to come back when called). But it was all training. I never got to see the dogs read their sheep or really work them. It was all whistle commands and a lot of yelling up close (so ha, ha, BC people yell too!).  To be fair, the only part I could see was the dogs picking the sheep up. (I heard the yelling, though!)

The thing I like about the ASCA trials is that the dog, if it really understands, is going to do what has to be done to achieve the directive, and if it’s a good dog, it won’t need a ton of direction. These dogs were working untrained, terrified, small groups of range ewes and only a few really kept control of their stock, and I think it was because they were being handled so much, not because they didn’t know how.

I got the classic, “Oh, you have Aussies . . . well, they’re good for penning” comment, too. Yes, a trial like this would likely fry Aussie brains because they’re very much “think for yourself” dogs and this kind of work is mostly, “Do what I tell you” stuff. At least that was my impression, from watching and talking to the people setting the sheep out.

Also, lordy, that was  a big thing. The pens weren’t set up ideally but my thought was like, “Someone tried, let’s get this done.” There was SO much bitching about how they were set up, but you know what, I did get it done and the people bitching weren’t there all day with me. The setting the sheep thing seems crazy to me. I get them into the squeeze pens, then they’re released, and three people and two dogs have to settle the sheep, then move them out into the middle of a field for another dog to pick them up. This took up to a half hour to do with terrified sheep, flapping tarps, dogs EVERYWHERE, and shadows from a tree that everyone kept telling me was for shade but was set up on the south side of the tree and not a bit of shade ever reached us, except in the squeeze chute and right when they popped out, which made them crazy if there wasn’t cloud cover. One thing that also drove me nuts was that you had to be SUPER quiet and you couldn’t use a livestock flag in the pens because people said the BCs trialing were too sensitive to it and I would ruin the run. I kept thinking that if a border collie picking up sheep is going to get shut down by me talking at a regular volume waving a flag stick WAY away from them, something’s wrong with that – but whatever. I don’t know BCs very well or the pressure of trialing in this environment. But I damn well expect my trained Aussie doing an outrun to just . . . do the outrun, even if there is a bar fight going on in the pens next to it.

The sheep would get away from the people setting the sheep out and we’d have to fill our exhaust pen with perfectly workable sheep (and sheep leaping the fence to come back in to escape the dogs) to keep it moving, and everyone was really worried that there would not be enough sheep and the trial would be ruined.

My first helper was awesome, mostly because he said he didn’t know that  and was happy to learn from whatever advice was given. So I taught him about his own little “hula hoop” of pressure that he could apply to the sheep, but to read them when they were upset and sometimes putting pressure off and giving them time to be curious and take steps on their own was the best. We talked about how being tight in the pens was comforting to the sheep, not because they didn’t think they could escape, but because livestock like body pressure and it keeps them calm. We talked about why the tarps were there and how effective they were at hiding the sheep from the draws (not, the sheep were tall enough to look over), how shadows worked (livestock have crappy depth perception, so shadows look like cliffs) and how little things like a bit of twine can be scary. The morning, into the afternoon, went really well – he was really fun to work with and we were high-fiving eachother on difficult penning job successes and I look forward to running into him again.

Around 2 (after about eight hours of me doing this), there was a changing of the guard (and I was the only all-day worker) and suddenly it got crazy with people literally pulling sheep by the legs to get them into the chutes, trying to push them in with intimidation and smacking them with the stock sticks. They eventually dumped a dog in with the tight pens who basically only got trampled and caused the new people to cuss and snarl at the sheep who were just terrified.

I got really pissed about this because I wasn’t going to contribute to this. I don’t really want to come off like I was judging them because I know that most stockmanship looks like this, but I’ve been taught to think about the sheep before anything else (thanks Kathy, and others) and I knew how to keep them moving smoothly even scared and this was not helping. Why did I know? Stockmanship. Having horrified sheep doesn’t make for good trialing nor good meat. Or, you know, good Karma. I’ve read Temple Grandin’s books, websites on this stuff, been taught how to work pens and move sheep by Kathy, have a number of livestock management classes under my belt from college, and I do, after all, have an affinity to animals. These little guys saw dark holes, shadows that looked like cliffs, angry, cussing people, and they just quit. It was about a half hour of nothing after the setting people went through three pens of sheep before getting a trial dog on them and I didn’t have a sheep draw to help the loose sheep trust that they weren’t walking into hell.  I kept trying to tell people why it wasn’t working, but without a clear, designated leader, it fell to everyone just trying a new approach on their own. In situations like that, I generally back off and let people do their thing because my thing might not actually be the best thing and fighting other strong-willed people isn’t going to fix it.

When people started talking about rearranging the panels and stuff when I finally threw my hands up into the air and was like, “That’s it, I’ve been here for 8 hours and there’s nothing I can do here so I’m leaving,” which finally caused one woman to go, “Wait, yes, she’s been working here all day and they’ve been moving smoothly, we should listen to her.”

Sure enough, calming everyone down after ten minutes I slowly, slowly put pressure on my sheep with just my body (and took it off if it was too much) and we got four in the chute. The rest followed and it was a very enjoyable experience for everyone after that, I think (except the gal that got peed on – yuck!).

I felt good about myself in that I didn’t make the sheep upset and I could get it done in less than ideal conditions (even if that meant clambering into each pen and physically turning sheep around to go through to the next pen as we moved them up), and that for that day, those sheep were treated well. I also felt good about myself because prior to this, I haven’t really been given much opportunity to do work like this in the dog world. My friend Amy and I did sort ducks for ASCA finals last year, but that’s about all I’ve ever been asked to do for a trial in my world. It was nice to know that all the work I’ve done has paid off and I’m a quite good stockman that everyone was happy with.

People were calling me the “range ewe whisperer” and it felt great.

I also reaffirmed a lesson I’ve learned earlier: you can’t force leadership. Even if you know better, saying so won’t matter. You have to let other people recognize you and put you there. During the whole debacle I described above, I had no idea how to fix it, but I knew criticizing others’ approaches wouldn’t work, so finally deciding to let them to their own devices was the best idea I could come up with. And it did work in an unexpected way": people recognized I could be effective, stopped going in all directions and gave me time to do so, and we all were happy again. So yeah, there are greater life lessons in stockdogs for sure.