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

A Little Update and an Interlude

So . . . almost accidentally, we bought a house by the sea and moved in. It is a fixer upper, and being people who don’t rest on our laurels, that’s pretty much all we’ve been doing with it since we took possession of it. The very first day I put plants in the ground because the previous owner never did. Then there was scraping and painting and reinstalling. We’re still working on the inside and will be for a few months, I think. And then there’s the backyard.

Oh, and my husband and I decided to open up a second location for our non profit climbing gym, in the midst of the busiest season for our for-profit event business.

What I’m trying to say is I haven’t been working dogs that much.

Aww, but she’s a time suck. I never expected that to be the case because I’ve been taking care of rentals like they’re my own forever. But now I can’t blame the landlord for it looking bad. It’s a compulsion. It must be fixed up. Much more to come in the front yard, but this is it for now.

Anyhow, that’s not to say I haven’t been working. I’ve gotten out a handful of times since then. And probably for good, too.

Remember my problem with Rippa and the ducks? Still no good. She won’t even do chores now. She’ll give it one half-hearted go and it’s over. The ducks still move off her so I can grab her and move them but she will just come over, suck up, and ask to do anything but that. Unless I let her go crazy on them. So, Rippa is on duck-time-out.

She was showing hints of doing this with sheep, too, at Stephanie’s place. But not at the Woods’.

I was so upset about it that I ended up deciding to go on a heritage search and contact anyone I knew that had her bloodlines too and figure it out. Tracey, of C-Me, reminded me that Fury’s mother (Rippa’s grandmother) didn’t like ducks, either. I started talking to more people about dogs just plain not interested in working ducks and sometimes sheep and wanting to give up, and it seemed to be coming from Spike. But then, someone didn’t have Spike, but they had Judd’s Chickasaw Dan.

And, lo and behold, I suddenly am on the phone with Joey Judd – which was pretty exciting. He talked to me for a solid hour about people, about dogs, about all of it. What I realized from that conversation is that Rippa is working exactly how you’d expect for me linebreeding on Dan. She’s got serious power with the cattle, and she’s getting frustrated on sheep and ducks as Joey mentioned his dogs were wont to do.

So, check it out, what happened? It’s probably that I’ve been working way more interesting stock at the Woods: goats and cattle, and she’s like, “Eff this other stuff.” She does work sheep fine at the Woods, so I’m wondering if there’s something about Stephanie’s sheep or the stuff I do there because it’s so much bigger of a space. I guess we’ll see!

And should I get upset about the fact that Rippa’s not amped on the little beasties? No. I wanted to breed cattle dogs. I got a cattle dog. If I keep wanting to breed for cattle dogs, she’s awesome. She’ll still work my chickens happily, too, but she’s getting a massive break from the ducks.

Actually, last time I was out there, she got to do nothing but cry as the Fury did her thing, and another guest was out working, too. I met this guy Roland and his red border collie at Stephanie’s. He trials ASCA and needed ducks to warm up on, and I said sure. Well, he comes out and his dog is great. He’s all apologetic about how she’s too hard on them, but man, my dogs are way harder (of course, they’re at the started level and his bitch is trying to finish a WTCh). It’s all about perspective.

I was supposed to trial with the Woods this fall but we’ve not put enough time in (and now I have no time with work and house), so they are off killing it on the cattle circuits in California and Oregon right now.

I posted to the California ASCA trial and show list about upcoming trials and so now it’s time to sort through them and pick one or two and just suck it up and go. I’m terrified we’ll do badly, but I guess I have to get over it. We’ll be fine. Let my dog work and me just concentration on the job and get ‘er done.

When I know my dates, I’ll post them here so there’s no backing out (unless I don’t get in).

Until next time . . .

Warts and all

I started this blog mostly for me – I wanted a way to track my ups and downs and remember my thoughts. I’m a huge fan of journaling for this reason because for me – how far I’ve come never seems far enough until I look back. But there are always bumps in the road.

We’ve kind of hit one.

The last month or so, Rippa has totally quit me. Not, “Hey, I am leaving the arena” but more of a sulky, “Please, I don’t know what you want, I don’t know how to do that” reaction with some hopping up on me, following me around, and generally not taking direction at all, even simple things like ‘get around’ to start an outrun.

It was really scary. To go from bragging on how we’ll we’re improving and being ready to trial to having a dog act like she has no will to do it, no talent, no instinct, what?

At first I blamed it on her heat, because that’s an easy out, but I doubted it was really the issue. Last time I was on ducks, we did our usual chores, took them out of the take pen, started doing some obstacles and after trying to get them through a center chute – Rippa just quit trying.

And I really don’t know what to do in that scenario. Stockdog people say don’t let them get away with that, so I tried to force it. It didn’t work. Then I tried running around moving the stock like I was getting a puppy excited about it. Nope. I put her up, put Fury to work, made her jealous, but when I started up again, nope. I worked them together and that went okay, but it’s really hard to work dogs on ducks. They can’t take pressure or they quit and then the dogs aren’t finnessy enough to figure out the team work thing where rougher work will work with cattle etc.

I wrote to Kathy Warren, who told me Rippa’s always been a little weird about pressure and to just go back to chores (but make sure they’re done nicely) and fun stuff. I talked to Pat Lambeth, whining about how I’d never seen such a complete transformation. Pat asked me if I had done anything really different lately.

I had! A month ago, Dustin had me do obstacles with Rippa. Up to this point, I do them occasionally, but it’s mostly just ground work. We had no issues with that on cattle, but he also added some extra mechanical stuff – he put her on a line to try to make her rate herself faster than she was doing naturally (she gets pretty excited on stock on the first go), and the pop he gave her scared the crap out of her – so much so that she quit trying on cattle and just drifted behind them until we put her up.

With ducks, we’ve been working obstacles ever since. She likes the take pen – she gets that, but center chute? I lose them! Not only does she think she loses them, she does. When they see the back fence where home is, no amount of dog pressure is going to have my duckies come off the fence – they want to go home. Obstacles came to mean futility. Never mind trying to get them off the fence when they were tired. So Rippa quit. I would pick the ducks up and reset them in the middle and that probably wasn’t a great move either because she was probably waiting for me to move them since she felt she couldn’t.

By the way, she can, with patience. Fury’s able to do it, though Fury has a lot more power and eye than Rippa. You have to work the dog you have, not the one you want.

Anyway, I almost canceled my Wednesday night session with the Woods but Shannon thought she could help me through it and I tend to agree. So what’d they do – put us on baby goats. That was a new one.  I thought, at first, that the goats needed space, but what they needed was super tight pressure to get the kids moving. Rippa LOVED that. She had to gently heel their little hinds to get them to move and she had a real hard time getting them off the fence, but between the noises and the biting and the total novelty of it – she was on again!

We moved on to their new goats – that’s something I love about going there, they change out stock ALL the time. I don’t think I’ve worked the same set of stock more than a handful of times that I’ve been there.  It went well. No issues. Was she fixed?

I asked the husband to come along with me today to work ducks and she did it again. We got going, she got the ducks out of the take pen and parked, but when they drifted back to the draw of the pen, she gave up.

“What’d I do?” I asked him.

”Nothing, but damn, yeah, she really quit!”

I had him call her in and send out Fury. I worked the ducks back and forth with Rippa in plain sight while Fury did fun things like outruns and fetching until Rippa was quivvering. Then I let them both work the ducks. Again, this isn’t something I’d do with other people’s animals, as two dogs at once is kind of rough on the ducks. The dogs don’t bite them or anything, but sometimes they’ll end up on top of them or in between them and it’s not pretty, but it gets Rippa excited and moving. I was pretty impressed with how both dogs took my commands so well together.

After a minute or so of that (it was hot), I had huz call Fury off and Rippa was game to play again, fetching all over the arena. I didn’t try anything fancy, just wanted to keep her motivated and happy. We quit quickly and all was good.

So . . . it looks like I need to build some confidence back up. I was working on so many new things – perfect distance outruns, flanks, driving, obstacles, adding stuff like a line, etc and Rippa is so situational that she doesn’t take it easily. She needs to understand what the thing is fully to do it with full commitment.

I don’t love that about her – it makes her slower to train to be effective, but I think it’s fine. She’s reliable on the chickens at home and she’s great at bringing stock off the hills or to get sorted because she understands it. If she were a little ranch dog, she’d get the game easily and that’s all I’d need. She might take extra work to be a precise trial dog, but that’s not the goal here anyway. I want dogs I can get in ranch homes that can go to work with minimal formal training  - so far so good there.

Where did this come from? Fury’s not remotely like Rippa in this way. In fact, Dustin put Fury on his goats with the husband attempting to handle (he’s pretty clueless, as you’ll see). Fury doesn’t quit if she doesn’t understand – she just goes harder. I talked to a number of people who have Rippa’s relatives and I guess it’s a pretty consistent thing. The dog I linebred on (it looks like Spike – Andrew’s Red Chickaspike) seems to have a fairly reliable incidence of dogs who would get sulky if they didn’t get something right away and need a confidence build up. To be clear, I’m not blaming Spike, nor saying all his relatives are like that, but it seems like that side of the line has it in there.

So, good to know. If I breed Rippa, it needs to be a super confident dog to improve that.

Anyway, so some more work to go, but we’re not ruined yet!

And bonus: here’s the video of 11.5 year old Fury working goats:

Oh! And the ducks are now laying! Green eggs:

It’s inspiring me to make things like this epic French Toast I had for breakfast:

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.

Mileage is definitely key–and coming into heat is a problem

Last week, Rippa was super flirty with the Woods’ dogs and sure enough, she’s coming into heat. Not standing or anything, just flirty . . . I hadn’t thought much about it until Dustin asked me last night about how I felt I was doing and what my goals were.

I told her about the ram incident and how I was pleased with her, but maybe her confidence was bad. The last work I had on ducks and sheep before going there, she was a mess. She stopped wanting to take flank and Way To suddenly meant WAY AWAY OVER THERE. She was doing great on sheep and our driving was going well, but then her mind just seems to drift.

I mentioned she was in heat.

“Well, that could be some of it?” It’s true –I forget. Cranky pets and cramps can affect it all.

So yesterday we did some exercises. Dustin had me work on getting her outrun cleaner and just thinking and slowing down. He also put a big emphasis on me working on my own stockmanship. I did a couple send outs, but then I had to make Rippa stay while I moved the cattle. They aren’t as light to me so it was a lot harder. Then he had me do some obstacle work – get them around trees or hold them. You’ll see me trying here, but Rippa’s not precise enough (or I am not timing it early enough) to get them to settle right where they need to. He says it shows me holes in training, and it did.

Something I’m noticing from watching these videos (there are a lot of them, you’re just getting parts that illustrate a thought) is that Rippa is doing a lot better than I think she is.

I told him that I thought she was lacking confidence. She seems slow and not engaged to me. This, ha ha, is what Rippa thinking and working seriously looks like. I don’t see the Woods dogs working like that (they’re typically fast moving and responding) and Fury doesn’t work like that (I broke her, plus she’s just a lot more intense naturally), so it’s hard to watch Rippa go about things slowly and not in a “snappy” way and think she’s working. But watching it third person like this – uh, yeah, she is. She isn’t even that slow to respond. It just feels like it handling.

So here I am trying to get Rippa to get the cattle in the area between the two feed buckets up by the camera. It’s not super smooth because I’ve got to put some training on her where she doesn’t take things.

There’s parts in this video where I think she’s blowing off a flank, and she’s not. It just doesn’t look wide enough from my perspective. At the very beginning, I lie her down and she takes a step to turn and face the cattle – staying in contact with them – which in hindsight looks like good instinct against my bad instinct. I need to command her earlier so she can do things like that and stay in control if I’m going to obedience the commands out of her.

I haven’t been using obstacles in training much because I’m working on commands and instinct, but he added some goals and it did indeed show me things to work on for both of us.

Today we went to ducks and sheep and Rippa did a perfect started B course with me.  That’s all I asked for today and that’s what we got. Fury did a decent one, but the ducks were hot (I used the whole flock, which is currently down to 7 since one died mysteriously, two wouldn’t work so I sold them, and one is in my backyard with pins in her leg). I had them hang out in the kiddy pool for a bit and started over: golden success.

Went over to Stephanies and did sheep with Rippa – sorting is a real challenge these days, so that was good. Rippa had a hard time keeping them all together for sorting, but we got it done, and then practiced driving again – going really well. I’m not sure what changed but I think both of us are getting it (and off the fence, too).

Fury had to sit out sheep this time because someone else came to rent and I was in the middle of business calls so figured it was a good time to bounce.

Really happy with how things are coming together and really, really glad I video taped the works so I could see where I needed to fix things.

And now: your moment of happy family zen.

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

My view on the way to Stephanie’s.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good dog.

It is starting to come together!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Psyched!

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