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When a person spends years trying to accomplish something, it can sometimes blind them to what is really going on.  I’ve been working Simon on stock off for 3 years, trying desperately to see that spark of ability and instinct I’d seen years before.  Maybe to both our detriment?  I don’t regret working him as it is through working him that i’ve made some really wonderful friends.  In honesty it is because I’m him that we have Molly and that is a blessing without a doubt.

But I’m done punishing myself for not being a good enough handler for Simon.  He’s a tough dog.  I’m not retiring him because he can’t work.  I’m retiring him because he really only does it because I ask him to.  The difference didn’t become obvious to me until I started working Molly. I saw what it looked like when a dog worked out of desire with joy.  Sometimes too much joy… but joy.

Paul is intent on finding something for Simon to do since Molly will be working stock and he won’t.  Since he’s not ball crazy, maybe we will end up trying the big dog in agility. A sport where you tug at the end! Hallelujah!

Young Simon taking on a ram.

Going around on the flank.

Learning cows with Ron Green.

The most fabulous thing ever, tug.

After a long 6 week absense, the Slimey-Dog (Simon) is home and settling in nicely.  Not only is it a huge releif to have him back to even out the estrogen overload in the house, but it is so great for Molly to have someone more fun than me to play with.  Watching them run around, chase and wrestle reminds me that the injured dog is long since gone.  That dog has been replaced by a headstrong, thoughtful young bitch with more potential than I have brain cells.  It’s really rather intimidating.

Molly and I trucked off to Spokane to pick up Simon and to work stock for the weekend.  Simon has developed a wonderful amount of restraint with his stock.  It’s really just amazing to work him now knowing that he does not grip inappropriately anymore.  The next step is for me to step up and learn to trust him while working him.  No easy task as we’ve nicknamed my apprehension Post Traumatic Simon Disorder.

Molly worked the sheep very well.  Our focus continues to be keeping her behind her stock and keeping her stress level low enough that she stays in contact at all times.  No easy feat, but I could see slow stead progress.  Can’t ask for more than that.

This coming weekend will be the ARPH Raffle Booth and Parade of Rescues in Graham Washington in association with ASC of WA.  The following weekend will be cattle handling in Hope, British Columbia with the ASC of BC.  It’s always a pleasure to be in the company of such supportive clubs.

Molly is making incremental progress. She’s not setting the world on fire, but for a dog with no sheep of her own she’s coming along. We’ve been starting each lesson with nice quiet work in the small pen. She’s becoming a pro at exhausting sheep from the small pen to the alley. The alley work would be better if her handler had a better sense of the expectations. However, i’m doing pretty good at staying out of the way. She’s redevloping a strong fetch. Which we learned quite by accident. When moving sheep around in the small pen, a sheep had chewed through the twine that kept the gate closed. 1 sheep escaped, Molly went right out and turned it back in. If it had ended there, it would have been fabulous. I think that once she saw the other 3 sheep on the other side of the field it dawned on her they should come along. We did some good albeit unplanned field work. Some really strong fetches with 3 trial level sheep. Still not so much on the stop, but still wide and fast and covering well. She is also not bombing around as much. So hallelujah.

After taking a well needed break, we went back to our pen work. This time we were looking for 1 successive excercise. To work through the steps and complete the task, going as slow as needed. So we started back in the small pen and then exhausted to the wide alley. Molly fetched the from the far end and set them back up away from the gate to the next pen and followed me away from the sheep on command without her leash. I then opened the next gate and sent Molly out to fetch the sheep and put them in another square pen. This time I asked Molly to follow me away from the sheep and to the gate. Thus pushing the sheep away from the gate. Then fetching them again into the arena and stopping nicely on command. This is where i chickened out, put her on her leash and we walked together across the field to the gate opened it up and put the sheep away. Chore completed.

T-30 days until we get our own sheep.

It’s been a busy few weeks, which leads me to playing catch up. Boo!

Molly has been doing pretty well with her new small pen exercises. Not only is she becoming more and more comfortable, but the sheep are taking less time to get used to moving around for her. This tells me that she is learning how to read her sheep and adjust her presence for each section of her exercises. Excellent work Little Pea!

The exercise is an augmentation of Erylon Hines’ pen exercises and is as follows: The first pen is a 10×10 square and serves as out Packed Pen. The dog should be able to enter the pen quietly and move stock around in either direction and or lift the sheep from the sides depending on the position of the handler. If the handler is in the middle, the sheep go circular. If the handler positions them self off center and slightly ahead, the stock should lift. Again the key is quiet controlled movement and direction changes with minimal pressure. While this might sound easy, getting a dog into a pen packed with sheep in such a way that the dog is not horrified (and lead to a bite) is a very careful process.

Out next step was to learn to exhaust into the next section, a 10×30 alleyway. So using the packed pen excercise, and a ‘down’ we quickly learned how to quietly exhaust and let the sheep go into the next pen. Here you might wonder: Why does the exhaust matter as long as the stock come out? It matters because it can be a relief to some dogs once they figure out that the sheep can go somewhere else and it’s ok. Fire will not reign down and the world will not end. Also, a take pen or small pen can be a very dangerous place for a dog to work. So the quieter they can accomplish things in small spaces, the safer they are.

The longer alleyway allows for Molly to easily find balance and allows me to easily prevent her from going to head when she’s not sure what to do. So in the exhaust the sheep go to the far other end of the alley. Molly comes out and lies down about 1/2 down the alley. We do this because she’s cutting in on the top and splitting her sheep occasionally. As she improves, we’ll move backwards and allow the fetch to get longer. So from 1/2 way down, she does her quick little fetch and send the sheep up the alley and back into the small pen. In this exercise, my job is to keep her from coming to head and just get behind her sheep.

And this was all going really well until the sheep caught on. Now the yearlings are heaving up as they’re on to the game. The no longer go to the end of the alley way. Heck the last 3 times i did the exercise we exhausted the sheep and i turned around to leave the small pen and there was a sheep, hiding behind me. <sigh>

We’ve been working on this exercise for 2 weekends and then took last weekend off due to gas costs. I’m really starting to see a difference in her working the very last time we did the exercise. Even though the latch broke and we ended up doing an impromptu working session in the big field, she brought the 1 rogue sheep to the group and settled down holding the sheep to the fence instead of running around and trying to cover imaginary unmoving heads. The balance here is not doing alot of the same exercise to the point where her natural ability and drive is diminished. At least i got some conformation that she’s not starting to work tight as a result of working in small spaces. Excellent!

Simon also checked in from cowcamp in Spokane. Apparently he is now working cows AND sheep. He has gone in for his first (unscheduled) head and learned to move cattle and sheep out of corners with expert ease. The difference in a few weeks at camp vs. the years of working him on the weekends his huge. He’s becoming more confident that the easiest way to move sheep is to ask.

I’m so proud of him and SO endebted to Ron for taking Simon on as a project and unlearning the bad habits he’d developed and teaching him new skills based on confidence and his comfort.

Last week’s work was so exciting that i was almost afraid to try to recreate it. “I’m good with that, moving right along.”. However, i’ve yet to find a training method that allows for results that cannot be replicated. Which makes sense as a dog can act very differently in a new place, or different sheep or different people watching, or new noises or the grass not being cut the same…. Finicky creatures these young dogs.

On Friday, I put my ego on the line and tried to recreate the pen exercises from last Sunday. The hard part about recreating an exercise in a different place is that no two facilities are the same. Last Sunday we had 2 round pens of different sizes connected by a narrow alley. On Friday the closest we could get was to work a series of pens all connected. The smallest pen was 7′x7′ (ish). We started there and first had to remind Molly that she can move around in a small space and the sheep won’t bite her ala “Black Sheep - The movie“. After a few minutes she got right into the groove of it. She moved them both directions in that little pen.

The next pen was the same width, but much longer. We worked on her waiting with me after she exhausted the sheep from the small pen to the larger pen. Then retrieving her sheep from the large pen and putting them carefully back in the small pen. The trick in small spaces was keeping things calm and easy. Not necessarily about learning a new skill, but using the same skills in a new place.

In the next practice session, I added a 3rd pen that was larger than the first, but smaller than the second. It was probably premature, but it didn’t go poorly just faster than I’d have liked. So we moved them back to the second pen and went back to a few rounds of quiet work before exhausting them to the big field.

I was really pleased with Molly’s quiet calm work. Maybe even more impressive was how well she was using her farm manners. In moving the sheep from the last pen finally into the first there was some gate management where i had to call her and have her walk with me. Otherwise we ran the risk she’d end up fetching them to me before I was ready and someone (me) was going to get hurt. She also held the sheep off me at a gate. Which was great, but a little surprising. Leave it to Molly to teach herself inside flanks from my giving her wrong commands. However, before assuming that I would need to replicate it. Right?

For the last month, we’ve been doing drills in the field.  Often stockdog trainers talk about helping the dog ‘make a picture’ in their minds about what is expected.  Often the drills consist of moving Molly back behind her stock in hopes that she’s start to make the picture that being there was right.  The entire time, I understood the point of the exercise, but something seemed to be missing.  Like when you’ve told someone to complete a task and forgot to tell them how.  It dawned on me Friday that we’d spent a lot of time telling Molly where not to be, and never bothered to tell her *where* to be.  While doing one of those lovely fetching exercises, i called out Molly’s name when she hit balance behind the sheep and got her to take a few steps toward the sheep.  Followed quickly by “There!” and a very quiet lowtoned “good girl” because I couldn’t help myself.  She was doing good.  I repeated the same little game a few times and called it a day.  She was getting it, but i didn’t want to push it. 2 times to make a habit.

On Sunday, we headed down to The Dalles, Oregon to visit with ARPH rescue friends.  I also wanted another point of view and Erylon has always been wonderful about pointing out the little things, and the glaring errors that I’d not seen.   While it takes 2 times to make a habit, I wanted to get an opinion about my “there” experiment before i started to work it into my list of expectations.  We ended up playing with a lot of different skills, and her There.

I watched Erylon work another dog in a series of round pens connected by a through-way or alley.   The sheep were fetched in the larger round pen.  Then the dog was asked to wait at the open gate, let the sheep pass along the alley and into the smaller round pen.  The dog was then asked to wait again and then sent around to fetch the sheep out and back along the alley, into the large roundpen.  While this sounds simple enough, to a young dog being in a small space with sheep is very stressfull and intimidating.

So much so that 1 little black dog would not enter the smaller round pen.  She couldn’t flank enough to use eye.  I think she even thought about making a bark, but then dismissed it.  Stress on a young dog can do a lot of long term damage.  It’s important to encourage and support the dog without forcing.  So for the first 5-6 times Molly and i walked together around the little round pen and moved the sheep.  After the 6th time we changed out from heavier sheep to a lighter batch.  We also decided that since she was being so deliberate and stopping herself at the gate, we’d dispense with the wait.  It was unnecessary. Then she’d take a few steps in alone and then stop, so I’d take a few steps to support her forcing the sheep out.  By the 9th time she was moving the sheep smoothly from pen to pen.  She was deliberate without being creepy.  She showed eye, but not inappropriately.

After a long break and some playing, we worked in a smaller arena.  I noticed a few different things right out.  She was much more thoughtful and deliberate.  She was more comfortable around the fences.  So much so that when i sent her Away to Me to fetch up the sheep instead of getting fast and running at them to avoid the fence, she went out along the fenceline. It was as far out as she could get.  She was also more aware of me; which was important and new.  We worked the same half moon exercises as we’d been doing at Fido’s, but assigned a There and made a bigger scene about not letting her bomb around.  Every well placed There got a “yes”.  Over flanking or attempts to come to full circle got a noisy flag on the ground and a “hey!”.  We also mixed in a few short fetches in the middle of the pen. Repetition can breed gripping.  Gripping is bad.

It didn’t take too long before she was walking her sheep along the fenceline by staying behind them.  “There”.

This past 2 weeks has been pretty uneventful. Molly worked stock Friday before last and we pushed too far too fast. However, in making lemonade out of lemons now i know what it looks like when she’s stressing out. It’s pretty distinctive. I think that sometimes I forget that under all that confident-do-it-all Molly is a baby puppy who will make mistakes and fuss about. I’ll learn, someday.

I’m interested to see how she’ll work for me on Friday. I’ve been out of town for a week and she’s been staying with a friend and her 2 male Aussies. Apparently Molly took over the dog world and arranged it all to be just so. Not in a mean or snarky way, but in such a way that was very Molly. Quiet, controlled, thoughtful and reasonable. Either way, Simon is in Spokane. So for the next while it will be just Molly and I. I’m excited to see if getting all the attention changes her working drive at all.

We’ll just wait and see…