Conquering the Cattle Arena (no cattle involved)
There is a largish arena at Fido’s that is called the Cattle Arena. Cleverly enough, when there are trials at Fido’s it’s where the cattle are trialed and have appropriately sized sorting pens for cows. It’s the largest size arena ASCA allows and every time i’m at an ASCA trial there someone inevitably says “that’s the biggest arena i’ve ever seen! is it standard?” “yes…”. Typically though 3 yearling sheep live in the Cattle Arena. Currently it’s set to an AKC course; the one with all the fun obstacles that look different to my myopic self. 
The Cattle Arena has been the previous site of a number of disasters. It’s not especially different than the other arena we work, it’s just enough different to be er, different apparently. The sheep in the other arena we work are yearlings. The other arena is of similar size, just slightly shorter (by a few yards, i’d guess) than the cattle arena or vice versa. For instance the disaster that led to this was in Cattle Arena.
-insert babble about association and anxiety here - :p
Today Molly and I actually started in Big Arena where we normally are. Instead of taking a few steps back in preparation to move forward… i just asked her to dive into something a little new. In a previous post i talked about The Game as learned from Dana Mackenzie. Today i strip
ped away the training wheels of using the corner and had Molly working wide flowing arcs from an long obstructed fenceline. At one point she was working about 20 or so ft of her stock and true to Molly form… she was still effecting her sheep. She is the high queen control freak. So we did a few sides of that, walk to the next fenceline (as each has it’s own draw or deflection…) work a little more, pull them off the fence, put them back, do it again.
After happily fussing with that for about 45 minutes she really started to get the groove of staying wider off her stock and i was feeling pretty confident and calm. I was giving her usable information in a way that didn’t raise her stress level and she reciprocated by not acting like a prima-donna. love it. Feeling all that, we took a break and then headed over to the dreaded Cattle Arena.
Even though they’re also yearlings, the sheep in the Cattle Arena seem lighter than the sheep in Big Arena. Though once they realized that i control the little demon, i left the field later smelling like sheepie. They didn’t stay too close though. I had a good time toying with Molly’s commands to accomplish the Z-chute and the little 3 sided holding pen. Previously she’s only been asked to use her commands to shift sheep from field to field. While in many ways obstacles in this stage of the game are all fetches, they still require a level of precision that i’m not used to having and she’s not entirely used to giving. I did find though that once she did as I asked, if i was ready with the next command making a behavior string instead of 1 and a 2 and a 3 that i got much better results. A little more fast paced than i’m used to, but the sheep weren’t stressed as she wasn’t fussing around trying to keep her brain busy while i figured out what i was doing. So, the command string to work the Z chute was Come By, Down, Walk up, she felt the pressure and stopped without getting the 3rd sheep in and Walk up. She brain farted and started to zip around to the head of the 1st sheep. So stopped that right quick, rinse and repeat but didn’t let her take the pause. She was doing fine, but not keeping them close enough together. So 1 sheep was just thinking about going in while 1 was almost out = OMG they’re getting away!! I started to move backwards along the Z to give Molly a more appropriate place to walk to and move the sheep through the obstacle. Remembering a random discussion with an AKC judge about this obstacle and knowing that Molly has a much better handle on what she needs to control there sheep, i let her choose whether to walk inside the obstacle or be outside.
Didn’t name her The Perpetual Motion Machine for nothing. whew. Busy busy day and no pics as the cell phone was at home, but i’m feeling really good about where we’ve been today.
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