Paranoia Got the Better of Me

This morning I was sharply reminded of how difficult life on your own can be.  Ross was injured while playing out in the yard right before I was to leave for work.  He was bleeding a fair bit, and I couldn’t immediately tell the extent of his injury.  I brought him in the house and checked him over, and gave him some homeopathic arnica.  The bleeding stopped almost immediately and once I cleaned him up it did not start up again.  My assessment was that he was going to be ok and did not need to see a vet, but I was not comfortable leaving him unattended in case I was wrong.  I called into work and told them I needed to stay home for the morning.

I spent the morning catching up on some housework and a few odds and ends, keeping a close eye on Ross.  He was quiet but seemed totally fine.  He ate his breakfast, followed me around the house, chased the cat, flirted with Kestrel, and instantly showed up in the kitchen when I opened a package of cheese.  If I hadn’t seen the blood earlier, I would not have even considered there might be anything wrong with him.  Needing the money and knowing how busy things are at work right now, I decided to go in for the afternoon.  I left the dogs with peanut butter kongs and headed out.

Despite my head telling me very clearly that Ross was fine, my heart was very shaken.  I couldn’t help but worry that perhaps I’d assessed things incorrectly.  Should I have taken him to the vet?  No, I was pretty sure that wasn’t necessary.  But I started second guessing my decision to leave him home alone.  If he had started getting worse (even though I watched him for nearly 4 hours with no sign of any problem), he would have no way of letting me know.  No one was at the house and I don’t have any neighbours I could call to have check in on him throughout the day.  I work one hour from home and by the time I was driving back at 7pm at night, I was on the verge of throwing up I was so worried about him.  Why, oh why, did I leave my poor boy alone?

When I got back to the house I jumped out of the car and started whistling as loudly as I could.  True to form, the dogs started barking from within the house.  Mira?  check.  Hannah?  Yep, that was her howling.  The gruff bark?  Kestrel.  But where was Ross’s voice?  I whistled again, and again, all the while fumbling in the dark with my keys.  Then, to my immense relief, I heard Ross.  I almost burst into tears.

I opened the door and ran up to my room and allowed the dogs to jump all over me in greeting.  I gave them each a hug, especially Ross.  He was full of beans and wanting to go and play.  He was totally, 100% fine and was looking at me like I was nuts as I hugged the daylights out of him.

I have quite a bit of experience assessing injuries and illness in animals and I knew in my head that I had made the correct assessment of Ross’s situation.  If I had thought for one second that he was in any danger, I would have never gone into work and taken him straight to the vet.  But once away from home, my imagination got the better of me.  And since I had no one to support me, no one I could ask to just peek in on him, I let my paranoia take over.  I really need to establish a better support system around here. I’ve never had to work so far from home before and I am liking it less and less every day.  I will definitely make a change for next year.  Maybe I could look into getting a video cam in the meantime!  Fortunately I only have 1.5 weeks of work left before I go on Christmas break.  That will mean a good 6 weeks of working strictly from home. I can’t wait!

Latency Period & Whistles

I just got back from training the dogs.  It only took 4.5 hours!  Yeesh, no wonder everything in my life is moving ahead so slowly.  I have to dedicate half a day every time I want to train the dogs, so their progress is slow, and my work progress is slow because I spent so much time training the dogs!  I sure can’t wait until I can just walk out the door and work my dogs.  I think it is much better for them to learn in short training sessions than long marathons like I end up doing after driving 40 minutes to get to sheep.  I have a friend who takes his young dogs out for 5 minutes at a time, several times a day.  Their progress is amazing.

In agility last week, we (re)learned the concept of a latency period.  Essentially that is the time lapse between teaching a dog something and letting it sink in.  In my lesson, the instructor has me introduce the dog to something new.  We do it for 2 minutes and then the dog goes and sits in a crate and thinks about it while we talk about theory etc.  Then we bring the dog back out (after a few minutes) and try again.  Every time, the dog is much better at what we had just been doing.  It’s as if she thought it through, figured it out, and understood.  Well, I expect that’s exactly what’s going on.

Ever notice that you teach your dog something and then go back to it days or weeks later, and the dog does it better than the day you last worked on it, even though you haven’t practiced or taught them anything new in between?  I’ve often assumed my dog has been thinking about our training and understanding things in between training sessions.

The day I got into my car accident, we had been working Hannah on whistles. I have been having a really hard time getting Hannah to switch to whistles.  If you’ve been following this blog for any length of time, you’ll know that I had a hard time getting her on voice commands too.  The friend I was training with worked Hannah for a bit, walking quietly with her and only using whistles.  When Hannah didn’t take the whistle command correctly, she did not revert to voice commands – which is what I had been doing.  The theory I was following is that the dog will backchain the commands, so if you add a new command (in this case, a whistle), in front of the one you are already using, the dog will eventually take the new command as a cue and start responding to that instead.  Works for many dogs, but not for Hannah.

I think what’s going on with Hannah is that she is so intently focused on her sheep that she really tunes everything else out except what she’s listening for.  Or perhaps her brain is too full to add anything else, or is too focused to start taking on what she sees as unnecessary tasks.  I don’t think she’s being stubborn – I really don’t think dogs behave like that.  I think they just get overwhelmed with information and tune stuff out.

My friend worked Hannah for a bit, using only whistles and correcting her with a “hey!” instead of going back to what Hannah already knew.  I didn’t get it at the time, but now I understand that what this does is force Hannah to start paying attention to the whistles.  She had no voice commands coming, so after a few “hey!”s to let her know she was wrong, she must have started listening to the whistles.  And she must have started understanding them too.  She must have spent a lot of time thinking about those whistles afterwards, because when we went to the herding clinic last weekend, Hannah correctly took every one of the whistles I gave her.  It was really astonishing.  One training session followed by a two weeks latency period (after the accident, when we did no training at all), and she had it figured out.

Today I did more whistle-only work with Hannah and she is really coming along well.  She sometimes refused and once ended up losing her sheep as a result.  She was not happy about that!  She took the wrong flank – twice – and so I called her off and let her watch the sheep run back to the barn.  I wouldn’t do that with a young dog, but at her stage there has to be consequences for not listening.  She took every command beautifully after that.

The sheep were really ornery to start with today.  I suspect they haven’t been worked for a while (trial season is over and the owners are taking a well-earned break!), and the rams have been mixed in with the main flock.  The dynamics of the flock seems to be different.  When I sent Hannah to gather them, they split in several different directions.  I really needed at least two dogs to get this flock up.  That’s never happened before.  I don’t know if a single dog should be able to handle 100 sheep going in several different directions, but it was too much for poor Hannah, even though she worked her little heart out.  I ran over as quickly as I could and we shed off a group of about 20 and and drove them away and worked those.  They were still quite obnoxious, splitting and running in multiple directions at once.  This is no doubt why Hannah was blowing off my flanks – she was getting stressed and wanted things under control!

To do so, I made her stay well back off the sheep and let them calm down.  We drove them around the field for a bit, and that got them to start behaving as a group and flocking better.  We worked on our whistles and some shedding and a few gathers, and by then we’d been going for probably and hour (using several different groups of sheep).  I put Hannah up with a big pail of water and took Mira out next.

The last group of sheep kindly stayed out in the field, so I decided to keep working them.  Hannah had them moving nicely and we had only been driving them fairly slowly so they were ok to keep going.  I had run the dogs prior to taking them to sheep, so I knew Mira would be relatively calm.  To make sure she shook out her beans, I started with a few outruns.  I’d send Mira on a decent size outrun and walk towards the sheep while she was casting out.  By the time she was at the lift, I was about two thirds of the way to the sheep.  That way I could control the lift and get her to lie down once they were moving, and the sheep didn’t have to run far or fast.  Then I’d wear up the field, leave the sheep and walk Mira down to the other end.  Repeat.

It worked well.  I have to say Mira is putting in such gigantic outruns now that I can hardly believe this is the same dog who used to run straight up the field at stock.  I’m sending her from my feet with just a quiet “shhhh” and she’s casting out beautifully and going big and going deep.  Too big and deep, in fact, for the field we’re working on, and for the group of sheep we had.  She’s coming in off-contact now, but at least is walking up fairly quickly and lifting them straight.

Mira worked very hard and I didn’t keep her out there too long.  I really wish I could take her out two or three times a day for just a few minutes. I think it would make a huge difference in her.  She burns out and then gets lazy.  Today she let three ewes go over the course of our training session.  The first one she turned back, the second one she stopped but when it ran off, she didn’t go after it.  I sent her after it and she ran half heartedly in that direction, then let it go.  I’m not sure if she thinks it doesn’t matter, or if she’s just too tired.  I’m not sure if it was my imagination or not, but she seemed to be wobbling a bit as she trotted around after our last outrun (which is why it was our last outrun – I immediately called it quits). It’s not hot, but I do worry that there’s something going on with her hips.  Walked her back to the car and gave her water, and walked her around the property a bit, watching very carefully.  I saw nothing wrong.  Hopefully the wobble was just my imagination.  Certainly she was ready to run hard in the hay field half an hour later when we went for a hike.

Next I took Kestrel out.  In the clinic we attended last week I discovered that she is asymmetric in her running, meaning that she doesn’t run properly when she circles left.  I was advised to work her left, a lot.  So that is what we did.  I had her go around and around and around and around the sheep to the left.  I also made sure to step into her and push her out as she’ s quite flat going left too.  After a few minutes of that, I did some flank drills (telling her to go “come-bye” and applying body pressure to send her that way, then doing the same on the away side).  She is starting to respond to verbal commands before I do the physical ones, so I’m pretty happy about that.  Next I did some short outruns with her.  she is starting to actually go around and gather from 50 or so feet away.  That’s a big improvement.  Not long ago she’d just go straight at the sheep and drive them off unless I was standing between her and the stock to push her around.

I need to call Kestrel’s breeder to ask what I can expect in terms of her outruns. With Hannah, I was taught to push her out but now she’s too wide.  I did nothing with Mira, knowing that her genetics would predispose her to big outruns.  Sure enough, they are coming out now. If I had pushed her out, she’d be going to the next county to pick up sheep.  So I’m very glad I let that develop naturally, even though it took two years to come out.  I bet Mira’s outruns would have come out sooner if I had know how to train her properly earlier on.  Kestrel’s breeder will be able to tell me what to expect from Kess, and if I’ll need to help her outruns or not.  From what I’m seeing, I’m guessing it will come naturally.  Regardless, I won’t do any work on them for some time.

I could be making a big mistake, but I’ve decided that it’s more important to get flanks and stops and other such commands down solid while close up, before trying to work the dog far away.  I think we didn’t do Hannah any favours by starting work on outruns first.  I suspect that made for a dog who really didn’t understand her flanks, or trust my commands, working at such a distance that she felt she had to take things into her own hands.  The result is a lot of anxiety when she’s working at a distance, and I’ve had to do a lot of our training over close up to build trust.  I still struggle with getting her to listen at a distance.  Maybe that would have happened regardless, but for Mira and Kestrel, the focus is on getting the close work down solid before worrying about outruns.

I now have three very tired dogs, snoring away at various points around the house.  Ross is barking in frustration as I locked him up to give Kestrel a break from his constant flirting.  I’m going to get the woodstove fired up, and settle in for an evening of work since I spent the afternoon training my dogs!

Hormones!

Good grief, I’m sick of hormones in this house.  Hannah is done her heat cycle, and Kestrel should be out in a day or two.  What a nuissance to have multiple bitches cycling together!  Well, I suppose it at least gets things over with all at once.  From that perspective, I wish Mira would join the club and get onto the same cycle as the other two.  For she gets just as stupid with all these hormones, even though she’s not in heat, and then goes through it all again when it’s her turn two months later.

The heat cycle of a bitch lasts around 21 days.  They are only actually fertile for a few days during that time, which is when they are in what is called “standing heat.”  They call it this because the bitch will stand for the male to breed her.  Hannah is a perfect case in point – if she’s not in standing heat, she will not stand.  Instead, she will sit on her behind and protect her chastity with bit pointy teeth.  Good girl!

Because of this, it is very clear when Hannah is ready to breed.  She stands around days 12-15 of her cycle.  Kestrel seems to be about the same.  Mira stands much earlier, at around day 9 and stands for close to a week.  She may not be fertile that entire time but I do have to watch her carefully.  Another way to tell when a bitch is in standing heat is the colour of her blood.  It will start out dark red, and then turn a paler, almost orange or rust colour when she’s ready to be bred.  Daily checking with a folded kleenex is the best way to keep track of this.

Because I don’t have an intact male in the house, I don’t really worry too much about them getting pregnant.  When they are in standing heat I don’t leave them outside unattended.  And even before they are standing, when they’re out I am sure to put either Ross or Mira out with them in the yard, as they will both bark loud and hard should another dog come near.  We did have that big male lab come visiting when Mira was in heat this summer, but there’s been no sign of him this time.  I suspect he’s just a summer resident as I haven’t seen him in a while.

The clearest indication, however, of when a bitch is ready to breed is behaviour. My goodness, you should have seen the flirting and carrying on that is happening in this house this week.  It got to the point of being so annoying that everyone got put in crates.  Poor Kestrel received the brunt of it.  When Hannah was standing, all she wanted to do was flirt with and hump Kestrel.  Mira has been wanting to hump Kess all week.  Now that Hannah’s out, she’s lost interest in flirting, but Kess is now standing and Ross is following her around, flirting his heart out.  At first Kestrel was terrified (she’s still very weary of Ross) but now she seems to be enjoying the attention.  Who knows, maybe they’ll get along better now.

Interestingly, Ross paid no attention to Hannah when she was standing.  I don’t know why this is.  Maybe he considers her ‘family’ or maybe she isn’t emitting the correct hormones or body language.  He is very keen to breed Kestrel and Mira, and I have to keep him apart from them when they are standing.  But he pays no attention to Hannah whatsoever.  Today, Hannah is beating up Mira while Ross is flirting with Kestrel.  Could she possibly be jealous?

I’d love to know what’s going on in their heads and how they all see each other and their relationships to one another.  I’d love to understand why the girls are so keen to have little love fests with each others.  Why does Mira try and hump Kestrel but not Hannah?  Is it a dominance thing?  Is it something else?

Hopefully this will all be behind us by tomorrow.  I am sick of the hormones and I’m sick of keeping high energy dogs cooped up in the house where they get sillier and sillier.  I’m also sick of how goofy Mira gets when there are all these hormones floating around.  This week she’s taken to refusing to go outside unless I’m out with her, and otherwise just wants to spend the day curled up on my bed.  She won’t come down when I call and I have to go and physically pick her up and put her out the door.  Then she sits, leaning against the door until I open it again.  Yeesh!  So bloody annoying.

Well, we’re off to work sheep and hopefully also work off some of this goofiness.  And by tomorrow hopefully we’ll be through this round of hormonal craziness.

 

Crate or Buckle Up Your Dogs!!!

I have not had much time to write this last couple of weeks, but the reason this time goes beyond just being busy.  Two weeks ago Sunday, I hit a deer on my way home from training the dogs.  It was around 6:30 at night, and pitch black.  I was driving down a completely unlit, two-lane highway when a deer came out of nowhere and bolted in front of me.  I was going about 80km an hour (50mph) when she came up over the bank on my left.  I honked, hoping she’d swerve.  She didn’t.  I slammed on the brakes as hard as I could.  We collided.

The whole thing happened in about 2 seconds, although it felt like a good half an hour as I can still replay every instant in my head.  The phantom deer glowing faintly in my headlights suddenly coming into focus in my mind.  My thought to honk, and then the hardwired instinct to brake.  Good thing I didn’t have the muscle memory to brake and swerve to avoid as otherwise I’m sure we’d all be dead.  At that speed, doing anything but trying to stop in a straight line would have been a death sentence to anyone who wasn’t well trained in high speed chases.  And given the ditch on one side and the potential for on-coming traffic on the other, there really was nowhere to go but straight.

Very fortunately, I drive a Toyota Matrix.  I am sure this car saved my life.  Its bumper was high enough to hit the deer’s centre of gravity and send her flying through the air forward, rather than hitting her legs and having her flip up on the hood and through the windshield.  The entire front end of the car collapsed inward, absorbing the impact so successfully that I felt little more than a gentle bump as we decelerated from 80km to zero in under 2 seconds.  $5,500 worth of damage to my car, and we were all fine.  Thank you Toyota.  I will never own another brand of car.

As strange as this may sound, before the shock of the accident set in, the very first thought that went through my head was “I wonder if I can fit the deer in my car and bring her home for the dogs” followed rapidly by “I wonder if I have it in me to butcher a deer.”  As I sat in the middle of the road, pondering these thoughts, the deer – who I thought was dead – regained consciousness and struggled to her feet.  I watched as she hobbled off on three legs.  I sure hope she survives, but I don’t think there’s much chance of that.

Once she was gone, I started to wake up to what had happened.  I noticed that there was a big ridge of metal sticking up in front of my windshield that I was pretty sure wasn’t there before, and an odor of something burning.  Rubber?  At the same time, I became dimly aware that I was sitting at a dead stop in the middle of the highway.  I turned the key and the engine turned over.  I pressed the gas, and the car moved forward.  Amazing.  It still worked.  Wondering what I should do, I started driving down the road.  After a few hundred yards, my brain finally kicked in and I pulled over.  I got out and inspected my car, and that’s when I really realized how close I had come to not making it home again.  Ever.  I started to shake.

I got back in my car and reached for my emergency kit.  Homeopathic arnica is the first remedy to give for shock and injury, and the sooner you take it, the better.  I found my bottle and put a pellet under my tongue.  Very quickly I stopped shaking and started to think clearly.  The dogs.  The dogs?  How were the dogs?  It had taken me this long to even realize that I had been in an accident, and I felt horrible that I only then started worrying about the dogs.  Ross was at my side in the front passenger seat and he had been calm throughout all of this.

Ross was wearing a seat belt.  The girls were each in a crate, sleeping with full bellies after a hard day of working sheep and hiking.  I don’t think they even noticed anything had happened other than a quick stop.  Thank you, Toyota.  Thank you, the inventor of doggie seat belts.

I let my dogs ride free in my car for the first 18 years of having dogs.  Jake and I drove 6 weeks around the US at one point, and 4 weeks on another trip.  All highway miles at high speeds.  I’ve driven across the continent several times with a loose dog in my car.  Did I worry?  Yes, mildly.  But not enough to do anything about it.

Then, two years ago, I had a conversation with a fellow dog owner who’s uncle is an OPP officer.  She told me what her uncle had said to her when he found out she let her dog ride free in her car.  He told her of all the horrible accidents he’s seen with loose dogs in the cars.  Dogs who were thrown through windshields, dogs who flew around the car and killed well strapped in people who would have otherwise survived.  Dogs who were thrown clear of cars, running away in terror, never to be seen again.  And then there were dogs who survived the crash, only to be shot and killed by emergency workers because they didn’t know if they could safely get near the people trapped in the car.

My gentle, sweet little Ross being shot to death because he growled at someone after surviving the trauma of a bad car accident?  The thought of this last scenario terrified me.  I went out and bought a seat belt, and have been strapping him in ever since.  And thank goodness, as otherwise he’d be dead now.  Launched through the windshield.

No, I can’t stop thinking about the ‘what if’s’.

But Ross was fine, the girls were all fine, and I was ok too.  I called my insurance company who called the police.  They took 1.5 hours to find me, so it was a good thing I wasn’t injured.  I expect they would have looked harder and faster if I had told them I was bleeding to death.  The cops were great (and quite cute I might add!) and sorted everything out.  My car clearly could not safely be moved under it’s own power, so they ordered a flatbed truck for it.  For me and the dogs, they ordered a taxi-van.  I was 150km from home (95 miles) and the taxi cost $295.  Good thing I had just been paid as I don’t usually have that kind of cash kicking around!  There was a lot of serendipity going on that night.

The dogs were good as gold in their crates as the taxi took us home.  I was absolutely exhausted by then.  From the time I hit the deer to time I got home, 6.5 hours had passed.  It was 1am and I could barely stand.  I came in, cancelled my meetings for the next day, put the dogs to bed, and hit the hay.

I had a very busy 10 days after that, and dealing with all the insurance calls, police calls, rides to get my rental car (40 minutes to the  nearest car rental agency), going to the body shop to pick up all the stuff I needed out of my car and so on, took up every spare minute I had beyond work.  And all I wanted to do is stay home and sleep!  My body ached, my muscles were recovering from having tensed up horribly, and my joints were swelling from the adrenaline reaction.  Two weeks later I still have a fair amount of pain and need to go to an osteopath and homeopath to work with getting it under control.  My insurance is covering everything, even the taxi ride home.

Apparently this is “deer season”, not just for hunters but for drivers.  Between the hunters in the forest and the combines ripping up the fields, the deer have nowhere safe to go.  Over the last six weeks, giant combines (this is a small one) have been working day and night (literally) to pull up all the corn and soy that is grown around here:

…turning fields, that the deer are used to looking like this:

…into moonscapes with no place to hide, like this, overnight:

With such dramatic changes to their environment, and gunshots going off all around, the deer are panicky and disoriented and run into cars willy nilly.  The police who helped me that night had hit a deer a few weeks before, and the tow truck that pulled my car away had a huge dent in its fender from where it hit a 9-point buck the week before.  The car rental agency said they get 3-4 people EVERY DAY in this area (i.e. rural countryside) in October and November, renting cars after hitting deer.

They say everything happens for a reason, but I’m not sure why this happened yet.  Maybe it will become clear down the road.  I feel like someone was really watching out for me, as it could have been so much worse. I lost the time that evening, and more time during the week.  But I am not injured, my dogs are safe, and my bank account is intact.  I get my car back this morning.  I had been slack a bit of late, with all this driving, and occasionally not strapping Ross in if I’m not going far.  But I’ll never take that chance again.  That accident happened so quickly – and if anything preventable had happened to him, or any of the dogs, I would have never forgiven myself.  Maybe I needed to learn that lesson.  I don’t know, but I do know that I am extremely grateful that we are all OK.  As for the poor doe – well, I sadly don’t know what happened to her.  The police couldn’t find her.  I sure hope she recovered, or died quickly.

Well, I’m off to pick up my little car from the body shop…

A Vote for Bitch’s Lib

This week I took Hannah and Kestrel to agility.  Both girls are in heat right now.  I brought the girls into the training arena and brought towels to put down in the crates where I would contain them during our lesson, with the intention of wiping down the crates afterwards.  Having bitches in heat has never been a problem where I was doing agility training before, nor has it ever been a problem at any herding venue.  In fact I had both girls at a herding clinic this weekend and all I did was keep them a few feet away from the boys to avoid unwanted puppies.  The boys still had to think and work, and they had no problem doing so (young dogs with virtually no training, I might add).  In herding, the attitude is: “if your dog can’t work around a bitch in heat, that’s a fault in the dog, not the fault of the bitch.”  This is also true for Shutzhund and other working-type sports, and even conformation competitions.

Today I found that this attitude is exactly the opposite in the agility world.  My instructor said bitches in heat are only allowed on the property while wearing diapers, and warned me that they are universally banned at all agility trials.  The reason she insists on diapers at her facility is that she holds trials there and can’t afford to replace equipment spoiled by contact with an in-season bitch’s blood.  Furthermore, bitches in season are forbidden on the property two weeks prior to any trial.

The argument is that intact male dogs often lose their brains around a bitch in heat.  In fact, they lose their brains if a bitch in heat has been near the agility equipment, ever.  In other words, if my dogs were to go over a jump and leave a drop of blood on it, the jump would have to be thrown out because intact males would become incapable of going past the jump without stopping and sniffing and losing their brains.  This – the argument continues – is not fair to the owners of said males, so bitches in season must be diapered, and kept away from any competitions completely.  It was further explained to me that the reason that things are do different at agility trials is that dogs in agility are rarely exposed to bitches in season, and as such don’t learn how to control themselves.

My thoughts on the above is that this is a load of crap.  At the risk of anthropomorphizing the situation, it is more than reminiscent of the argument that women should be covered up because men are not capable of controlling themselves if they see hair or breasts or, heck, an ankle in the Victorian era.

Last fall I competed with Hannah at a sheepdog trial and the male dogs there were all perfectly capable of functioning in her presence, and keeping their mind on sheep despite her scent mark at the post.  I’ve seen an intact stud dog pick sheep up off a bitch in standing heat at a trial and, after a quick glance and sniff in her direction, get back to work with a single holler by his owner who was a couple of hundred feet away.

I would hazard a guess that these agility dogs lose their focus because agility is not something they are driven to do by instinct (unlike herding) and as a result, they are not used to having to control their primary instincts, unlike a trained herding dog.  At the same time, an intact male agility dog with sufficient training should get over this.  The first step in agility training is, after all, impulse control.  Hannah has been in standing heat at an agility class and the intact males were perfectly capable of running a course, although they did sniff and froth a bit while waiting for their turn.  My former instructor (who is now too far away to train with) never thought twice about having my girls in class while in heat.

I think a big part of the problem is that a bitch in season will bring out holes in the training of the owner of the intact male.  If the dog’s training is not solid enough, or if his enthusiasm for the sport is not strong enough, he’ll get distracted.  And since our society is quick to blame the woman for any poor behaviour on the part of a man, the distracting bitch must therefore stay home.

Another potentially contributing factor to this issue is that, in my observation, agility dogs on the whole tend to be a lot less stable than working dogs.  A dog who is capable of working (be it stock work, hunting work, search and rescue, police work etc.) must be capable of considerable self-control.  In fact, many people do agility with their dogs specifically because their dogs are so high strung and reactive.  I have taken a number of my foster dogs to agility classes for exactly this reason.

This is likely for a number of reasons.  Dogs bred for these types of sports (agility, flyball, dock diving etc.) are selected for manic and obsessive-compulsive behaviours, instead of for an ability to think and have self-control in face of strong stimulus.  Also, many agility people get partners from shelters, and many of those dogs have been rejected because of their behavioural issues to begin with.  In other words, it’s a population already tipped in that direction.  This is often made much worse by the stress of the shelter coupled with being surgically altered and heavily vaccinated all at the same time (for my thoughts on this horrifically damaging practice, read this).  Some agility training facilities require yearly vaccinations, and many of them as well, further contributing to the mental problems of these dogs.  As a result, many agility dogs start with much lower thresholds for distractions.  Reactiveness and hyper-sexuality are both behaviours that can result from a demyelination of the central nervous system caused by vaccines, especially the rabies vaccine (here is a list of articles discussing this further).

Nevertheless, I don’t think this is a good reason to ban bitches in heat from competitions.  How about more proofing people?  Is it my dog’s fault if your dog can’t work past a toy or treat that has been dropped on the ground?  Or gets distracted by someone else’s shout or movement or click?  Certainly not.  When a dog who is afraid of men is running, does the judge ask all men to stand back from the side of the arena so as to not distract her or cause her to panic and run out of the ring?  No again.  People who have dogs who break for these reasons all have to work very hard to desensitize their dogs and have them stay focused despite such distractions. My girls will all break for various reasons, and I proof my training against this as much as possible.  We in fact look for such holes and practice, practice, practice. This is a big part of agility training in general.

My instructor told me today that until I could get my dog to hold a 2-on-2-off contact position and continually nose target a piece of plastic on the ground, while I run at top speed, hooping and hollering and tossing toys and treats as I go, she will not be ready to trial. If my dog can hold her position during the above scenario, surely an intact male can learn to hold it when a bitch in heat walks by. So why not train and proof intact males around bitches in season?  Why should my girls have to stay home just because someone else hasn’t trained their dog to keep his mind on the ball instead of her tail end?  It seems to me that sending any bitch in heat home only serves to make this problem worse.  If I had an intact male (which I have had in the past, and will have again in the future), I’d work him around bitches in season intentionally, as another level of distraction.

The icing on the cake is that if you have to keep your in seaons bitch home from a trial you have already paid for, you can only get your money back if you get a certificate from the vet to prove that she is in heat.  This requires having a good relationship with a vet so that you don’t get charged for an office visit to get the certificate. When I heard this, it was enough to make me reconsider ever trialing in this sport.  How unbelievably ridiculous.

Training Notes for the Week

Yet another busy week.  The poor dogs had three very boring days (Tue-Thur) while I worked 10-12 hours at a stretch.  But I think I made it up to them.  On Monday I trained all four dogs at agility, and then the three girls in herding immediately afterwards.  Today they had plenty of entertainment running with Hannah’s family pack, which I was caring for for a few days.  Plus they got to spend a fair bit of time hiking, and Hannah got a solid hour of work and training in.  All four have been sound asleep since 7pm, and the house has been very quiet as I’ve caught up on some paperwork.

It’s been such a tiring week that I can barely remember what we did on Monday, but I’ll try to record at least the highlights.  I got to the agility arena late – I was scheduled for 10:30am but had some work to take care of in the morning and didn’t arrive until 11:05.  As I had to be out of there by 11:30, that meant spending 5 minutes with each dog.  Doing 5 minute training sessions is actually a very good way to train.  Ideally I would rotate through all four dogs several times, each doing 5 minutes. But that day I only worked each dog once.  Still, I think we accomplished a lot.

With Ross I am just getting him to focus on me in an arena environment.  I would like to someday do some Rally-O with him, so I did a bunch of obedience exercises with him around the equipment.  He’s not used to arenas or equipment, and gets highly distracted in environments that smell a lot like other dogs (especially if there are other dogs there, but even the scent of dogs past is enough to take his mind off of work). I’ve been keeping him on a leash in order to prevent him from blowing me off (and from peeing on the equipment, which is totally not cool in the agility world) and carrying yummy treats.  The first time I did this I had a hard time keeping his focus, but this week was better.  Ross and I have done these drills so many times that he falls into step pretty quickly, even with the distracting scents around him.  We worked on heeling on both sides, flying downs, recalls, pivots and figure-8’s in heel, and heeling while we walk backwards.  He did very well.

I next worked Kess.  She continues to amaze me with how quickly she picks things up.  This was our third time working in the arena, and the 5th or 6th time I’ve done any agility with her.  Yet she was easily sequencing 4-5 jumps at a time.  I merely pointed at a jump and she’d kick out and take it.  Truly astounding. She can be a rather excitable and easily over-stimulated dog, but despite her hyperactivity, her brain works really, really well.  She obviously totally gets the idea of agility.  So cool.

Mira also did well, although I continue to struggle with getting her to both enjoy, and understand the point of this sport.  She does fly over jumps, but still turns in to me after every obstacle to get her rewards (the tug).  I’ve done agility with her – off and on – for about two years now, and we still struggle to sequence more than 3 or 4 obstacles.  I really think she just sees agility as doing tasks for the reward of playing tug.  She is not transferring the joy of tugging to the joy of jumping, which is what is supposed to happen.  The idea is that if the dog gets a great reward for doing the jump, soon the jump itself becomes rewarding.  Mira is not being fooled by this psychological manipulation.  As much as she enjoys jumping while flying through the forest, jumping plastic bars remains a duty only made bearable because of the fun game of tug she gets to play after each one. Or two.  Or three… which is really pushing it.

Mira did do a nice sequence of jumps that ended with a tire.  She managed the jumps but didn’t know what to do with the tire.  I couldn’t remember if she’d done one before, so spent some time teaching her the tire.  She picked it up pretty quickly (ie. she’s to jump through the tire, not dodge under or around it) and did it over and over and over successfully.  However, for some reason she refused to jump through the tire after a jump. So while she would do it without any problem when we just worked on that one obstacle, as soon as I elongated the sequence to “jump – tire”, she just went under the tire.  When I dropped the tire to 6 inches off the ground, she dodged around it.  I tried a dozen times at least and she would not, or could not, do it.  We’ll try again next time.

Hannah was as brilliant as she always is at agility.  That dog can read my mind.  She has absolutely no trouble taking any jump, in any sequence I ask, regardless if I do a front cross, a rear cross or if I fall flat on my face and point with my foot.  I really should sign her up for the next agility trial and get going with her. She’s been more than ready to compete in a jumpers course for well over a year now.  I am also starting to work her on full contact equipment.  She has been doing her contacts for three years, but has never actually done full contact equipment (i.e. she can hop on the the bottom of the A-frame and target a piece of plastic on the ground put there to stop the dog from flying off the A-frame without touching the bottom portion, but she has never actually gone over an A-frame before last week). Our original instructor, who is very talented and brilliant and super wonderful to train with, is also very, very, very careful and precise in her training.  So Hannah has really great technique, but at nearly 4 years of age, she still can’t run a full course.  Time to change that.

Next we drove to the farm where I took all four dogs for a short hike in the hay-field before training.  I started with Hannah and worked on pace on the fetch.  I sent her on progressively longer outruns, but nothing too big. I really want to make sure that she listens well and takes her time bringing sheep to me before trying to work her too far away.  Hannah is capable of putting in open outruns (450 yard or longer) with no trouble. She runs fast and she runs big.  Her challenge is bringing the sheep to me calmly and in a straight line at that distance.  When she’s that far away I think she feels like she’s totally on her own and she doesn’t listen to a thing I ask.  So I have cut her outruns down to 100yards or so and am very, very gradually stretching them out.  Today (Friday) I let her do bigger outruns at the end of our training session, mostly because the sheep kept trying to dash back to the barn.  I noticed that while she did gallop them a bit, as soon as I said “Take your time!!” she went from a gallop to a trot, something that she would not have done even a couple of weeks ago.  This is a big improvement.

We have also been working on shedding.  I’m not sure if I’m doing it well, but we have been successfully splitting sheep and holding them apart.  I still can’t get thing set up very well to have her shed specific sheep, but she’s getting pretty good at coming in through any gaps I call her through, and driving off the sheep I point to.  Today we had plenty of opportunity to do so as the sheep were were working on seemed more than happy to split and form gaps.  What they didn’t want to do was flock!  That was a new challenge for Hannah, and it was interesting to see her bring back a single ewe who had run 50 feet away from the others, who were wanting to blast off in a different direction.  Hannah stood between them, trying to move the wayward ewe with her eye. I said very little figuring Hannah knew better than I how to handle this situation.  I was right and she put them back together after a good minute of staring.  The ewe kept turning her head left and and right, clearly trying to decide which way to go.  Hannah similarly shifted her gaze, each time turning the ewe’s head back towards the small group she had left (in hopes of making it back to the larger group).  Eventually, Hannah won.

Today I only worked Hannah because we were training on my old trainer’s sheep, and she has only given me permission to work Hannah.  She does not know Mira and Kess on sheep, and she obviously doesn’t trust my ability to start and train a dog.  I was caring for her dogs and her sheep for a few days while she was away, and I could have trained all three without her ever knowing.  But I would have felt guilty so I respected her wishes that I only train Hannah. Poor Hannah got her tailed worked off, however.  We spent a good hour on the field, practicing shedding, outruns, driving, and pace. Hannah’s not keen on drill training and I don’t think it’s ideal to train this way either. But I couldn’t help it. I love training and since I couldn’t switch her up for one of the others, we just kept going.  And being the devoted working girl that she is, Hannah just kept working.  The sheep were very light and flighty and didn’t flock well, which was a pain.  But this was also very good for practice as the sheep we’ve been training on are pretty cooperative.  It’s good to try different sheep and put our training to the test.

Mira and Kestrel did well on Monday.  I think the homeopathic remedy I gave Mira has helped clear her mind because she’s been thinking more clearly this week.  Both dogs have a tendency to be rather wild on sheep, and I decided it was time to put an end to that.  Mira will be three in December and is showing herself capable of taking pressure.  Kestrel also can take a fair bit of pressure from me, so I cracked down on both of them.  Mostly I wanted to stop them from running the sheep over me.  I can’t get over these damn sheep that have no trouble slamming into me at top speed.  The sheep I trained on today (Scottish Blackface) will do no such thing, being nearly as afraid of me as of the dogs.  I prefer this and hope to get this breed when I own my own sheep.  The fact that they are such pretty animals (wooly white sheep with curved horns, black socks and faces) doesn’t hurt!

I worked each of the young dogs in the round pen first to make sure I had a measure of control.  Since there is no gate on the field I had to use each dog to gather sheep to train on and bring them out of the barnyard and into the field. This is quite challenging and required me keeping them on a leash. Mira is almost ready to listen, but she still blows me off a bit too much. The barnyard is very tricky, and full of stuff that an animal could bet injured on (piles of wood etc.) so I have to keep things calm and quiet.  As such, I kept both young dogs on leashes until we were out in the field

Once working I insisted on some pace and obedience.  It was a challenge at first, but as they shook out their beans, they settled down and started working well.  Mira is definitely developing some new talents and ideas, which is great.  She’s now doing big outruns and coming in slowly at the top, even though I’ve never taught her that.  Most people teach the dog to lie down at the top, and then bring them on slowly to the sheep.  Mira is naturally coming in slowly, so I am so far skipping this step in training.  I lay her down once the sheep get moving and ask her to bring them to me at a quiet pace.  This is not quite happening, but I’m pretty happy with what she’s doing.

Kestrel was frustrating me by refusing to wear smoothly.  She is happy to hold sheep to me in a straight line but when I start to turn, she ricochets around the sheep to get to their heads.  Or, she just pushes them past me and tries to drive them away.  I wasn’t sure what to do but started to really get after her whenever she’s set a toe out of line with respect to holding sheep to me. I  was pleased to see that she figured things quickly (really, no surprise there) and within 10 minutes was holding sheep to me nicely while I walked figure-8’s and s-curves around the field.

I have signed Hannah and Kestrel up to a training clinic next weekend.  I’m hoping it will be fun.  I am allowed to run two dogs a day, for both days.  There are several levels of dogs at this clinic, but most are either “puppy” or Pro-Novice/Ranch.  I wanted to work Mira but she’s more advanced than a puppy, but not advanced enough for the other group.  Kestrel could probably still benefit from the puppy group, so I decided to put her and Hannah into the clinic, and Mira and I will continue to muddle along.  While I’d like some professional guidance with Mira, I don’t want to put her in a situation where we will be under too much pressure. We still have a lot to figure out, but it seems our path continues to be one that only the two of us can follow.

On Barking and Thunderphobia

This morning I took Ross and Mira out for a hike together.  These are the two that I have to keep an eye on if we run into other dogs, and so I was hoping to run them early enough in the day that we simply wouldn’t encounter anyone.  However, being an unseasonably warm and sunny day in November, others had the same idea.  We only encountered two groups of people, one with a dog, and one without.  Each time I either saw, or intuited that someone was coming (I have this uncanny “spidey” sense around when to leash my dogs) before we actually ran into them.  I leashed up both dogs and then proceeded to pass the other hikers.  Each time Mira barked her little head off the instant she saw the others approaching.  While Ross only barks when up close to another dog, Mira sets off the alarm the second she discovers we’re not alone in the woods.  It doesn’t matter if they have a dog or not, although she almost turns herself inside out if there is one.

Mira reacts the same way whether or not she’s on a leash.  Yesterday I had her out with Hannah, and we ran into two beautiful Irish Water Spaniels.  The other dogs were off leash so I  left mine free too.  Mira charged up, barking her little head off, hackles raised and pranced around the other dogs.

She gets over it pretty quickly, and settles down and interacts more or less appropriately after the initial 1-2 minutes.  Interestingly, she doesn’t react at all when meeting other border collies.  All my dogs behave differently when we meet other border collies; they are much more relaxed, as if meeting a long lost friend.  But Mira is downright fearful of non-border collie dogs.

After our walk, I came home to a very quiet house.  Hannah and Kestrel were up in my bedroom, locked in with bones to keep them busy while we were gone.  As I came in the house, I heard their footsteps, but not a sounds emerged from that room. Not a yip, not a bark.  Normally when I come home, it’s pandemonium.  There’s so much barking I can’t hear myself think.  But with Mira (and Ross) out of the equation, the other two are quite silent.

This evening I took Hannah and Kestrel for a run just before sundown (I can’t believe it’s pitch black at 6pm, thanks to the time change!). We also encountered two new dogs, a Malamute and a black Shepherd mix.  Both intimidating dogs.  All dogs were off-leash, and when they met there was not a sounds.  No one barked, no one fussed.  The other owners started calling their dogs back, so I whistled once and my two came flying back without hesitation.

The difference between how Mira reacts and how the other two do (Ross is not included here because he is not all border collie) is night and day.  Border collies should be quiet dogs; they are not supposed to bark and fuss and make all sorts of noise.  This is something I quite like about the breed.  I was very dismayed when Mira turned out to be such a noisy thing.  It’s really irritating.  She barks at everything and anything.  A squirrel running by, a strange sound, the cat she lives with, my roommate coming out of the bathroom with a towel on her head.  If Mira was a human, she would be labeled “extrovert” as everything that passes through her head comes out her mouth.  It’s as if she is announcing everything, all the time.  ”Alert, alert!!  Terrifying Monster…. oh, it’s just a squirrel…”  ”Alert, alert!!!  Terrifying Monster… oh, it’s just the cat…”  ”Alert, alert!!!  Terrifying Monster… oh, it’s just our roommate…”

I really wonder what’s going on in her wee head.  Then again, maybe I don’t want to know.  The world seems like such a scary place to her.

On a positive note, the homeopathic remedy I gave her two days ago seems like it might be helping with one aspect of her fear. Since the day I first moved to this house and left her outside during some fireworks while we ate supper, and she subsequently escaped the yard and got lost, she has become thunderphobic.  I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, given how sensitive she is to external stimuli, but I am not happy to see this develop.  In a dog as naturally reared as she is, I really shouldn’t see any of these behaviours, and especially not this one.  It’s been an interesting learning experience for me to observe behaviours, and age of onset of these behaviours, which I had previously blamed on environmental factors such as vaccines and kibble, still rearing their ugly heads in their absence.  I do believe these factors are at least partially to blame, having damaged previous generations.  Certainly I wouldn’t want to see what Mira would turn out like if she were fed Old Roy and repeatedly vaccinated!  But perhaps there’s something else going on too.

Why the onset of thunderphobia at age 2.5, which is common in conventionally reared dogs?  Is there something that happens at that age?  Is it just a coincidence, with the phobia being linked to the experience of being lost?  Or is there some physiological change causing over-sensitivity?  I don’t have an answer for that, or even a speculation.  Except perhaps that there definitely is some change in a dog when it reaches this age of maturity.  Mira has in many other ways settled down nicely since turning two, and Hannah changed even more at age three. All in good ways.  Hannah became more confident, calm, relaxed.  Mira has also calmed down, no longer constantly pacing and getting into stuff, and otherwise being a puppish (that’s Kestrel’s job now).  But she’s also become more insecure.  She’s clingy, jealous and a bit bitchy with the other dogs, and now somewhat thunderphobic.  I don’t like seeing a progression in this direction, especially after two years of steady improvement before that.  I really hope it doesn’t continue.

I decided to give Mira a dose of a homeopathic remedy indicated for anxiety and also sound sensitivity, particularly thunderphobia.  The next day she was quirkier than usual, suggesting a possible aggravation. Aggravations are not idea, indicating that you probably gave too strong a dose, but they can also mean that you are at least giving a remedy that is having impact on the vital force along the lines of the symptoms I am hoping to improve.  Seeing them get worse is often what happens before they get better (although ideally you give a gentle enough dose that you only see improvement, without the aggravation.  Aggravations can be miserable).  I didn’t bother working her that day, having learned the hard way that if I see signs of an aggravation in the dogs, it’s best to let them be quiet and not to ask for anything until it passes.

That was two days ago.  During this morning’s hike, we heard a lot of gunfire.  The last time we heard gunfire Mira glued herself to my leg for the rest of our walk, and then hovered about me during subsquent walks even when guns were  not going off.  Today she flinched when the guns fired, and even trotted back to me for a second or two, but then she went back to running about.  There were at least a dozen gun blasts during our time in the woods (all coming from the far side of the river so I hoped we were safe), and – other than checking in with me after each bang – Mira stayed calm and continued to enjoy herself the entire time.  That is a nice change and I hope it holds.  Time will tell.

Healing Power of The Inner Wolf

Another busy week.  But it wasn’t that bad.  I worked only two days away from home – Tuesday and Thursday.  Thursday I was even home a bit early, at 6pm.  So the dogs haven’t been too neglected.  I had them out to the farm Monday and Friday, and Wednesday we went hiking and then to agility, followed by a trip to the chiropractor. They seem pretty content – relatively mellow around the house, and not too clingy with me.  This seems to be a good balance.

Wednesday afternoon I loaded all four dogs into the car and took them to the conservation area for a run.  I usually only take one or two at a time, but lately it has been so deserted that I figured there’d be a strong likelihood that I’d have the place to myself and could let all four run as much as they wanted.  I was right.  What a wonderful option this is for me.  I’m not good at estimating distances, but based on farms I know, I’d say this conservation are is a good 200 acres of forest, meadows, streams and a marsh.  When I explore the back paths, it takes about 1.5 hours to do a full loop of the perimeter.  And much of the time, I have the whole place to myself.  This is the sort of area I need to live near, until I have property of my own.  It’s amazing to let the dogs run free in such wilderness.  It does something to them; it brings out their inner wolf – a magical, healing state of being.  They can express their wildness to their heart’s content.  They run, they stock, they chase.  They mouse, they hunt.  And then they return gentle, quiet, relaxed; once again domestic beasts.

I discovered the healing power of the inner wolf when I first brought Ross home.  He was such a broken soul, physically and mentally.  I used to call him my puddle dog – he would lie like a black puddle of fur at my feet, moving only to get up and follow me, settling in a fresh puddle wherever I stopped.  I never knew that animals could be depressed before, but Ross was definitely depressed.  There was a big, black hole of sadness surrounding him.  I had seen the sadness before I took him home, and it had disturbed me.  Others had noticed it too.  It was part of the reason his last home had given him to me.  They knew he needed something that they were not able to provide.

Every day I took Ross for hikes in the woods.  There, he would come alive.  He was a different dog.  He was my little back wolf, running wild and free.  I wondered if he had ever had the opportunity to run in a forest before.  I suspect he hadn’t, having been found roaming the back alleys of New York City.  And while his rescuers lived in the country, they kept him in a fenced area, or on leash.

I let him run free.

During those early walks, Ross would run and run and run and run and run.  It was like he had to make up for all the running he had missed in his first couple of years.  Or perhaps he was running for the joy of a healing body, once so broken and full of pain.  He would go absolutely wild, racing and charging, chasing squirrels, and leaping about just for the joy of it all.  It brought tears to my eyes to watch him.  Tears of joy, but also tears of sorrow, wondering what exorcism he was undertaking.  I wondered what demons he was running from, or – hopefully – chasing away.  I’ve never encountered such an emotionally complex dog.

Today Ross is not so frantic about his freedom.  Over time, the inner wolf healed his injuries, and – more importantly – his heart.  It has been a long time since I have seen the puddle dog; the black and sadness is gone, hopefully for good.  It took several years, but Ross seems to believe finally that this is permanent.  That he will always have this freedom, and this ability to let loose his inner wolf.

More Steps on the Learning Curve

I took the dogs to the farm last night to work sheep for the first time in two weeks.  It was a beautiful, sunny day and it felt great to be out in the fields again.  I really love being outside, and so do the dogs.

I started with Hannah, who I needed to sort out some sheep from the main flock and bring them out to the big pasture to train where there are fewer draws.  I have been watching Alasdair McCrae’s shedding video, which I borrowed from a friend.  I have to say it is very helpful!  I had a lot of new ideas and wanted to practice them with Hannah. The basics involve getting the sheep to string out and then calling your dog through a gap between some sheep, and having the dog come around behind you while you step through the gap.  Kevin Evans had shown me how to do this when I took his clinic last spring, but I have not been successful with this method.  Watching the video gave me new ideas on how to do it.  Specifically, I need to work with more sheep, and ideally ones who would happily separate.

Alasdair talks a lot about the importance of using the right kind of sheep for introductory training.  For example, in this case you want sheep who will split easily, ideally using two different breeds of sheep from different flocks, so they won’t stick together.  That is unfortunately not an option in my case.  The sheep I use are really dog broke, which means they run to the person and stick to your knees.  Even when you get them strung out in a line, when the dog comes in, the group behind you.  Alasdair warns that you should simply not try to teach shedding with such sheep (I watched that part of his video last night, after trying and trying with Hannah earlier in the day).  If the dog continually fails to shed, then it will lose confidence, and stop trying.

I did see this happening with Hannah, even before watching that part of the video, and stopped trying to shed during that training session.  I had an idea, which I will get to in a minute.  Instead, I worked on other things with Hannah, specifically testing her pace to see how much she remembered from our last session.  I was delighted to see Hannah work with beautiful pace; she obviously remembered everything, even though we just spent one day working on it.  What a good girl!  Now I think it will be safe to gradually stretch out her outruns again.  That will be our next project.

Next I worked with Kess, who was brilliant and lovely as usual.  She was doing a better job of keeping the sheep to me even when I stepped out of the way, so I started doing little tiny outruns with her.  She actually got it, instead of just walking in on the sheep and pushing them away from me.  She’s going to be a great driving dog, but I do need her to gather first.

Kess also continues to be way too pushy.  I don’t want to take that out of her, but I am also sick of being run over by sheep.  Time to get some pace on that dog.  I first moved around a lot, to let her get a bit tired, then I started asking for pace.  She has a quick but steady pace, and I was happy with what she did.  I will slow her down more later, but as long as she’s not running me over, for now I am happy.

Mira, unfortunately, didn’t work consistently last night.  I never know what to expect when I take her out.  Some days she’s fantastic, others she is not.  Last night I didn’t set things up well, so things started off tense.  I brought her out with Hannah, wanting to use Mira to help me with shedding when we were done training.  I should have brought her out on a leash, but I didn’t.  The two dogs didn’t work very well together – they havn’t done much of that.  Mira won’t lie down well, so she kept bumping the sheep, then Hannah would head and stop them.  This led to a sheep sandwhich, making the sheep nervous and edgy.  Then I worked Mira, who is tense at the best of times, and a tense dog with tense sheep is not an ideal situation.  Mira did do a few really nice moves, such as an impressive outrun to catch them when they got away.  She stayed deep and wide and then came in slowly at the top for a lovely lift.  I’ve never seen her do that before and was very impressed.  But then she started being goofy after that.  She was either way too tight, bumping the sheep and running me over with them, or going so wide that she was off contact and they’d just stop and graze.  It took her a good 20 seconds to walk in to the point that they moved at one point.  She shouldn’t be going that far off contact!

I find that I have to be quite mechanical with Mira, often telling her what to do when she should really be doing it instinctively.  She’s always been like this, and while she steadily improves, days like yesterday leave me questioning (once again) just how far I’ll be able to get her.  I think she has enough talent to make a decent working dog, but the question remains – do I have enough knowledge and skill to bring that talent out?  I am not sure.  But we will keep trying.

Once I finished working with Mira (who’s really getting solid on her flanks, which makes me very happy), I tried my little shedding experiment.  I tied Mira to a post on the fence line and then had Hannah bring the sheep to that general area.  I stood about 10 feet in front of Mira, and Hannah brought the sheep to my feet.  My idea is that if Mira was behind me, the sheep wouldn’t want to go there.  So instead of hiding behind me, they’d run to either side, allowing Hannah to split them.

I think this would have worked if I had done it right at the start, and if I had brought Mira out on a leash and kept everything quiet.  But the sheep were too rattle, and this was causing them to stick together (and to my knees) like glue.  It was getting dark, we were failing, so I called it quits.  Next time I will be more careful to keep the sheep calm.  I will also select sheep from different parts of the herd in hopes of getting some who are not “friends” and thus more likely to split.

Back at Agility

Yesterday I took Hannah and Kestrel to agility.  There is a trainer about 25 minutes from me who offers lessons and also is willing to rent out her arena.  When I spoke to her on the phone earlier this week, it quickly became clear to me that she’s had a lot of people come to her facility who didn’t know what they were doing, and either accidentally or intentionally made a mess of things.  As a result, she has a lot of rules about being on her property.  I respect this, and offered to take a private lesson with her prior to renting her facility so that she could show me the ropes directly, and also get a feel for me and my dogs.  Actions, after all, speak louder than words.

We just worked Hannah and the instructor showed me the various courses she has set up this week.  She changes them weekly.  Her facility is really nice. The building is very large, the equipment is excellent, and the ground hard packed, slightly moist sand (so there’s no dust). I can only imagine how much it cost to put up.  I wonder how she can rent it for just $10 an hour.  Not that I am complaining!

Hannah was in her element.  She really loves agility and was over the moon to be back in the arena.  She performed magnificently even though I truly can’t remember when we last seriously trained.  I lost count of how many times the instructor exclaimed “what a nice little dog!”  I think by the end of the hour, she felt much more comfortable about trusting me with her arena and equipment.

After the lesson ended, the instructor told me I was welcome to spend a little time training Kess on my own.  Wow, that dog is fun to work with.  Agility is very different from herding because in agility, the dog is totally focused on you.  With herding, it’s about the sheep.  And with a young dog like Kess, you sometimes aren’t in the picture at all.  Herding is a working partnership, while agility is a game.  The dynamics are very, very different. I have long said I think they are complementary, and Hannah is an excellent example of that.  She’s a very serious worker around stock, and a light hearted whiz at agility.

Kestrel was similarly excited about learning the equipment.  I had her sequencing three jumps within seconds and taught her the tunnel in about two attempts. I had closed up the tunnel and helped her through.  She went through under my guidance once, twice, and then figured out that this was a game and that was that.  She loved it and dove hard and fast through the tunnel.  I started to stretch the tunnel out, then bend it.  By the time she was on her 10th go (ever), she was driving through a full-length, curved tunnel faster than I could run it.  Woo hoo!  This is going to be a fun dog to run.  She is fast and confident, but still very focused on me.  What an exciting combination.

I am going to start doing agility at least once a week now, taking the occasional lesson and training regularly on our own.  I’ll bring Mira in the future and see if I can get her up and going with the same enthusiasm as the others.  Today, however, we’re heading up to the farm to work sheep for the first time in two weeks.  It’s turning out to be a good weekend for the dogs!