What a Week!

Phew…. moving sucks!  Moving as a single person really sucks as you don’t have anyone committed to the process along with you.  I am very fortunately to have had quite a few friends pitch in, and so things have been much easier than they could have been.  Yet it was still an exhausting ordeal, and is not over yet.

I purged my house as much as I could, tossed and donated anything that I didn’t absolutely love or use daily (and even then got rid of some of those things, like my living room furniture, tv & stand, bed, clothes & some kitchen stuff).  I then moved what I absolutely needed to keep (my research books, books shelves, clothes, freezer & mini fridge for dog food, crates) and what I wanted to keep (a couple of dressers, several wooden chairs, my oak buffet, my butcher block table).  What is left is a house with many boxes of paper and mystery items.  The furniture is all gone, but I still have quite a lot of junk piled around.  My plan is to spend the weekend sorting through all this stuff and tossing absolutely as much as I can, and then moving what remains by Tuesday.

I also have to finish moving my garden, no small feat.  I am currently taking a break from working on that as it’s supposed to rain in the morning.  The rain will make the plants easier to dig up, but I’ve weeded and trimmed around them to facility digging.  My last outdoor task of the day is to disassemble my composter.  Oh joy.

The dogs have been amazing throughout all of this. They went several days in a row with zero exercise.  Today I have yet to take them out, and given that I can barely type, I’m not sure if they’ll get much of a run either.  I feel really bad, but take consolation in knowing that if I take care of all this sorting and organizing, when I move to my new house I will no longer be plagued by a ‘to-do’ list six feet long.  I made  a point of throwing out anything that needed to be fixed, except for a few things that are simple to fix and will be worth having once back in working order.  Just doing that has shortened my ‘to-do’ list tremendously.  Sorting all this paper and so on will take care of most of the rest.  I have been wanting to do this for years now, but who wants to sort through a basement full of boxes you haven’t opened in 10 years?  I supposed I could just toss them as is, but that would take more courage than I have.  The more tired I am, the more ruthless I become my purging, and I’m pretty wiped right now.  So I suspect I’ll be safe going through the boxes.

I had hoped to get back to training this week, but no luck.  The move just wiped me out; that I had to do it in 32′C weather didn’t help.  I really need to take a break for 2-3 days to recover at this point, but that’s not an option. I hate operating like this – my adrenal system has been taxed to it’s limit and so is working very sluggishly (I suffer from chronic adrenal fatigue), meaning that it takes three times as long to do anything as it would if I were feeling energetic.  By this time of day (5pm) I’m pretty much toast.  I think I may lie down for half an hour right now, and see if that perks me up enough to get something done this evening.

Just a closing note, I am soooooo not going to miss the screaming kids in this area.  One of the reasons the dog are locked up so much is that I cannot poke my nose out the door without half a dozen kids charing over, screaming “DOGGGIIIEEEEE.”  Even with us all tucked safely in the house, they are screaming so loudly right now that I cannot hear myself think.  I am so glad to be moving away from all this noise, which starts at 8am and augments steadily until the 5-8:30pm daily scream off.  I long for rain and bad weather, just for the peace and quiet it brings.  How bad is that?  My new house is in a retirement area and all you hear are chirping birds, peeper frogs, and surf.  I can’t wait!

Relationships & Training

I tried catching up on a few of the blogs I like to read tonight, just skimming over them.  I have decided to take a couple of them off my blogroll – the two agility blogs (Susan Garrett’s and ShapeUpDogs).  I will add new blogs as I find ones I enjoy reading.  There are many great blogs out there but I just haven’t much time to explore of late.  I am deleting ShapeUpDogs because it doesn’t have many postings and quite frankly, I don’t read it.  As for Susan Garrett’s blog, I am finding that it is becoming too much of an infomercial for her products and seminars.  Plus while I do think she’s brilliant at the mechanics of dog training, I am finding her focus on perfection to be not in keeping with my own philosophy of dog training.  

I do love her advocacy of positive methods, but I question this need for making everything so mechanical.  Dogs are way more than robots, and just because they respond to classical and operant conditioning (heck, so do we!) doesn’t mean that this is the only way they learn.  A dog who has a healthy, clear mind is very capable of putting two and two together and moving forward very quickly with learning, skipping all sorts of steps in training.  Heck, some can learn just by watching other dogs.  Once they know what you want them to do, provided they want to do it – and this is where relationship is so important – many will just get down to work.  The trick, I suspect, is getting your dog healthy enough mentally for him or her to learn that quickly.  

Unfortunately this issues is never discussed in most dog training books or blogs.  Also, this mechanical training using operant and classical condition can and does override some of the mental health problems many dogs have.  I know many, many half-crazy (or fully so) border collies who are taken to agility as a way of getting their over the top behaviour under control.  I could have done this with Mira, but instead I worked at getting her mind clear through good health (diet, homeopathy & chiropractics).  Once her mind cleared and stabilized, training became much easier with her.  

My agility instructor was amazed at how much Mira changed over a 6 month period where we did absolutely zero training, and plenty of focus on health and homeopathic treatment.  Her exact reaction was “Wow!  This dog has come a million miles!”  Now, how is this possible if I hadn’t done any training?  It’s because her brain started working, and our relationship was solid.    

I really enjoyed Patricia Macconnell’s discussion around building relationships (in Bones Would Rain) on different levels, and how yes we can train dogs mechanically, but there’s a whole other level of connecting with them that goes way beyond this.  It is that next level that I am trying to work at, and I find myself almost turned off of some of the teachings I used to take as gospel.  I can’t really explain it well right now because I’m still trying to figure it out.  But when I think of the incredible relationship I had with my first dog, Jake, I am sure it is that that got us so far, and not any specific mechanics of training.  I knew virtually nothing about dog training theory, yet he and I just clicked; we read each other’s minds, and we worked in perfect tandem together.

Hannah has a very clear mind now, and I have a very good working relationship with her (most of the time).  At one point during the the Kevin Evans clinic, I told Hannah to go ‘away’ when I meant ‘come by’.  She went ‘come by.’  I was standing right near the handler’s tent with everyone watching within earshot.  I wasn’t paying attention to them, but when Hannah did the correct flank, i.e. the one I wanted her to do and not the one I asked for, I said “yeah, you know the one I was thinking of” and everyone laughed. The thing is, I am quite sure she did know what I wanted, and that’s why she took that flank.  Not because she was blowing me off.  She does the same in agility and all sorts of other situations as well. She can read me very well, even if my verbals don’t match.  Dogs read us way better than they hear us, and when the relationship is solid, they will respond to what they know we really need them to do.

I don’t want my dogs to be mechanical robots because sometimes I make mistakes.  We are team, and that means we work together.  I suspect that if we were doing daily work on a farm, I’d want my dog to listen very carefully, but also to know when to fill in the gaps and fix my mistakes.  A robotic dog may do better a trial, but only if the handler is really good.  That’s not me – I need all the help I can get from my dog!

I could change my mind on this down the road.  Perhaps I’ll become more competitive, or perhaps I’ll discover that I’m wrong about this.  But for now I am going to put my time and effort into building my relationship with each dog.  This is not to say that training together doesn’t build relationship.  It certainly does!  I’m not sure if I am able to be clear on the difference just yet.  I’ll have to put some more thought into it, and see if I can differentiate better in another post.

Guard Dogs!

Another lapse in writing…  I have been sorting my house and purging as much stuff as I can, and packing what I just can’t part with.  I move in a few days, which is exciting and a bit overwhelming.  Needless to say, I have not had much time for keeping this blog up to date.  I hope to get back to regular writing once I’m settled in to the new place.  Hopefully I will have done most of the work up front, so that once there I can get organized to get back to work very quickly.  

I have been taking the dogs for some good runs most days, and today was no exception.  I have only had time to do one really good dog walk per day, however, and since I can’t take all four at once, each dog is only getting run twice every three days.  Not ideal, but they seem to be living with it amongst all the chaos in my house. 

Twice I’ve had work men come into my home when I have been out.  The first crew tried to come in but where frightened off by Ross, who stood in the door and growled at them. I have to say I was quite surprised that he did this – that’s my man!  Taking care of his home.  Today I found work men in my house, much to my surprise.  Apparently Ross tried to deter them but the one guy just walked past him.  Since he had steel-toed work boots, he didn’t feel Mira nipping at his ankles until he bent down and she nipped him in the behind!  That’s my girl  I am very glad to see that my dogs make it clear that intruders aren’t welcome, but I’m also happy that they are not going to maul anyone.  I suspect they’d try a little harder if someone were actually here with bad intent.  But these guys were helpful and friendly and calm, so the dogs settled in with them around once I was home.  I think I would have been a little happier to find this crew waiting outside like the first one, but at least no one is missing a limb!

Time is a fly’in!

Oh, Tuesday already!  The days are just melting away of late.  I can’t believe I have exactly two weeks to pack and move my entire life.  I have started on it, but have barely touched the tip of the iceberg.  I’ve driven down to my new house the last two days, mostly bringing garden stuff down.  I’ve done a fair bit of work reclaiming some old garden beds and moving my own garden into them.  Still a lot left to do, however, plus I have to pack and move my whole house!  Mostly I need to purge and downsize, not an easy thing to do.  

I took the dogs with me on Sunday.  First we stopped by the sheep farm where I hope to train.  They have a very nice small field that will be good for working Kess and Mira.  They also have a good size round pen for starting Kess.  I’m not sure about training Hannah there, I’ll have to see how the sheep are.  I will at least be able to work on her close work, which is where I need to focus anyway (i.e. getting her to take commands instantly and precisely.  Hopefully I’ll get out to train in the next 1-2 days and see how things go!

Yesterday I started doing some endurance training with Mira and Hannah.  It was obvious at the clinic that my dogs are not in working condition.  Of course the mental energy expended makes them tire more quickly, but that’s part of not being in working condition.  My dogs can out run and outlast most pets, but at the clinic, they faded quickly.  So time to build up their endurance, especially in summer heat.  

As much as I’m not keen on paying ball with them, I’ve decided that two sessions a week will become part of our routine.  The ball chasing is certainly good for training the sprint, and if I do it up hill that will increase their muscle tone as well.  I am also going to do swimming and biking with them.  That on top of working sheep 2-3 times a week will hopefully make a big improvement.

Speaking of which, I had best get on with my day.  It’s almost noon and the dogs have only been out to pee.  I woke up with a headache and was just not up to exercising them.  I have had headaches nearly every day this week, not unusual for me in the past, but it has been a long time since I’ve had cluster headaches like this.  I’m not sure what’s triggering them, but possibly the stress of the move on top of my already busy schedule.  I kind of feel like I’ve been in final exams for weeks now.  Not fun!  Once moved, I should have a whole lot more free time as I am cleaning and organizing everything as I go, so once set up at the other end, I shouldn’t have any outstanding house projects other than food storage for the winter and tending the garden.  Here’s hoping!

Third National Dog Blog Carnival

Just wanted to bring this great collection of dog related articles to your attention.  This month’s Dog Blog Carnival is being hosted on Mysterious Beautiful by Beth Lowell.  The focus is on our relationships with our dogs with many really interesting entries including one by Patricia McConnell!  So do check it out: 

Third National Dog Blog Carnival

Time Out

Today I awoke with a headache that went from bad to worse.  It was such a beautiful day out – sunny and warm, yet with a cool breeze.  It was one of those days that makes you want to stay out all day.  Yet I felt like crap!  I did manage to do a little garden work for about an hour, and then had to sit down for an hour.  Then I drove to the butcher to stock up on meat (they are only open on Fridays so I had to go today or wait a week and feed the dogs lower quality meat from the grocery store in the interim).  

The headache got really bad after that, and pretty soon I was non-functional.  I ended up in so much pain that I thought I was going to throw up, and had to spend several hours lying perfectly still on the couch.  Eventually I fell asleep, and when I woke up I felt much, much better.  I’m still a little off, but I think whatever was going on has passed.  Perhaps it was simply my body saying LIE DOWN!

So the poor dogs didn’t get any exercise today.  I will have to make it up to them tomorrow.  This weekend there is an ASCA herding trial being held at the farm were I hope to start training.  I am going to go and watch for a bit at some point, both to see the facility and to watch the ASCA style trial.  ASCA involves herding ducks and cattle as well as sheep, so it should be quite interesting to see.  I don’t think I’ll bring any of the dogs, except perhaps Hannah.  But just to watch.  I’ll try and remember to bring my camera!

Rear End Paralysis: A Case Study in Homeopathy – Part II

The Mechanics of Vaccine Induced Demyelination and Paralysis

An update on Jack.  While his mind cleared with the first remedy we gave him, his hind end continued to deteriorate.  Two days later, his owner panicked after Jack fell down the stairs, and she took him to the vet to get a prescription for Prednizone, a powerful steroid which she hoped would suppress the immune system and stop the demyelination of his central nervous system.

From a homeopathic perspective, suppressing the immune system’s efforts is the absolutely worst thing you can do in terms of cure, pushing things backward and typically making them worse.  However, from a conventional perspective, a drug like Prednizone is often the only option.  To understand why, I’ll spend a little time here explaining the mechanics of why vaccination leads to rear end paralysis.

A vaccine is composed of two main components: 1) a trace amount of the virus we are hoping to build antibodies for, and 2) the adjuvent.  The idea behind vaccinating, as most people know, is that if we expose the immune system to a tiny bit of a virus, the body will develop antibodies to destroy it, and memory cells to make more antibodies should it ever encounter that virus again.  Unfortunately, simply injecting a little bit of the virus into the body is not terrible effective at producing the results hoped for.  I’m not sure why this is, but I suspect it is because injection bypasses the body’s security system.  Most viruses would enter through the nose or mouth, thus coming into contact with the mucous membrane and starting a chain reaction. Switching to an oral polio vaccine certainly proved to be much more effective, for example.  Very few viruses ever enter the body directly into the bloodstream, rabies being an exception as it is transmitted by bite.  

If we simply inject a bit of live virus, the patient may actually contract the disease, yet if we inject a killed virus, nothing happens.  So a new method had to be found: the adjuvant  (‘adjuvant’ is derived from the Latin word ‘adjuvare’ which means ‘to help’).  It is not fully understood how the adjuvant works, but essentially it shocks the immune system like putting a screw driver into an electric socket.  This sets the immune system on full red-alert, and it subsequently attacks anything it deems as foreign in the body.  Ideally, it finds the bits of injected virus and develops antibodies to destroy it. 

This system, however, is problematic.  First, the primary ingredient of adjuvants is alum, or Aluminum salts.  Also, to be safe, the vaccine is denatured and either left as “modified live” or “killed.”  This is often done with formaldehyde.  The vaccine is then preserved in a substance that often contains mercury.  If you do some research on the internet, you will find many articles (funded by pharmaceutical companies) which assert that there is absolutely no risk in injecting any of theses products into a human or animal.  Many independent researchers disagree.  I’ll let you draw your own conclusions, and say only that I can’t help but wonder if the link between Alzheimer’s and aluminum comes from vaccine adjuvant (a practice that started in the 1950’s), and not from aluminum pots…but I digress.  

Finally, vaccine viruses must be cultivated, and are typically grown in animal cells, for example monkey or pig etc.  As a child I received vaccines grown in chick embryos which left me with a violent allergy to raw eggs and an inability to receive any “boosters.”  Vaccines are also grown in calf serum, rabbit brain tissue and monkey kidney cells, and so on.  This results in the vaccine containing foreign proteins and possibly other contaminants from the animal cell hosts.  Pharmaceutical companies claim that there is, again, no danger to this.  However,  the oral polio vaccine (OPV) AIDS hypothesis, as summarized in Wikipedia, “argues that the ADS pandemic originated from live Polio vaccines prepared in chimpanzee tissue cultures and then administered to up to one million Africans between 1957 and 1960 in experimental mass vaccination campaigns.”  This, of course, has been strongly refuted and dismissed, but I saw a documentary on the topic that was quite convincing.  But again, I digress.

That vaccines contain toxic substances and contamination from the animal cell hosts they were cultivated in is fact.  The debate is whether or not injecting such a concoction into our bodies, or those of our animals, is harmful.  Evidence is mounting that it is, as I have argued many times on this blog.  

The more I study the phenomenon, however, the more I understand why this is the case.  Getting back to the rabies vaccine (and I would also argue, the distemper vaccine), here is a virus that attacks the central nervous system.  As such, a vaccine made from this virus can, and sometimes does, contain contamination from tiny bits of myelin.  Myelin is the insulation around our nerve cells which allow them to transmit a signal clearly, in the same way that insulating an electric cord allows a current to flow through without interruption or shorting out.  

When injected into the body along with the virus and an adjuvant, the myelin becomes one more foreign object for the body to attack.  However, myelin from a foreign culture is the same as myelin in our body, and the antibodies developed in this process then turn on the myelin found naturally in the body.  In other words, the body starts attacking itself, destroying the myelin that serves to protect our nervous system.

Here is a very interesting scientific journal article that discusses the case of a Rottweiler suffering from post-rabies vaccine de-myelination.  In the article, the dog recovers after being given Prednizone, which is why Jack’s mom wanted to give it a try.  The theory is that the steroids “calmed” the attack on the myelin.  Apparently it worked in this case, however it did not work for Jack.  She had him on Prednizone for two weeks, during which he did indeed regain function and strength.  However, as soon as she weaned him off, he began deteriorating again.  

Prednizone is extremely harmful and cannot be maintained for any length of time without serious side effects such as kidney failure. Even while his leg was getting better, he had violent diarrhea and other side-effects almost immediately.  As such, keeping Jack on this drug is not an option.  We had suspended homeopathic treatment during this period, and will be starting again this week.  I will continue to write about our efforts to help this dog, documenting any successes and failures as we go.  Please keep Jack in your thoughts.

Training Tools

I’ve heard a lot of discussion around training tools for herding.  Some people use nothing, just their voice, and perhaps wave or throw their hat from time to time.  Others use a herding stick or crook.  Others still use any variety of objects, ranging from rakes to paddles to pool noodles.  

The need for such tools varies with the trainer, but basically, seeing as you are working in a highly dynamic situation that moves much faster than you are able to most of the time, you occasionally need extensions of your arm or voice to keep things in control.  This is mostly true when starting out.  It’s been a long time, for example, since I’ve needed anything other than my voice to train with Hannah.  

Herding is about shaping instinct.  It is very different from training agility, for example, or flyball.  These latter dog sports involve creating a behaviour in a dog, such as the desire to jump over things, go through tunnels, or race at break-neck speed down an alley and back to fetch a ball.  Dogs don’t have natural instincts to do these things, but if you make it fun and exciting for them, they will typically develop a taste for it.  Because of this lack of natural born instinct, it is paramount to make these sports fun and positive; a dog who is worried for any reason is not going to run fast, which is the foundation of these activities.  They are therefore best taught through positive means.  Furthermore, there is no reason for a dog to do agility or flyball except for the fun of it, so there is no reason to use anything other than positive means of training.  In short, it makes no sense whatsoever to use compulsion when training dog sports.

Herding is very different.  As much as I have been lamenting the fact that I have had to use some compulsion when training my dogs on sheep, I have yet to find a way around it.  Perhaps when I am more experienced and talented, I will manage to avoid it, but for now I simply can’t.  Herding involves shaping a dog’s instinct to go after livestock in such a manner as to move the stock where you need them to be without harming them.  This is modified prey instinct, modified wolf-pack hunting behaviour.  In other words, you are playing with fire. 

This weekend a few of the dogs ended up grabbing and gripping the sheep during training.  The sheep had been recently shorn, so that they would stay cool while being run around the field, but this left them with little but skin for the dogs to grab onto should they try.  Try they did, and some succeeded.  Some of the sheep ended up with gashes and tears that had to be tended to by a veterinarian as a result.  Nothing life threatening, but it was certainly eye opening.  No wonder most of the sheep farms around here refuse to allow dogs near their stock.  As my trainer has drilled into my head since day one, sheep are fragile.  You need to keep your dog under control around them because they can get hurt pretty easily.  

This is where the training tools come in to play.  Sheep are naturally afraid of the dog and want to run, and border collies naturally want to go after the sheep and (ideally) bring them back to you.  It is pretty much impossible to outrun sheep or a border collie if you are a human, so you need to find other ways of keeping the dog under control so the sheep don’t end up getting hurt, or hurting themselves.  

Training tools are used as visual distractors for the dog – the rake or the stick or the pool noodle get waved in the direction of the dog so that the dog hesitates when it starts thinking about diving in at the sheep.  Essentially these tools lengthen your reach by 6-8 feet, so you suddenly have a very long arm you can wave in front of their faces as they dash around supposedly out of your reach.  The problem I have found is that the timing is difficult with such things.  My original instructor puts a basket ball in a garbage bag, tapes up the excess bag like a handle, and swings the basket ball towards the dog, or even throws it.  Effect, yes, if your timing is right.  But the basketball is a slow, heavy object and if you don’t see things happening quickly enough, they can be over before you even start to swing.  The same, I expect, is true of the rake or paddle.  I’ve tried throwing my hat or coat at a dog, but the only thing I succeeded in doing was losing the sunglasses I had perched on top of the hat.

At the clinic this weekend, we used a new tool: a whip.  I have to say, I never in million years would have thought I’d ever use a whip in training my dogs, but it was surprisingly effective.  Now don’t get me wrong – the whip is not used on the dog.  Not a single dog was touched in any way other than with affection throughout this whole weekend.  But you need to be tough and block them with your body and your voice.  And when first training up a dog, if you can’t out run it, you need an extension to help you.  This is where the whip comes in handy.  You don’t touch the dog with it, not even close.  You can use it to make a snapping sound that punctuates your voice I typically stamp my feet or slap my stick on the ground, but the sharp snap of the whip is far more effective.  Or you can use it to flick in front of the dog as it’s about to dive in to the sheep. The whip has a small pice of leather on the end that makes a very strong visual cue, and if you flick it a few feet in front of the dog, the dog hesitates and backs off.  The whip is probably the fastest and most precise tool I’ve seen used, and was exceptionally effective.  It’s as if you were able to leap, with lightening speed, in front of the dog for a fraction of the second.  Used once or twice, the dog stops thinking it can outrun you, and things carry on much more smoothly. 

I of course didn’t need it with Hannah (when she was just getting started, however, we used a makeshift flappy thing we waved in front of her face, and the basket ball in a plastic bag), but it sure came in handy with Mira and Kess.  With Mira it kept her going around when she wanted to stop short and stay on pressure, and it kept her from diving in at the sheep.  With Kess, who earlier in the weekend caused a lamb to break its leg (which I then had to pay for, more on that in another post), it kept her off the sheep nicely too.  There is a certain amount of wolf in a border collie, and it is really, really important to keep the dog from harming them. 

I still would like to use exclusively positive methods in training my dogs, but I don’t presently have the precision and skill to be precisely at the right place, at the right time, all the time.  I can’t do it in agility when things are stationary, and I certainly can’t do it in herding when things descend into chaos in seconds.  When that happens, I end up racing around, hollering at my dog and getting really angry and upset.  Nothing positive about that, let me tell you.  When I used the whip, however, everything stayed under control, and I stayed calm.  My dogs didn’t like it, I have to say, so that is something to consider.  But they didn’t like the flippy thing or the basketball either.  They prefer to be allowed to do their own thing, but around sheep, that simply can’t happen.  

Lots to think about for our future training, that’s for certain.

The Clinic

Well here I sit in my hotel room, half way home from the Kevin Evan clinic.  What a treat it has been to work with someone of that calibre for three days!  My brain is so full I can’t seem to stop going over and over our lessons.  I mostly worked Hannah, but I had so much time with Kevin that I was able to do everything I wanted with Hannah, and still work Mira and Kess with him too.  Again, what a treat.

In my first session with Hannah, he had me just work her a little while he watched and assessed.  He said Hannah is a really nice bitch, that she “has it all” and that all that is needed is that I sharpen up her training (no surprise there!).  Basically, she’s slicing her flanks, coming up short at the top of her outruns and lifting crookedly, and has no pace.  So we worked on these points.  All of them are due to me letting her get sloppy and nothing more.  When he showed me how to get pace on her and how to insist that she do proper flanks, she came up nice and square with good pace.  Lots to practice on, but I can now clearly see the difference.  She also sharpened up a lot when I started demanding more of her.  She was clearly bored with what we had been practicing and was getting lazy, cutting corners – literally!

Once we had that sorted out, we spent our next three lessons working on shedding, penning and the look back respectively.  Shedding was awesome.  Shedding is when you need to split off some sheep from the main group.  You stand on one side, the dog on the other, and when a gap forms between the sheep you want and the rest of the group, you call the dog through the sheep and have the dog drive the ones you want away.  Sounds easy, but it sure is not!  The sheep were were working on were very dogged at that point and just wanted to stay glued to each other and your legs.  They were definitely not interested in shedding!

Kevin worked Hannah for a bit, and that was just magic to watch.  Both were clearly enjoying themselves with the challenge of shedding un-shedable sheep.  I doubt any sheep are un-shedable for Kevin.  He soon had them splitting and Hannah coming through and taking away half.  Then he had her shed those and take away half again.  Soon he was down to two, and split them.  Then he had her drive a single away from the rest.  That was tough, but Hannah was up to the job and seemed to be over the moon with glee pushing that stubborn ewe up the field.  I am quite sure Hannah would have climbed into Kevin’s suitcase to come home with him after that, given the chance.  She’s always thrilled to work with someone who knows what they are doing, and this guy is as good as they get (current world champion).  

I’ll allow myself the vanity of believing that he was also enjoying working with her.  You can see how much he enjoys bringing out the best in a dog, and the dramatic improvement in some of the dogs this weekend was really impressive to watch.

I learned a lot with penning as well, which we did with very tough sheep.  The decision was made to bring out the very light Cheviots and use them for the more advanced dogs.  Hannah fell into that group, which surprised me but most of the handlers & dogs attending were fairly novice, like myself.  She was the second most advanced dog there, although there were handlers with more experience than I have.  It seems most people brought dogs they were having trouble with, rather than dogs they wanted to polish.  

Training for the look-back was a lot trickier than I expect.  The principle is simple, as with all of this training, but the implementation of theory is really tough.  We were not able to make it happen in the time that we had but I am pretty sure I’m clear on what to practice.  

Kevin explained that you can train a dog up about 80% without teaching it to take pressure from you, but to get that last 20% you had to get that pressure going.  I don’t put pressure on my dogs; I didn’t know how.  So when I step into Hannah, she just turns and looks at me, as if to say “what?”.  Getting the dog to move off your body pressure is apparently very important for putting that really cutting edge polish on, the kind where the dog and handler move in synchronistic together without words.  Hannah sure moved off Kevin – the man has a tremendous amount of presence and the dogs all move off him!  But I need to work on that.  He said we’re 80% there.  The problem of course is that he uses a lot of aggression in his voice and body language to teach the dogs, and I just can’t do that with Hannah!  We just don’t work that way together.  But I’ll figure out how to get that from her.   

Having felt that I covered just about everything I can with Hannah and now just need to go home and practice for a few months, I used my last two slots with Mira and Kess.  We got Mira going very quickly.  The problems I had with her at home vanished within seconds.  Kevin said she was a nice little bitch and would make a good trial dog.  That’s two very experienced British handlers who have said that about her now, so it’s clearly my job to make it happen!  

The problems I was having with Mira, it is clear to me now, is that I was trying to train her on sheep that were simply too wild.  Last fall I had a choice of sheep and I could select nice quiet ones.  This allowed us to make progress because she didn’t feel she had to constantly cover as they tried to bolt back to the barn.  When we were sheep sitting this past May, the sheep were yearlings and had just been shorn, and were flighty as deer.  This got Mira all rattled and made her want to always stay in position where she could stop them from running back to the barn.  Back on heavy, quiet sheep, Mira did quite well.  

Where we will be starting to train next week, the sheep are very “dogged” (quiet and like to stay with people) – not ideal for Hannah, but very good for the young dogs.  It seems you really need a variety of sheep to properly train dogs: nice quiet ones to start, and then several grades of flightiness as you work your way up the scale.  As Mira develops more confidence and obedience, she will be able to work more difficult sheep.

Finally, we worked Kess.  I only wanted to spend about 10 minutes on her, getting an idea of how to start her and what steps I need to follow to get her going.  We took her into a round pen that was a bit too small to do much, but after diving in once or twice, Kess was going around them very nicely within about 2 minutes.  It’s so amazing to watch a talented handler work.  It looked sooooo easy.  He let me take over and we were back to a mess within seconds.  But soon I got it and she was working nicely for me too.  He remarked “there’s nothing wrong with this one, is there?” and when I told him that I’d gotten her free from the pound, he said that he’d paid a lot more for a lot worse.  He also said that it was clear that she had some really good quality breeding behind her.  Yeah Kess!  

Finally, a word on Ross.  He did extremely well this weekend.  While he spent most of the time in our room, we got out for a nice hike in the woods each day.  He slept a lot, clearly tired by the strain of it all.  However he stayed pretty calm and, other than over one meal, ate well and never showed any overt signs of stress (i.e. panting, drooling, shaking, vomiting, not eating – all things he’s done in the past).  I did give him a dose of his main homeopathic remedy (Calc. Carb) when we got there, which may have helped keep him calm.  

All in all, the 12 hour drive each way and spending money I don’t have on the clinic was worth it.  It really wasn’t that expensive if you factor in that accommodation and chef-prepared food were included (the food was amazing!).  I’d have spent more on a weekend in a hotel and never leaving the room.  I learned that I have three very talented dogs, and the next steps needed for improving myself if I want to bring out this talent.  I gained significant new insight into how to put a foundation in a dog, and how to better read sheep.  I really hope this new training facility works out for me to train there regularly because I want to put all this new knowledge into practice as soon as possible!  But for now I need to get packed up and moved out of this hotel room, and off to lunch with my grandparents!

Good Things are Happening

Today I drove out to watch a sheep herding and sheering demonstration, with the intention of finally introducing myself to the farmer putting on the show.  I have been wanting to introduce myself for months now, but have never had a good opportunity.  This was perfect.  There weren’t many people, and I stuck around afterwards and said hi.  He was an extremely nice person, and very happy to talk dogs and sheep.  He was also happy to have me come out to his farm to train.  He said he’d be open to some kind of barter system, such as help on the farm and perhaps training together. 

I’m delighted about this opportunity.  I will be going the weekend after next, after getting back from the clinic.  Fingers crossed it all works out!

Later in the day I took the dogs to our new house to let them sit outside in the fenced yard while I worked on the garden.  I had to work pretty hard reclaiming the garden bed from nature, which had obviously been working her own art with it for years.  But now the weeds are gone, the soil is turned, and my tomatoes, kale and cucumbers are finally in the ground.  I just hope there aren’t any hungry rabbits around – I totally forgot about that since they don’t dare enter my yard here.

After finishing the garden, I packed up the dogs and headed out.  I decided to take a small tour of my new “town” (village?), and ended up down by the beach.  

Wow!  What an incredibly beautiful place I am moving to!  It is very wild, with crashing waves, drift wood everywhere, and huge cliffs that run off into the distance on either side of the small beach.  It’s really quite breath taking.  And it’s like being on the ocean because you can’t see the far side of the lake.  Just water to the horizon, and a constant crash and roar of surf.  

I had no idea such a wild and beautiful place existed in the manicured, industrially farmed region I live in.  What incredible good luck.  Or is it luck?  I already feel a connection with the house and the land around it.  I feel like this was meant to happen.  I’m starting to get excited.  The beach is only about a ten minute walk from my new house, and there’s a tiny café right there as well.  I can already picture myself sitting there and doing my work with a dog or two at my feet (they have outdoor tables).  Then wandering home, puttering in the garden, and napping in the hammock I’m going to set up because there is a post the exact perfect distance from a tree, exactly where a hammock should be set up.  

When I turned the corner and pulled up to the beach, the setting sun broke through the clouds and pained the white crests and spray of the waves orange and gold.  It did the same to the wind farm on the distant cliffs.  I don’t remember the last time I saw something so breathtakingly beautiful.  I tried to take Ross for a walk on the beach, but he was having none of it.  It seems that roaring, crashing surf is not his thing.  He all but dragged me back to the car, so I put him up.  By then the sun and dropped, and the gold light was gone.  I walked a little on my own, then got in the car and drove back here, relaxed and refreshed like I haven’t felt in ages.  

Nature restores me, and soon I’ll be able to walk that beach every day.  I am so very, very grateful.