So what have I been up to?  Well, all sorts of things!  I’ve been visiting with friends, camping, cooking, eating, and training the dogs.  I’ve also started a new relationship, which I’ve wanted to focus my time on while I still was on flexible summer hours.  In short, I’ve been really enjoying myself and remembering what it is like to have a balanced life!  What a treat.  I am hoping I can hold on to this balance, or some semblance thereof, throughout the coming months.  Between now and next April, things are going to be pretty crazy.

The dogs have had a pretty darn good summer. At least I think they have.  I can see the improvement in Ross, who’s coat has turned soft again and who is behaving in a much more relaxed manner.  His weight and energy are good, and even his eyes look better.  Most of the time they are a soft, almond shape rather than the round, stressed out sad shape with saggy lower lids (that indicate a thyroid imbalance).  I’ve had him on a new homeopathic remedy this summer, but I really think his improvement has come from me being home nearly 100% of the time.  Or him being able to come with me when I go out.  Ross is a real mamma’s boy and he likes to be close at all times.  Mira is like this as well, and is similarly behaving much more relaxed and happy.

Hannah and Kess don’t seem to be as bothered by my irregular schedule during my work year, but they have both enjoyed quite a lot of training and work this summer, making them quite happy dogs.  We managed to get out and train at the farm 2-3 times a week most weeks.  Last week we farm-sat this farm for 8 days, and Hannah was over the moon with joy at having so much work.

This farm is a working, commercial farm with somewhere between 200-300 ewes and lambs.  Every morning we had to get up and put them all out to pasture, and every evening they needed to be brought back into the barn and locked up for the night.  This is because of coyotes, which have been very destructive this year.  More on that later (or perhaps in a separate post).  Hannah had to also hold sheep off feeders while I filled them with grain, and otherwise move sheep here and there depending on where I needed them to be.

What amazed me was just how brilliant this dog is at farmwork.  She is so, so keen to work.  Every morning she’d be sitting by the front door, waiting for me to get ready and go out.  After dinner she’d start to pace and bounce about in anticipation of evening chores.  Then we’d head out and she’d get down to task.

All I’d have to do would be to show her what I wanted, and she’d do it.  Once she understood, I wouldn’t have to say a word.  The first morning I guided her carefully around the barn, gently lifting sheep out of nooks and crannies, carefully moving the whole flock out the small gate without causing panic or chaos.  After that, she knew what to do.  I just sent her in and she’d come out, walking quietly, behind 250 sheep.  She’s lie down and wait patiently while old or lame ones would limp along at the end.  She’s flank to one side or the other of the flock to tuck in wayward lambs.  She’d stare down those who didn’t want to move, and – on a few occasions – nip at the noses of the really stubborn ones to convince them she was in charge.

Once all the sheep were out in the pasture field, Hannah would lie down in the gate and watch them trot away.  After that she’d look back at me, very clearly asking “OK, what’s next?”

Bringing in the flock at night was equally lovely to watch.  I’d send her from the gate and say nothing more until the last lamb disappeared into the barn.

Of course one danger with Hannah is that once she is sure of what needs to be done, she will often think she knows better than I do what comes next.  As such, I made sure to sometimes change things up, or at least to do some training on other things – where she needed to listen and work with me – throughout the day, in order to keep her listening.  My biggest problem with Hannah is her tendency to work on her own, and just letting her do barn chores would certainly make that worse.  But doing the chores + things that she cannot anticipate made for a good balance.  All in all, I think we both came a long way in that week.

I did work with the other dogs as well, but I let Hannah be my main working partner.  I know it would be really good for Kess or Mira to do the same, but with only a week, I decided to just focus on one dog.  Kess is only two, and Mira has enough other things to work on, so there will be time to let them be my right hand.  Plus Hannah just loves it so much.  Her desire to work is so much stronger than theirs.  The other two love to work when you bring them to stock, but Hannah clearly sits in the house thinking about her job.  I can’t say the same about the others!

I am noticing some big improvements in all three dogs.  Hannah is working incredibly well, although we still need to improve our whistle performance and her shedding is still hesitant.  Kess is coming along and starting (finally!) to develop an outrun.  It’s still spotty and I never know if she’s going to walk straight up the field or cast out when I send her.  I have been doing my best to always set her up to cast out, but not everything can be controlled.

Mira has recently surprised me by her increase in confidence.  She remains very tough to manage around stock, behaving as if she really doesn’t hear me (and I suspect she really doesn’t) until I have hollered at her several times and the stock are totally in the wrong place.  But she’s now going in to all sorts of tight places and pushing stock around and out of corners she would never have considered only a few months ago.  She almost never barks while working, and her tail stays down most of the time now.  We still have a long way to go, but her improvement is noticeable.  While she’s not an ideal dog to train by any standard for breed selection, she’s teaching me a tremendous amount by her challenges.  I know I’ve said that before, and I will say it again many times I’m sure.

Last week I also decided to put Ross on stock.  Why you ask?  Well, because he has really turned on to stock and is so fixated on them that I decided it would be prudent to do a little training to at least get a lie-down and recall off stock on him.  Who knows when he might actually get through a fence.  It has never happened, but anything is possible.  Now that I’m traveling more with the dogs to farms and trials, I need to be confident in my dogs.

Ross on sheep was quite entertaining.  The first time I tried I put him in a round pen with them.  He went round and round, tail up, singling out one ewe and cornering her.  Once she stopped, he’d walk up to her tentatively and sniff her nose.  Just like I’ve seen a lot of young dogs do.  In short, he’s behaving like a puppy.  No surprise, really.  I would have been far more surprised had he gone around the sheep and brought them back.

The next time I brought him out, I tried it in a larger field to give him more room.  That was probably not the best idea because there simply was a lot more running.  He’s still not gathering, although he did start to turn back the singles he was chasing and bring them back to me.  And once he started getting tired, he did show some inclination to go around.  He may never do more than this, but then again more instinct might come out in time.  It doesn’t really matter either way.  What I want is to be able to call him off, and that I was able to do.  I also established that he is no sheep killer.  Quite the opposite in fact.  While he enjoyed the chase, he’s very gentle with the stock. Good boy.

I have plenty of other stories to tell and I will do my best to tell them over the coming days.  I also have a bunch of photos to share.  I just downloaded them to my computer, and once I have formated them for posting, I’ll start putting them up.  Those might be the fastest way to get caught up after my long silence.

I think all visiting is done now, at least until the end of the month.  Hopefully I will have time to get back to regular writing again now!  I do have some things to report on the dogs’ training.  I’ve been getting out to the farm when I can, and even had a wonderful friend and Open handler spend some training time with me last week that helped tremendously.  He’s a very kind and sensitive trainer and Mira actually would work with him on the field, and even worked for him!  Finally someone who can help me wit her.

I’d love to write more but I’m beyond tired and need to get to bed and back into an early to bed, early to rise routine.  Good night!

The conclusions drawn in this video are pretty self-evident, but from a “scientific” perspective they had to do experiments to come to this conclusion (just like they had to do “scientific” studies to prove that goats were efficient at eating back shrubbery – this ideology of sciencism is really getting out of control!). What I like about this “new” understanding of motivation is that it flies in the face of the dominant theory that we (humans) are only motivated by self-interest and gain. Our entire economic system is built on this belief, and is failing the vast majority of the global population quite spectacularly.

How -or if- this applies to dog training is something I’m still mulling over.  Would love to hear people’s thoughts if anyone cares to comment.

Still, I’ve done very little with the dogs.  I’ve hiked them a little, and taken them to the farm and worked them a little.  A very little.  That was more because of circumstance than heat.  The sheep had all been mixed together into one big flock – the working group and the main flock.  The main flock comprises the ewes with lambs, and some of the lambs are still fairly small.  This means ewes with big udders, and bad tempers.

I don’t like pushing around ewes with big udders (I assume it can’t be good for them to have to run fast unnecessarily) or small lambs who could be trampled or get heat exhaustion in this weather.  I tried to sort out some of the working group but it was pretty much impossible without some kind of containment or shoot set-up. The sheep were being kept in the barnyard with its attached side field which makes a U-shape with a narrow channel about the width of a one lane road at the bottom of the U (the barn yard makes one side of the U and the small pasture makes the other).  When I brought a dog into one side of the U, the sheep would stampeed to the other.  The channel is too small for the dog to get ahead of the sheep so we have to go all the way around to the other side of the U, at which point the sheep stampeed back into the baryard.  The pressure is very intense and it is very difficult work for the dogs.  It’s also stressful on the sheep.  I decided not to put anyone at risk in the heat and just went for a hike.

This weekend I’m farm sitting so we’ll get to do more.  The owner of the farm ran the sheep through this shoot yesterday and separated out the working group and put them in a separate pasture.  So now it will be easy for me to get a suitable group to work with.  And it’s cooler.

On Wednesday a friend of mine came to the farm with her young dog to take a lesson.  Not with me – with the owners.  She had picked up this dog from the pound as a puppy last summer.  They said he was a Shepherd mix of some sort.  When I met him he was about 7 months.  I took one look at him and told her I thought he was a Kelpie, and not a Shepherd at all.  Or perhaps a Kelpie mix, but mostly Kelpie.  She has since taken him to a duck herding clinic and he did fairly well.  On sheep this week, he did quite well.  Definitely some genuine herding instinct in this dog.  First time on sheep and he immediately did a gather and brought them back.  She was pretty excited and plans to continue with training.

Other than that, not too much else to report right now.  I’ve been spending a lot of time at the books, both researching for my work and preparing courses to teach in the fall.  I’m working more than full-time hours right now, and I’m not even getting paid!  This isn’t exactly how I had envisioned life as an academic.  I’m discovering that this notion of having summers “off” is a fallacy.  But at least I am working from home almost all the time.  I go into town roughly once a week for meetings and that’s it.  It’s lovely.

The dogs are generally doing well.  Ross seems to be relaxing a bit, although I am still unhappy with the condition of his coat and the droopiness of his eyes.  His thyroid is definitely still off.  We started him on a new homeopathic remedy but I don’t think it is doing anything.It can take months to reset a thyroid, and so I am being patient.  I really want to get his blood tested and possibly get him back on thyroid meds but until I have an income again this is not an option.  His hypothyroidism is very, very marginal so another few weeks shouldn’t hurt his health in the long run.  But it does affect his moods and I don’t like to see him moping about.

I’ve been doing a lot of research on the thyroid lately and am wondering if my own thyroid has been off as well.  I’m am currently reading The Thyroid Solution, which is an interesting lay-oriented book written by an MD.  I have a lot of the symptoms – mostly mental – typical of low grade hypothyroidism.  Much of it is resolved now, with only a residual level of fatigue and slightly sluggish metabolism.  I was diagnosed as having adrenal malfunction, but the adrenals and the thyroid work very closely together and typically if one is off, so is the other.  I wonder if going on thyroid meds would have sped up my recovery.  I’ll talk to my GP about getting tested when I go for my annual physical in a few weeks.  I suspect I’m too close to normal for test to pick up any imbalance. When I was really unwell I had a whole battery of tests done and everything came back “normal.”  My diagnosis was then ‘depression’ due to ‘stress.’  Fortunately I knew better and kept changing doctors until I found one who actually helped.  You really have to be your own advocate in health, both for yourself and for your animals.

No health issues to report in any of the girls.  They are all doing well, and are stable and happy.  Kess seems to be maturing a bit and is showing more interest in being affectionate with me.  This makes me happy.  She mostly spends her time in isolation, off in her crate or lying in the kitchen or out in the yard while I work in the dining room. This is her choice and I’ve let her be.  I started to tie her to my chair for a while but stopped.  I figured if she wanted to be off on her own that was fine with me.  Now she is seeking me out of her own accord with greater frequency.  She’ll be two in August.  I think she’s starting to grow up!

I was supposed to be at a trial this weekend, the one I didn’t get into because I sent my entry in too late and it was full.  I have since decided to scrap the trial season completely.  The next one is the August long weekend but they only have one run for novice classes and it’s a 6 hour drive.  I wouldn’t mind going and watching the rest of the trial, and then the really big trial  that starts 2 days later.  But I don’t have the time right now to go and sit for a week watching a dog trial.  I have too much work to do.  I will likely go and watch the Nationals in late August, and that will be it.  They are being held 3 hours away and I can go just for the day if I wish.  We’ll see.  Otherwise there’s a trial in late October which I might try and compete in.  I’ve decided that I may have to bite the bullet and put Hannah into Open so that we can actually attend trials.  There are simply too few around here that have any novice classes.  Only three this year, and the only one that was convenient in terms of location or date was the one this weekend.  So shooting to run Hannah in Open in October is my new goal.  At least it gives me something to work towards!

Now I’m off to market and then to pick up milk.  I’ve been getting enough milk lately to make yogurt and cheese!  Cheese making is really exciting.  But that’s a different post.  I’d best get going or I’ll miss the organic potatoes.

We went for a great, 1.5 hour hike.  I had kept the dogs home all weekend because of how busy everything was (Canada Day +  July 4th weekend), so they were more than keen to burn off some steam.  They ran their hearts out and jumped in and out of every available puddle, swamp, stream and river.  By the time we got back to the car they were exhausted.  And very smelly.

Once home, I spent a few minutes and hosed off each dog.  Ross even got a soap bath on his stomach and under arms.  He’s allergic to the water around here so I need to make sure he’s clean, otherwise he gets very itchy.  I think he reacts to the high algae in the ground water, which is the result of all the nitrogen run-off from the farms.  The conservation area is in a river valley surrounded by corn fields, so the water is likely very toxic.  I hate it, but what can I do?  There’s no where else to let them run.

Once they were all clean, I popped them into the large electro-netted fenced area beside my house and went inside.  As I was opening the front door, I found a note.  Curious, I opened it.  It was the note I have been waiting for for the past year: from Animal Control.  Lovely.  This happened to me at my last house as well, except it only took them a few weeks to find me.  This time I managed to stay under the radar for a whole year, but now I have to register my dogs.  The cost? $183.  You can imagine how happy this made me!  Especially when I knew that the only reason this happened was that one of my neighbours must have ratted on me.  And they likely did this because the landlord hasn’t cut the grass on the back side of the property (a steep hill and not my responsibility to cut), and they are trying to get revenge.  I wonder if they know that they are hurting me, the person who has cleaned up the other half of the property, planted flowers and otherwise made the place look a whole heck of a lot better than when I moved in.  I wish I knew who it was so I could point out to them what their petty little scheme is doing.  Passive aggressive jerks!

But I knew I was taking a risk when I fenced the side of the house off as people could see that I had dogs.  In the back yard, off the kitchen, no one can see them.  Damn it.  Well, I’ll know better next time.  Hopefully there won’t be a next time though…

To make matters worse, about an hour later I received an email from the manager of the sheepdog trial I was planning on competing in in two weeks.  She said that there had been too many entries so they had to do a draw to see who got in.  And I didn’t get in.

This is just as well as I have a lot of work to do, and the trial entry fee will go towards paying my stupid dog license fee.  Plus it means not having to travel next weekend, which is not bad.  I’m still getting over all the traveling I did over the last two months!

This may sound silly, but since I’m missing this trial it means I don’t have a shot at winning the provincial championship.  As a result, I no longer feel compelled to try and make every trial.  Not that there are very many trials at the novice level.  In fact so far there are only four listed so far.  The one I am not in, one more over the August long weekend, and a couple in the fall.  Considering how much I’ll be working this fall, I may not make any trial this year now.  I was going to go to the August one but they only have one run for the novice classes.  This means driving 6 hours for one run.  There are another 5 days of Open level trials that I would like to watch, but they start two days later.  This would mean being away for a whole week, and I simply can’t do that.  I might just drive up to watch the final tow days of the open trial.  Then again, maybe I’ll skip it all together and just go to watch the Nationals at the end of August and call it a trial season.  Next year I may need to just move Hannah to open so that I can have a chance to compete.  There’s very little going on for novices within 5-6 hours of where I live.  *sigh*

Now that I’ve wallowed in self-pity, time for the ups of the week: training has been going much better!  The dogs have been working very, very well (another reason I’m disappointed about the trial) and I’ve made good progress with each.  This is true for agility as well as herding.  In agility, I have been training any evening I didn’t work stock (except tonight), which means my dogs are actually moving forward.  Who’d of thought?!  Kess is coming along really nicely, and Mira is making progress as well.  On stock, all three dogs are moving ahead quickly.  This week Kess even did some very nice driving without my assistance, taking flanks both ways and driving the sheep in a big rectangle with me staying in one place.  Pretty good for a dog not yet two and handled by a novice handler!  She is definitely talented!

Mira has made some progress as well, although I still have to check any expectations at the gate when we walk out on the field.  I think I may start using her for some of the farm chores, like rounding up the flock and putting them away so we can use the back field to train in.  Perhaps doing some real work will help build her confidence.  We’ll see.

Hannah is doing much better as well.  She did some spectacular driving the other day, and is even taking her new whistles pretty well.  Although still not consistently, and not quickly enough.  Again maybe it’s just as well we aren’t competing.  I’d have to holler her around the course, which would no doubt elicit snickers and frowns.  Not that I should care, but I’m afraid part of me does.

I’m not sure why the dogs are suddenly doing better, but I expect it has something to do with my attitude shift.  I’ve been in a better head space this week (other than today, thanks to the animal control incident) and feeling more calm about things.

Oh, one more downer from the past week: fireworks!  A few just exploded reminding me of the last four days and nights of cowering dogs.  With the exception of Mira, my dogs don’t react in thunderstorms.  But they were all getting pretty jumpy after four days of explosions, running either to me or to their crates.  Kess is the worst, which is worrisome in such a young dog.  I gave her a dose of Phosphorus last night (a homeopathic remedy that is indicated for thunderphobia) but I’m not sure it helped much.  She might need a stronger potency.  It’s a remedy that might be a good fit for her in general so I need to research it a little and see if it matches her other general symptoms and personality.

The fireworks will now continue, at least on weekends, for the rest of the summer.  This is one big drawback to where I live: in a cottage beach resort where rich city people have their weekend homes, and less-rich city people have their tralers.  I live where everyone wants to be in the summer, which means I want to leave!  I really hope that by next year I have lined up a permanent job and am able to move to a house with property – and no uppity neighbours – and be away from fireworks and partying city-dwellers.  The exceptionally early summer weather has started all of this in June this year, when it didn’t get going in earnest last summer until august.  The noise all night long has been getting to me, with people yelling and singing and letting their dogs bark and even fight, even at 4am.  It’s too hot to close windows so I’m sleeping with ear plugs.  That does the trick, but I’ll be glad for Labour Day, at least on that front!

But the real reason I think I was feeling so low yesterday is that I haven’t had any interaction with another person in days!  I didn’t realize this until my agility lesson this morning.  Social interaction really perked me up.  I live quite an isolate life right now, seeing as I am an hour from town and not working.  The only people I talk with are those I buy food from.  That makes for good discussion, but it rarely lasts more than a few minutes.  Then I’m back on my own again.

Because I am so busy with work, I have not been feeling lonely.  But apparently at some level I still am.  Spending an hour with my agility instructor this morning made it clear that I need to factor in some social time!  This will be tough because I could easily work 12-14 hours a day at my computer right now, but that is quickly becoming counterproductive.  Tomorrow I am driving into town to have lunch with a good friend.

I started my lesson by telling my instructor that I’ve been in a training funk, and a funk in general, for the last several days.  She spent the next 45 minutes problems solving with me.  We didn’t even get Hannah out of her crate until I only had 10 minutes left of the lesson!  But it was a very good session.  I discussed my frustrations with Hannah, and she theorized ways I could fix them.  We talked about learning theory, and how to reduce latency (the time gap between when you ask a dog to do something, and when the dog actually does it – my biggest challenge with Hannah).

In part I need to get on top of Hannah in areas other than training.  As I mentioned yesterday, she’s likely to blow me off for several seconds – or longer – when I call her to me.  She often acts like she thinks rules don’t apply to her.  While this may not be a big deal around the house, it sure is a problem when working stock.  To fix this, I need to let her know this is not acceptable.  This means withholding reward if she isn’t fast enough: you pick a time line, say 3 seconds, count to three and if the dog hasn’t listened then it doesn’t get rewarded, even if it does what you asked on the 4th second.  When what she is doing is self-rewarding – for example, sniffing about the garden – you take that away from her.  I’m to walk over, slip a leash around her neck, and march her into the house.  Better yet, put her straight into a crate.  Positive, my instructor reminded me, is not permissive.

On sheep this is going to be trickier, but it should work.  This winter I put pace back on Hannah by simply calling her off sheep when she wouldn’t listen when I asked her to slow down.  I will need to go back to that.  It only took a couple of times for her to smarten up and pay attention.  The difference was so dramatic that it was clear to me that she really was blowing me off.  Brat.

Regarding whistles, my instructor insisted that I need to keep pairing voice and whistle commands (whistle first, followed by voice) to really solidify her cues.  I find that Hannah just tunes out the new cue, but my instructor suggested trying to do this away from sheep.  Like on a basket ball.  Sounds ridiculous, I know, but Hannah will actually flank around a basket ball.  Perhaps I can get her to listen to my whistles this way.  Certainly I can’t see how it could hurt.  I’ll likely give this a try this evening.

I was also given a list of recommended books on learning theory, which I am going to start reading.  I also need to watch the new Derek Scrimgeour DVD that a good friend sent me a few weeks ago.  The more new ideas I have, the better able I will be to fix the problems we are facing in training right now.  The biggest right now, however, is my morale!

I am interested in learning more about learning theory, but I have to say I have some trepidation around the extreme worship of Behaviourism that I see in the dog training world.  While training methods based on behaviourist beliefs work on both dogs and humans, this school has been largely rejected as a comprehensive way of explaining, understanding and predicting human behaviour.  I would argue the same is true for dogs.  I am currently reading The Culture Clash, wherein author Jean Donaldson offers two understandings of dogs: 1) that they are like little humans, and think and behave like we do; and 2) they are a black box that respond to stimulus with behaviour.  Donaldson tells us to face up to reality: the black box model is the correct one.

In my opinion dogs lie somewhere in between, likely a lot closer to the human end of the spectrum than most people would like to accept.  They are smart, and they don’t necessarily have to be taught like machines.  The step by step methods presented in most dog training books are not necessarily needed because that’s the only way dogs learn, but rather because that’s the most straight forward way for us to communicate what we want.  But a dog like Hannah can extrapolate very, very quickly.  In part some of her issues I am sure come from being bored as she waits for me to figure things out and learn the next step to teach her.  We discussed this as well, and ways I can liven things up.  Apparently even doing something simple like throwing toys around that she must ignore will heighten focus and thus attention and response.

We didn’t get around to working with Kess as the next student was already waiting by the end of our lesson.  I’m going to do some work with her this evening here at home. And with the others.  The little bit of brain work I did with them the other night made them so happy I couldn’t believe it.  I need to do this kind of training more often.  Oh how I wish there were more hours in the day!  Or less work to be done during them.  I am going to try really, really hard to take one day off this week – Sunday – because I am definitely burning out.  And I’ve only just begun the crazy year I have ahead of me.

Tonight is no exception.

After dragging myself out of bed this morning, and letting the fog clear from my brain, I took the dogs for a nice hike in the conservation area.  I was feeling pretty low energy, and surprisingly so were the dogs.  I expected them to be quite wild after their weekend of doing nothing, but no, they were pretty calm.  They have been getting a lot of regular exercise these days, and even Kess is almost two now.  So perhaps they are all mellowing nicely.  Also it was overcast with storms rolling in. I find these low pressure days make us all rather low key.

Speaking of Kess mellowing, she’s been becoming more interactive with me lately.  The last two nights in a row she’s asked to come up on the bed, and once there has slept all night in the spot I allocate to her.  This is very unusual, as she typically sleeps in a crate (her choice).  She’s also been coming over to me for cuddles and otherwise showing more affection and attention.  I am, of course, encouraging this as much as possible.

I also mentioned a while back that I saw some tension between Kess & the other girls.  That seems to have just been a hormonal thing while they were in heat.  I am seeing none of that anymore.  Fingers crossed it stays that way.

I worked all afternoon and then took the dogs to the farm this evening to train.  I probably shouldn’t have gone as I was still feeling rather low energy.  And by the end of training I was feeling emotionally low too.  Tonight was one of those nights were I wondered what the heck I am doing.  Am I ever going to get good at this endeavour?   They say it takes 10 years to be a really good handler, but is that with, or without owning your own sheep?  For tonight I felt like it’s going to take me a hundred years, not ten.  Despite all my effort, my dogs simply are not running very well.

The problem, of course, is that I am starting to prepare for this trial in mid-July.  For a trial I need precision and dogs who listen to me.  I, unfortunately, seem to have neither.  And tonight I was getting pretty tired of it.

I started with Hannah as she got short changed when we worked on Friday and ran out of sheep and light.  I decided not to train in the big field as the pasture is almost up to my knees and makes working already reluctant sheep even more difficult.  Instead I took a small group into the back pasture where the main flock is kept.  That grass is already shorter, and part of it had been cut over the weekend.  So I used Hannah to round up the main flock and put it in the barnyard, and then (after coaxing the llama to also go into the barnyard) brought out a small working group to train with.

We pushed the sheep into the back field and then I started doing a few outruns.  I can’t even remember what my focus was with Hannah tonight.  I try to have one thing in particular that I am working on with each dog, which I decide before I go to the field.  I think I just wanted to see if Hannah would listen to me.

She didn’t.

I mean, she works just fine, but there’s always a few second delay between when I ask her to do something, and when she does it.  This is Hannah though and through.  She does this at home when out in the yard.  I call her to come in, and she continues to sniff about and take her sweet time before she comes.  The other dogs are all in the house and then she looks up and wanders over to me.  I have to get after her to get any kind of quick response.  I am sick of this.  Tonight, in particular, I was fed up with that behaviour.  Being tired and cranky didn’t help.

To fix this I find myself putting her through drills, which she finds immensely boring and useless.  It doesn’t help that the sheep are very, very dog broke and extremely pokey.  No excitement here at all. So my bored dog does her job half asleep, eating a little grass along the way, or sniffing some sheep manure.  She’s bored, I’m bored.  Not a good combination.

I put her away and brought out Mira.

Mira was working fairly well tonight, but it has become very clear that she won’t take her flanks at any distance from me.  So I worked on getting her to flank with me just a little farther away than usual, but still close enough to insist.  I also worked on having her come around off-balance and stopping in places she doesn’t expect.  She, like Hannah, anticipates too much and then ignores what I ask in favour of doing what she’s used to doing.

I think with Hannah, and to a lesser extent with Mira, I have created a lot of the problems I am dealing with because I stayed too long at one stage – specifically wearing – and entrenched that behaviour to the point that the dogs default to it unless I practically stand on them.  I knew this was a problem at the time, but I didn’t know how do go to the next level.  I now know a bit more and am able to move Kess along more quickly.  Hopefully I can avoid some of these problems.  Of course I will create (and have already created) others.

With Kess I worked on getting an outrun.   I kept them very short – about 30-50 feet – and sent her from each side several times.  Some were looking not too bad, others were pretty terrible.  Half the time she goes out slowly and comes almost to a stop when she draws even with the sheep.  Then she walks straight at them, pushing them sideways.  So not what I want!  Perhaps I need to bring the whip out to put a little pressure from a greater distance.

I came away very frustrated in general and wondering if I should indeed sign up for this trial.  Will it just be a waste of money?  Is trying to compete spoiling my enjoyment of training?  But without the goal of a trial, what will get me to work through these issues?  I don’t know.  It hasn’t been a great day on the morale front.  I had best just go to bed and try again tomorrow.  Agility in the morning should cheer me up.  As long as I’m not late…

When I finally fully woke up, I took the dogs out back and ate my breakfast and did some reading.  I love that the landlord still hasn’t cut the grass on most of the property because that gives me a nearly four foot privacy barrier around the area that I have kept short.  This means I can wander out in my pj’s and enjoy my breakfast or doing a little yoga, without the neighbours being able to see me.  The landlord will eventually cut the grass, but I’m quite enjoying for the moment.  And I’m hoping he’ll put what energy and time he has for this house into fixing the leaking roof first.

I didn’t do anything with the dogs yesterday, and you can really tell the difference today.  When they are well exercised and mentally tired, I can get up and walk about the house without them stirring.  Today they leap to their feet and follow me where ever I go.  Cute, but annoying.  Nothing’s going on guys!  I keep telling them, but they are eternally hopeful.

I may take them for a hike this evening as I expect the conservation area to be pretty quiet by then, but we’re into full summer here now and there are just too many people about for me to go to our favourite hiking area on the weekends.  The chances of quite a few people being there are high enough that I don’t want to waste my time driving there only to turn around.  Or to have to walk them on-leash.  It won’t kill them to have Saturdays as down-time days.  We don’t usually train on the weekends either because that’s when the farm holds their lessons, and I don’t want to get in the way or tire the sheep they use for their classes.

I will likely do some agility training with them in the yard today, however, as we have a lesson again on Tuesday.  I’m determined to get Hannah trialing by fall, and my instructor is helping us accomplish this.  That means pushing us forward a bit faster, which in turn requires us to take lessons a little more frequently.  Twice a month isn’t quite cutting it.  So we’re going every week for a few weeks to see if we can make more progress.

In agility I am now working with Hannah to get her doing full contact equipment at last.  We’re still putting the final polish on her contacts, but we’ve also started her on the teeter and the A-frame.  She’s doing 12 poles very consistently and with increasing speed, so I expect she’ll be ready to compete in a starters class by early September.

I’ve made some progress with Kess in agility as well.  She gets very excited when we go to class because she is still quite stimulated around other people, but she does seem to be finally settling a bit.  I stopped using the clicker, and I think that helps. The click seemed to rev her up too much.  For stationary behaviour (we’re having to do all the same things that I’ve been doing with Hannah around contact equipment, which entails a lot of standing still and doing nose touches) I need to keep things pretty quiet with her.  Even with jumping I’ll need to stay low key as she gets pretty wound up and will send bars a-flyin’.

I can’t say that I am very motivated to do agility these days.  I’m not sure why not, other than my heart really is in herding.  But I do like doing the agility training.  I think it’s because I’m feeling rather low energy – still – after all my travels.  Plus my days are so very full.  In addition to writing and preparing my courses for fall, and cooking and putting food by for winter, and training & exercising the dogs, I’m still finishing off setting up my house and rearranging things since my roommate moved out.  I thought that would be a small job, but it’s taking several weeks!  I have friends and family coming to stay for most of the month of July, so things need to be tidy and the extra bedrooms need to be functional.

This morning I spent two hours sorting out my closets.  I think that’s pretty much set now, at last.  There are still several piles in my bedroom and living room to finish organizing.  Plus a bunch of the landlord’s stuff to box up and put into the one room he has kept for his storage.  I try to do these types of jobs while talking on the phone as otherwise they’re just too boring for me to get through them.  I have a couple of ‘phone dates’ with long-distance friends this week, and will hopefully finish up these remaining tasks.

Tomorrow I need to mail out my trial entries as one of them closes this week.  I feel like it just opened for entries, but that was nearly three weeks ago.  My goodness how time flies.  In a few days it will be July and my summer will be half over.  Yet I have barely scratched the surface of all the things I need to do.  I’m trying not to panic and just take every day as it comes, working on what I can do in small, daily pieces.  Speaking of which, I’d best either go train the dogs, or get back to some work.

I took the dogs out to train last night in hopes of making up my mind.  The owner of the farm had offered to hold sheep for me so I could do some outruns in the big pasture field.  We’ve never trained there (and I don’t think the owners have either) as it was used for growing cash crops for the last few years.  This year it is to be fenced for the sheep.  Now that he has 400 of them, he needs more space.  And he’s planning on growing the flock further.  I’m excited about this as it will give me and the dogs great experience.  I think he’s hoping to get up to 7-800 head once the fencing is done.

I first did some work with Mira in the small fenced field.  The problem I have with her is that she doesn’t always take her flanks, and when she does, she often slices them and bumps the sheep.  By this I mean that when I send her to the left or the right, she is supposed to turn almost 90 degrees, then go around them on an arc, keeping the same distance that she started at.  Instead, she comes in at about 45 degrees (called slicing) and closes the distance between herself and the sheep.  As a result, the sheep move forward to get away from her.  Because of this, while we can get around a course, penning is all but impossible.  As I try to maneuver her to the right point to drive the sheep into the pen, she keeps pushing them forward.  Once past the opening, they whip around the back and then there’s no catching them.

To fix this, I’ve been working on squaring off Mira’s flanks (i.e. making them as close to a 90 degree turn as I can) and on getting her to listen more reliably for the last few weeks.   This is the sort of thing a trial is good for – it pushes me to work on these things that I could otherwise let slide.  For farm work I could just not use Mira, for example, or only use her for the things I know she can do.  To trial her, I need to polish the rough spots, of which she has many (as do I).

Last night Mira was really showing a lot of apprehension while working.  She is now afraid of my stock stick, and is constantly looking up at me for reassurance.  If she’s facing away from me, she’ll turn to look at me if I raise my voice.  For example I sent her to the left but she went right.  I laid her down and tried to send her left again.  She went right.  I laid her down and started to walk to a position where I could put some pressure on her to go left.  She turned and watched me, then ran over to me.  She turns off stock so easily right now that it is really almost impossible to get her to work.  All because I’m trying to fix some of her rough edges.  Despite being as encouraging as possible, she still gets totally stressed out from the pressure of being told she’s wrong.  At 3.5 years of age, she should be able to take it by now.  But Mira is Mira, and there’s not much I can do about it.

I came away wondering if I should trial her at all.  Is it going to be too much stress on her?  Do I need to do this?  This is my goal, not hers, so is putting all this pressure on her fair?  But if I don’t keep pushing her forward with her training, then there’s no point going on.  She doesn’t really know enough to even be a useful chore dog, so if I don’t keep going forward, I might as well quit working her altogether.  And she does love to work.  Or she at least seems keen to do so every time I take her to stock.

I think I will sign her up for the trial and see how it goes.  If she hates it, I won’t do it again.  In the meantime, I am going to back off the precision training for a few sessions and see if I can build up her confidence again.  She was working better before.  When she is doing what she knows how to do, she can be quite good.  She just crumbles if she’s unsure of what’s expected of her.  And I simply can’t figure out a gentler way of teaching her than I am already doing.  Going to others for help doesn’t work because I have yet to meet an open handler who would bother with such a dog.  Most rely on a dog being able to take pressure, and if they can’t, the dog goes to a pet or agility home.  But Mira is already in a pet home (really, that’s what I am), so we’ll muddle along with fingers crossed.

Next I worked Kess.  At this point the owner of the farm was free and so he took his dog and three sheep into the big pasture field.  There is a very fast road at one end of the field and I wanted to see what the sheep would do with him there to manage it, before I tried this myself.  I don’t think I have much to worry about.  The barn is half way up the field, and the sheep are intensely keen to get back to it.  I highly doubt they’d run several hundred feet in a direction they’ve never gone in before, in a field they’ve never been in, and end up in the road.  But it was good to see that this was in fact the case with the owner there to back up any potential escapees.

He held the sheep and I sent Kess on a small outrun, about a third the distance she would need to go in a trial.  She went straight at the sheep.  Darn it.  I laid her down and walked towards her.  She immediately kicked out and started again, this time in an arc.  The training I have been doing is definitely helping – Kevin had shown me how to get an outrun started and work on squaring off her flanks and getting a nice shape to her sides.  She’s definitely doing this well, but when I tried to put it into an outrun from my feet, it feel apart again.  I am not surprised, and I know that with more gradual work we’ll get there.  But the question remains – will she have an outrun in three weeks?

After yesterday, I am leaning towards thinking not.

The other problem is that she simply was not listening at a distance.  With me about 50 feet away, she went back to working on instinct and not on my commands. This is also not surprising.  We made a big jump last night, and now I know quite clearly that it was too much, too fast.  I’m not concerned about this at all.  We’ll go back to where we had been and keep working at gradually increasing the distance.  I think we’re done working in that small field, and now that I am confident that the sheep will be safe if I work in the unfenced field, we’ll have plenty of room to stretch out.  But I don’t know that I’ll get her stretched out to working at 150 feet from me in three weeks.  If I could train every day, maybe.  But we can’t.  Three to four times a week is our maximum.

As such, I think I am going to sign Hannah up for PN, and Mira up for NN, and leave Kess for now.  While she’s definitely going to be my stronger dog, there’s no point putting her in over her head.  If, come trial time, I think she might be able to do it, I’ll ask if they can squeeze her in at the last minute.  NN is usually a very small class and when I trialed two years ago, they seemed happy to have additional dogs.  I don’t expect much has changed.  Otherwise there’s the fall trials.  And Kess is exciting enough to train that I don’t need to dangle a trial date in front of me to keep working with her.

As for Hannah, she only got to do one outrun before we lost the sheep back to the barn.  The owner’s dog had been holding sheep for me for some time and was getting tired.  The sheep managed to get past him, bolted, and went over the fence.  By then it was getting dark and we figured there was no point continuing to train.  The sheep would be a bit worried at the best of times about being in small groups in a new field, let along at dusk when coyotes would be coming out.  I’ll go back on Monday and try again.