A Herding Road Trip

I find it so amusing that I’ve had such incredibly good luck with weather and herding … until this week. And I’m talking for like over a year I kept missing the really hot or the really cold or the really rainy. My least favorite weather is heavy rain with wind – so unpleasant, and that’s what we got this weekend! Thankfully, not the whole time, but not the weather you would expect from Central Oregon. All my raingear I had gotten for herding FINALLY got a test drive, and, yes, it keeps you dry!

This was perhaps not that much of a roadtrip, but I don’t travel much and while I have lived in Oregon for 24 years (damn, time flies!), I have actually never been to Central Oregon. So that was part of the appeal, it’s fun to go someplace new and Central Oregon is very different than the valley. Reminds me a lot of Colorado, the wide open spaces and tiny trees. Very pretty in its own way, though the wrong color of green (sage instead of emerald!). There were some absolutely lovely skies over the weekend, without trees they do seem huge and the cloud formations were amazing.

Haku and Navarre are great travelers, making themselves at home wherever we are. They are such good dogs and they thought our trip was great, being very patient with a lot of downtime as well. And, of course, not minding being wet and dirty at all. Great company, fun dogs, that was also part of the appeal – just hanging out for the weekend.

As for the herding, I was hoping to get an overall feel for how Karen Child worked with dogs from beginners to more advanced. While I had worked with her like 9 years ago, I don’t really remember much about the couple lessons we had. Without access to sheep back then it was pretty immaterial. So, yes, got to see her work with a variety of dogs, mostly more beginners than advanced, in a variety of situations.

My big question was whether she used the same correction based system as I have been presented with, and, yeah, it was. Which was not surprising, and obviously every trainer is different and has their own system of what works for them. Karen actually came from competitive obedience before herding, and it showed in her corrections started with long lines and collar pops and pushing the dog into a down to teach them to down. She had to find a collar to put on Navarre to give him collar pops, since my dogs don’t wear any. Still, it was a lot of the fine art of yelling ‘hey’ at your dog, which is just herding in a nutshell. And obviously pressure and release and the reward being able to work the sheep, which is what herding really is.

I liked her games/exercises she presented – which is breaking herding down and working on the individual pieces rather than trying to lump everything together. There is a ton of lumping in herding, and I do always just want to stop and break it down and focus on getting the pieces right rather than trying to blunder through. We looked at ‘Double Wraps’ and their progression, ‘Top End’ exercises smoothing out outruns and lifts, and exercises for leaving cleanly on their outruns. Also some offbalance flank exercises as well. They were helpful and I enjoy breaking things down like that.

Karen is very much into being consistent, and I liked her common sense statement, “Dogs do best at what they practice” – and if they keep practicing the wrong things, obviously that’s what they’re going to do. So setting the dog up be correct every time, so they’re not practicing the unwanted behaviors. She is very much into obedience around sheep and spends a lot of time working on initial approaches as she thinks the first 30 seconds of a run/practice are the most important. She doesn’t think dogs should fail more than twice before you make it easier/more obvious what you want or break it down into an easier exercise.

As for my dogs, I had no particular goals with them for the clinic, I don’t think there is really enough time to make much progress in this sort of setting. Especially as I split my working time between the two dogs, Haku worked mornings, Navarre worked afternoons.

With Haku we worked once in the fenced arena and once out in her big open field with no fences. What she saw was she felt like Haku was coming in too fast (not surprising!), so we worked on first yelling ‘hey’ at him until he stopped that, and then trying to use ‘lie’ as a ‘steady’ cue instead of ‘lie down’ and stopping him completely. Haku didn’t get that one, he would just lie down every time. Then we got into how Karen does not think ‘lie down’ means ‘lie down until released’, but the dog should be able to get up whenever they feel like they should after that. This … doesn’t gel with me. But I’m game, I gave it a try but it found it hugely inconsistent as while she SAID that the dog isn’t supposed to stay there until given another cue, she corrected dogs all weekend long for getting up out of downs unsolicited. So that seems pretty unfair to the dogs to have that kind of random criteria, and frustrating for the handler – sometimes you really NEED them to stay, and chanting ‘lie down lie down lie down lie down’ while you’re trying to do something else seems hugely inconvenient to me. So I’m not sold on that concept, but I’m going to put it away for further study.

Out in the big field we worked on ‘driving to infinity’ and just letting him pick the line and then worked on keeping him on his feet and holding with his eye and not his motion. This was a good exercise for him and I’m glad we had a chance to do it in a new place with new sheep, he thought it was very fun. And did I mention how easy he is? And perfect? Because he is. He also is doing much better at lying down at the top of his outruns then he used to be.

As for Navarre, we just worked in the fenced arena as I was less concerned about the herding part as I was looking for advice to work with him without getting frustrated. And I think as he really wasn’t showing much in the realm of actual skills, she had the impression he was a tiny baby that hadn’t done much. People seem to think that a lot about him. And I’m not saying he’s not a young, inexperienced dog – but he does actually have quite a bit of mileage and skills on him at this point, at least more than a total baby dog. And maybe I should go out every session with the assumption that he knows absolutely nothing, I think I’d be much less frustrated.

So, yeah, I didn’t feel like I got a lot ideas to help with our communication other than, “Stop getting frustrated and be nicer to him,” which is not bad advice, but doesn’t help with him trying to constantly herd through me and not really responding to pressure (or anything else) from me. I still have to walk all the way into him and call him completely off the sheep to get him to lie down, which just seems silly at this point. Then we looked at some flanking where he was too close and too tight and me putting pressure on him didn’t make any difference at all. So, as usual, at the end of that it just seems like we made zero progress. He is better about lying down though, since we’ve been working our herding plan, and I am better at using my calming inside voice (sometimes).

I will try the short exercises that she presented with Navarre when we get a chance to practice, I think that should give us something to do where hopefully I’ll have a plan and a response when things go wrong. But I don’t have any burning ambitions to get working with him and sheep, that’s for sure!

However, it remains really fun with Haku, and it makes him so happy. He did some hard running and big outruns at the clinic and seems to be holding up okay. I didn’t give any metacam and we didn’t do our normal exercises and stretching over the weekend. Knock on wood, he seems to be okay tonight. He’s not perfect, but nothing like he was. So it gives me tentative hope that we can do some trials, as this was more than he’d do at a trial and seems okay. There is a USBCHA trial up at Fido’s in May, was considering entering him in Pro-Novice because, hey, why not? We’re not doing much herding between now and then, but he can theoretically do it. We shall see …

Meanwhile, back at home it sounds like Bright had a fabulous time with my mom and was very happy to see me and the boys, just love that girl. Of the cats, apparently Dragon missed me the most. Go figure.

We don’t have much herding on the schedule at the moment (other than Haku’s AKC trial), going to continue to take it easy with Haku and hope he continues to improve. If he does we’ll get back to some practicing and actually thinking about training things like shedding.

Meanwhile, our next big project is getting Navarre ready for his obedience debut. We did an impromptu group stay practice today – and he just kept sitting pretty again. Yeah, need to fix that in the next couple weeks! Now that we’re done with our herding adventures for a while, I finally feel ready to focus on it.

In other news, Figgy is looking for a new home – she was the little red merle puppy I raised last year. Apparently she was being a bitch to the other girl in the household (who just happens to be Bright’s sister!), so she blew her chance for a good home. So that’s a bummer, but other than the bitchiness she sounds like she’s doing well, has a nice foundation in agility and is looking for a home that can handle her and all her girly attitude.