Cramming for the Trial

Not herding every day did not magically fix Haku’s latest issues, unfortunately. We did some shorter outruns on his first practice back, still too fast – then we argued about a down, after which the sheep are off in space so we tried to fix that. After that he wasn’t flanking when I asked, and then flanking when I didn’t ask on his drives and basically not being at all helpful. Some days it just seems so much harder than it needs to be, then, sometimes, magically he’ll sort of snap into a good dog and suddenly everything that was stupidly hard is now easy. But not nearly as much as I’d like.

Our homework continues to be getting Haku to ‘believe me’. Believe that I mean what I say, and also believe that if he does what I ask I know what I’m doing. At the moment, I just want a down at a far distance. I did introduce a stop whistle, he can do it in the agility arena. It’s not really the sound I was going for, but it’s what comes out. I can do better once I ‘warm up’, but I quickly found that trying to get the whistle in my mouth correctly and make the sound right away is a whole other issue. I figure it doesn’t matter, right now any sort of whistle and he lies down. Whether we get to other whistles is a challenge for another time. Next step, seeing I can get the same behavior around sheep. I’m guessing we’ll be starting over at that point.

Navarre continues to be a little show off, he continues to do well with Ian and the experienced herding people continue to be impressed with how much pressure he can handle. He only made it this far because of that fact, he’s definitely proven that this is what he’d rather be doing than anything else. And at least with Ian and Dave, he does look good and is being so thoughtful. Mostly.

We also did a bit of agility this week, some fun either/or exercises and backside of tunnel commitment. Now Bright is the most happy doing agility again, but Navarre enjoyed being back as well. Also worked a bit at getting back into some obedience practice, very pleased with Navarre, he looks good with it all. He even did some fast heeling without breaking out into a spastic gallop. A bit slow on his drop on recall, but that seems to be his down in general. That butt always wants to stay up … The premium for the April trials is already available, I think that will be his obedience debut – exciting!

I continue to try to cram for the herding trial next weekend with Haku, we’re sticking to Ranch and we definitely don’t need to be doing a trial at all right now, but, hey, life is short. Went out to Heidi’s to work on introducing the stop whistle on sheep with the baby doll sheep. We haven’t seen them for a while as we’ve spent all our time working in bigger fields this winter. The baby dolls have gained confidence! They were giving Haku the finger, stomping at him and then just splitting off in three directions. And this was probably Problem #1, as we had just a terrible practice all around. Of course, all I really wanted to do was introduce the damn whistle, but we couldn’t do ANYTHING.

Haku and I are definitely in a Phase at the moment, I’ve had almost 10 years of working with Haku – I know how he learns. Unfortunately, it’s rarely even remotely linear – and most definitely can’t be rushed. We are currently in the Haku Learning Phase: ‘Never Seen These Behaviors Before’ that happens after we introduce new things. Couldn’t move sheep, couldn’t do any flanks correctly, didn’t want to lie down, kept shutting the sheep down on his drive – it was just kind of a disaster. And this was not with any distance, this was mostly with me RIGHT THERE.

So, talked to Ian and part of it was that I WAS moving around too much, apparently. I was trying to ‘help’ by walking behind him as he was driving, by moving around to make things easier, to help move the sheep – Ian says I’m just annoying Haku and I need to stand still and let him do his job.

Meanwhile, Navarre continues to show off – he was doing such nice work with Ian! I feel a little better that he’s still shit with me though. We had our regular trainwreck check in session, where I immediately get tense, frantic and shrill. Shockingly, this does not transfer to good work. And I have to use totally different commands with Navarre now, which is not easy. I can’t just tell him, “Away”, as apparently I say it like two separate words. I need to say it like a have Scottish accent, “eh-wheee!” Which just makes me laugh every time I do it. And then, yeah, ‘Comebye’ is such a silly command, I’ll get used that someday. But not today, Navarre is still not my problem for a while.

Still, today we learned that to get Navarre to listen to me I need to be calm and ask for everything with the right accent, in a calm, normal voice – unless I’m yelling, ‘hey!’, of course. Mostly it just feels like he’s rushing everything so I just want to yell, “CALM THE HELL DOWN!” Which is not a herding command, unfortunately. Maybe someday I’ll be a good enough handler for Navarre – but not today. Back to Haku, much more my speed.

Oh, and I let Bright come spectate at herding, so she would feel included. At one point where I thought Ian was going to work Navarre I ended up with Bright and Navarre in the arena with the sheep while we were working, with the assumption she would immediately slip out the gate as soon as she saw sheep coming for her. But New and Improved Bright actually just went in a down at my feet and got all in my way instead, not . Still, what improvement from the past 7 years – she used to just go cower by the fence and refuse to go anywhere near sheep. Bright is feeling braver recently, sometimes in a kind of annoying way – she’s getting nippy with other dogs when over excited and not listening and basically being really, really happy. Love my Brightness.

Finally this week, we dared to practice out in the big field at Mollala, and thankfully didn’t lose any sheep. In fact things went suspiciously well at first, with Haku taking his down whistle on his outruns right from the start, driving without turning the sheep, not running the sheep down the field – I was pleasantly surprised. Well, until that all ended and we turned into a total trainwreck. Continually crossed over every time I sent him, wouldn’t lie down, turned the sheep back to me on the drive and, eventually, didn’t even lift the sheep on his outrun. Hm.

So, yeah, I’m not imagining it – I have two herding dogs in Haku at the moment, the Good Haku and the Bad Haku .He can change from one to other basically in an instant, and I’m not sure why. Things that probably help, I was very calm and relaxed when we started, quiet, ready to fix things. At the end I was shouting, constantly fixing things, frustrated and not at all relaxed in any way. I can certainly imagine which Heather I’d rather work with. We were also working for a while, he may have gotten tired – though we have had it go other way, that he got better at the end of a session when he was ‘tired’. Certainly I think the more time sheep spend with Haku, the more time they have to realize that he’s a total pushover.

So today was equal parts encouraging and discouraging. It’s really fun when we’re working together and we can do things easily. It’s not at all fun when I feel like I have to stop and fix everything that Haku does. There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of in-between at the moment.

So, yeah, we have two more practices between now and his trial next weekend – his ‘official’ graduation from our Winter of Herding. I’d like to be able to do what I know we can, which isn’t super great, but we’ve worked hard on it. There’s a good chance Good Haku may not show up for the trial though, so we’ll see. We will keep working on it, I’ll try to do better, which will hopefully help Haku to do better. All part of the journey.