THE OTHER END OF THE LEASH

Today, it’s all about the farm. I had a blog written about the effect of acoustic environments on us and our dogs, some new products available for us to use to calm our dogs, and some new results of “calming” music that Katie and I have seen with our dogs. And then I erased it all with one key stroke. I’m sure that has never happened to you….

So I’ll save that topic for later (and promise to catch up in the next month or so on other topics I’ve promised you, like exercises to calm the sympathetic nervous system, and the methods of the clicker versus no-clicker study ). Right now I have to get home to the dogs and work on the talk that Karen London and I are giving at the Interdisciplinary Forum on Applied Animal Behavior next week in Phoenix. So here’s the second half of the blog, which I somehow magically managed not to erase:

BEST. NEWS. EVER. Willie worked long and hard in an unplanned emergency sheep herding session at the UW Stock Pavilion last Tuesday, and he came out of it none the worse for wear. I’d been easing him back into herding with 3-4 minute sessions and easy work, but had to quit 2 weeks ago when I sprained my Achilles tendon and couldn’t get up my own hill to work sheep. I tried to find friends to help with the sheepdog demonstration I do for my University of  Wisconsin class (“The Biology and Philosophy of Human/Animal Relationships”) but none could bring their own dogs. So I planned to do a shorter than usual demonstration with Willie to ensure that I wouldn’t set back a year’s investment in getting him sound again.

Everything went according to plan (famous last words) until it was time to put the sheep back in the truck. There’s no loading ramp, so this is not the easiest of maneuvers. You have to get the sheep right up to the truck bed while preventing them from going under the truck or squirting out the sides. A good number of students stayed to help, but I had put Willie in the truck to protect him from over-using his shoulder.

Long story short: After loading 2 of the larger ewes into the truck (not so easy without Willie to help), Rosebud and her lamb Oreo escaped between the fencing and the truck. Oh shoot. No way could we get her back without Willie, so I let him out and we set to work again. Even with him working hard, it wasn’t easy; Rosebud had little interest in coming back toward the truck and the students surrounding it. But finally we got her in the truck (I say “we” in the sense of nurses saying “It’s time for us to take our medicine again” — Jim and some very helpful students hefted her into the truck while I and my stupid ankle stood by uselessly). Whew, okay. Four down, one to go.

Now the only sheep left outside of the truck was Oreo, who promptly jumped the fence like a Dutch Warm Blood. And now I had a single, panicked ewe lamb in a dirt arena surrounded by cement bleachers. Not good. Single sheep are so frightened they are unmanageable; and it was clear that Oreo was considering a Mission Impossible suicide run up into the bleachers. I once watched a demonstration in which a single, panicked ewe died when she ran herself into a cement wall and broke her neck. Not a good image, but a good reminder to never, ever, ever try to work a single sheep who is truly panicked. Leave it alone, and go get the rest of the flock to pick her up like velcro.

With that in mind, Willie and I managed to cut off Oreo’s consideration of a Tom Cruise like escape, and keep her on solid ground.  Once we had her stopped, I yelled to Jim and others to “Let Rosebud out of the truck.” Believe me, “Let Rosebud out of the truck” is a figure of speech. At this point Rosebud had no interest in leaving the rest of the flock, so after the understandably stunned reaction of “You want us to WHAT?”, Jim lept into the truck and pushed poor Rosebud back out. As expected, Oreo ran right to mom, and calmed down considerably. But it took a tremendous effort from Willie, who was then joined by Jim and students to get the two back toward the truck and back inside.

The entire time my heart was in my throat. If a sheep was badly injured or killed I’d probably never do the demo again, and the students tell me it’s a highlight of the course. I’d never forgive myself if a student was injured. But Willie? Willie was cutting right, cutting left, working like a quarter horse to keep Rosebud & Oreo coming toward the truck. They’d dash one way and he’d have to counter, none of the rest of us was fast enough to stop her. It seemed to go on and on… was all this work going to set him back? Once we finally got everyone loaded, I drove home with my stomach twisted into knots.

Willie, on the other hand, sat in his crate on the way home with what I can only describe as a face radiating joy. His tongue stayed bright red for an hour after we got home, but his happy, happy face stayed on all night long. And I won’t say all that hard work didn’t affect his shoulder: he was reluctant to do his stretching exercises that night. But no limp, no favoring, no hiking of his shoulder, and the next day he stretched his leg out like a gymnast. He looks great, strong and sound, and he’s never looked happier.

I’ve got my dog back. My dog has his life back. Happy Dance.

Here’s a photo that shows Willie and the Stock Pavilion. Class hadn’t started yet, Willie and I were putting the sheep into the pen for safe keeping.

The truck is out of sight to your right. When we went to load them up Jim backed the truck up to the pen’s opening. The fence that Oreo lept over was the back of the pen. She ran to the other side of the arena, and stood on the right, eyeing a break in the railing that led up to the bleachers. The railings weren’t a barrier anyway, she easily could have gone under them.

Here’s the group during the demonstration: Rosebud is in the front, and her ewe lamb Oreo is the pinto in the middle, with the black forequarters and white hind. I’m thankful that they all seem none the worse for wear as well. They are all due to lamb at the end of March and early April, so I’m especially glad that they seem to be doing well once home and settled at the farm.

A reader asked for an update about Will and Sushi, so I thought it was time to fill you in on how it is going. I’m happy to report that things are going extremely well. (Whew!) The entire story would be a chapter in a book (and probably will be!), but here’s the summary:

Problem: Willie stalking Sushi the cat. As I said in earlier posts, this is very different from “chasing the cat.” Cat chasing can be a serious problem, don’t get me wrong, especially if it is predatory and not initially motivated by play, but “strong-eyed” herding dogs who automatically go into a stalking posture around a cat are a real challenge. Using positive reinforcement for, say, looking at the cat and then turning to look at me for a treat or a toy wasn’t working.

The primary problem is that once a strong-eyed dog makes visual contact with an animal it sees as something to be herded, it is extremely hard for the dog not to begin stalking. I’ve read so many books that describe Border collies as “mesmerizing their prey” with their intense stare, but in truth it’s the exact opposite. It’s the dog that goes into a trance.

Super “strong-eyed” dogs are not favored by the top handlers, because they literally become “stuck” once they make contact with the sheep. They just stop moving altogether and stand like statues while you whistle yourself silly trying to get them to move. I’ve worked on that with Willie, having been encouraged by Alisdair McRae  to keep Willie moving and simply not let him stop or lie down for months and months during his early training. (I used to call Alisdair the “Tiger Woods of Herding” but it no longer seems like the compliment it is meant to be!) Willie still can get stuck sometimes, but it doesn’t happen very often at the farm and I’m grateful for the advice that Alisdair gave me early on.

But that strong-eyed predisposition made working with him and Sushi especially difficult. All the techniques you would use (and I did use to cure  him of bark/lunging at other dogs) don’t work in this situation. Teaching him to look at the cat on cue made things worse, and teaching him to get a toy as soon as he saw the cat didn’t work either. Once he saw the cat, he was lost in stalking-land. I tried telling him to lie down every time he saw the cat, but that just kept him in herding mode. (You can read more about what I’ve worked on in Willie & Sushi Part II, 12/9/2009).

We made big strides when I switched to asking for a Sit rather than a Lie Down (not a posture a herding dog takes when working, unless they are a tad confused). Once he had sat down, I reinforced him with play. That helped a great deal. But the next break through was serendipitous: I sent Sushi to a boarding kennel for a few days when a cat-allergic house guest came to visit. Sushi was gone for 3 days, and when she returned I made a decision to use (cover your ears here if you believe in 100% positive reinforcement and consider even mildest of punishments a sin) positive punishment when he focused on Sushi. Three times I threw something soft in between him and Sushi when he lowered his head toward her (twice it was my bait bag full of treats!), then we ran in the living room and played with his toys. Ever since he has been great. I think the combination of the work we’ve done before, the break from having Sushi in the house and starting over anew by stopping the behavior before it could start again was the key.

Granted, it  doesn’t hurt have a puppy to play with to keep his attention off the cat, but the problem was handled before the puppy came. Willie still focuses on Sushi if he sees her in the window, but as soon as she comes in he turns away from her and grabs a toy. GOOD BOY!!!

None of this would have worked if I hadn’t had a good foundation laid beforehand, but it sure feels good right now. Of course, it’s also summer and Sushi is outside a lot, so the big test will come next winter, but right now the Willie/Sushi problem is history. Of course, now I’m working on teaching Hope not to chase the cat (more on that later, but it’s going really, really well…).

MEANWHILE, back on the farm: Will and Hope are playing beautifully in the house together, lots of tooth fencing and wrestle play. Every once in awhile Will seems to get a tad irritated and end the play session with a snap and an offensive pucker, but it’s rare and probably appropriate, given that shark-tooth Hope isn’t always mindful of the arsenal he is carrying around in his mouth. I also am quick to let Will go upstairs to take a break if he tells me he is ready, and I suspect that makes a big difference. Who doesn’t need a break from a puppy every once in awhile?

Their play outside is still driven by Willie’s nerdy and rude herding behavior. He just can’t figure out why Hope doesn’t want to play “You be the sheep and I’ll smash into you every time you move forward!” Sort of like the big brother who wants to tie his little brother up to a tree so he can play pirate and his little brother plays the captured victim. But Hope is figuring out he can play as long as he has somewhere to hide, like the edges of the wading pool:

The next photo is Will and Hope in a ‘road training’ session. Hope is learning to automatically lie down every time I walk toward the road. He is not allowed to go within 30 yards of the road, and he is learning to lie down if I move over that invisible barrier myself. This does NOT mean that he wouldn’t go to the road if I was behind him (on the house side rather than the road side) and someone appeared on the road that he’d like to meet. That is a completely different concept, and one we’ll work on once this stage has progressed. This is his 3rd session, and he will now lie down to a visual signal and stay until I come back parallel to him. Once I do, he gets enthusiastic praise, belly rubs (he LOVES them) and sometimes a piece of the cheapest steak I can find in the market. I also think it helps greatly that Will knows the drill and he has big brother beside him doing the right thing. (It’s very controversial whether dogs can truly ‘imitate’ others, but I do believe that at minimum it helps in the sense that Will is not moving around causing a distraction, and I do wonder often if Will’s behavior doesn’t also directly influence Hope’s… Food for thought.)

One of the segments on the BBC show The Secret Life of Dogs that generated several interesting comments was the segment that showed “Betsy,” (not her real name, you gotta love that some dogs now have ‘nom de plumes’) retrieving an object after being shown just a photograph of it. Wow. That truly is amazing. It got me to thinking about the trouble I had a year or so ago when I tried to teach Willie to discriminate between toys based on a name. For over a year he’d been told to “Go get your toy,” and he’d pick out whatever toy he liked best that was nearby.

When I tried to teach him to touch or pick up a toy based on a different word (“ball” or “rope”), he became hopelessly confused. He became so stressed over the entire operation that I dropped it and went on to teach him other things. My best guess is that he had categorized all signals as requests for action, not as labels of an object. That’s a pretty big frame shift to make. And yet, here is Betsy, able to pick out 250 different objects by name and by just looking at a 2-dimensional photograph (which dogs, by the way, were not supposed to be able to do). And of course, there’s Rico, the other famous BC, who could not only pick out hundreds of objects, he could get the larger of two versions, AND could ‘fast map,’ or be asked to retrieve something he’d never heard of or seen before, and deduce that it was the only unfamiliar object in a group of familiar toys. Wow. These are some smart dogs.

Will now has learned labels of living things: he knows “Jim” and “Trisha” and “Sushi.” I can say “Go to the Barn” or “Go up the hill” and he runs the right way, but I suspect he doesn’t think of the “barn” or “hill” as a label of the object itself, but rather of an action and direction. The BBC segment got me rethinking about what Willie understands as an action and what he understands as a label. He knows “get your toy”… and I suspect understands that “toy” relates to the objects he plays with, but does he see it as a label or as an action? Is it more about playing with anything in front of him, or the objects themselves?

I’m inspired now to start testing this out with Will. I’m going to write down every word and movement I make that I think might be a cue to him, and what I think it means to him. This, needless to say, is going to take some time, so stay tuned for what I come up with. Meanwhile, I’d love to hear from you. How much of what your dog understands relates to an action, and how much is it a label of an object? Is there any difference between learning to label a living thing versus an non-living object? Willie definitely knows “sheep” and “Sushi,” and I wonder if it matters that the ‘object’ of a label is living or not? He knew all the names of my other dogs, in that he’d turn and look at them if I said “Where’s Lassie?” He gets excited when I say “Dinner,” but does it mean the actual food itself, or the action of eating them? See how interesting this can get?

Meanwhile, back at the farm: We are all continuing to heal. Willie played for hours with his new friend, Max, an adolescent Border Collie who lives not far away. Watching them run and run and run huge circles around the Orchard Pasture cheered me up immensely. The best part of it was the way they played, because Willie didn’t always play as well with others. Willie would start running with another dog, then get in front and air snap toward their face to stop their forward movement. Then he’d stand still with a satisfied look on his face. Look what I accomplished! Boy, am I a good herding dog! Eventually the other dog would just stop running, because what was the point? However, recently the lovely Dobberman Mishka seemed to have taught Willie to stop playing by herding. Mishka put up with his “herding” two times, and then growl-charged at Willie. Totally appropriate, very controlled; I remember saying “Good girl!” I was so impressed. Willie backed off with that confused, silly look that male dogs get around females who discipline them, and never tried it again. They began racing instead and now it’s Willie’s favorite game.

It helps that Max is fast. Really fast, and so is Willie, but neither can really beat the other, so they run and run and run in the snow, stop and get their breath and then run some more. And you’d think that would have tired Willie out enough to sleep through the evening? Of course not, he kept dropping toys in our lap all evening long. I think it just warmed him up. Here’s some photos of Max and Willie playing. Not the best photographs, but I love how it shows the world we live in right now. Black and white (dogs). Black and white (everything else!)