THE OTHER END OF THE LEASH

I originally called this post “Barbie’s Not Always a Nice Girl,” but then I thought about what the title would look like on Google and the kind of people who’d click on it. Hmm, not really my “brand,” as they say.

I thought though, that you’d be interested in yet another interaction between Barbie, my cantankerous, lead ewe and Willie. Barbie, as you may recall, is the only sheep who has ever seriously challenged Willie. She won a few times when she had three-week old lambs this spring, literally chasing Willie away, her anvil-like head down and ready to bash Willie into the ground. He ran away like a frightened chipmunk, because Barbie was serious, and because we all know she can be a witch, and because well, he’s just not the bravest dog in the world. That’s partly why I love him so much, because he’s not perfect and neither am I, and he still tries his best, and when I’m being who I want to be, so do I.

Here are photos I took just a few minutes ago (Willie is still panting rapid fire at my feet.) First we found the sheep lolling in the shade of the woods on a steep hill between the barn and the main pasture. Barbie was lying by herself under a dead tree.

Soon after I took this photo she grudgingly got up (who could blame her? — it’s mid day and hot outside) and trotted down the hill with the others toward the barn. Willie picked them up (eventually, more on that later) and we moved them into the Orchard pasture and practiced driving a little bit.

In this next photo you can see, as is often the case, Barbie being the last to move away from Willie and turning  her head toward him. I imagine her saying something like “Your mother eats kitty litter.”

Willie stood his ground, good boy, and here’s the result: Barbie turned away and began walking forward.

You might ask yourself at this point: “I get the Barbie and Willie title, but what’s with the mad dogs and Englishmen in the title? Simple: Remember “mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the noonday sun?” (Words in an old song for those of you not familiar.) We were working in the noonday sun, and I’m wondering if I had a mad dog. Not “mad” as in with rabies, but “mad” as if angry.

We all know how often people wrongly assume their dog is being disobedient because they were “mad” at them. Usually it’s confusion or mis-understandings or pain or fear or anything beside the fact that some dog is ticked off at its owner. But, here’s my question to you: Can it EVER be true, even if rarely? Are dogs ever truly irritated by their owners, especially while doing difficult work? I wondered this while I was working/photographing Willie for this post. He behaved atypically: he didn’t listen as well, he seemed slow and disconnected. But more than that, he gave me a look a few times that was hard to interpret as anything but some canine equivalent of a finger. There are several reasons he could have been off his game: We’ve been working on driving for an upcoming trial, and it’s difficult, tiresome work. I think it’s stressful to dogs (constant whistle signals given out 2-3 to a second), and especially to dogs like Willie who don’t like being in constant contact with the sheep.

In addition, during the “photo shoot” the sheep got all the way back to the barn before Willie could round them up again, in part because I was busy taking that first photo of  Barbie. It’s hard work running down the steep forest floor, going into the small, enclosed area of the barn and forcing the sheep back up the hill. He wouldn’t have had to do it if I’d been paying more attention. Hummm.

It’s far more likely that Willie was tired from our work of the past few days, or maybe his shoulder was hurting. But that look he gave me started me thinking: Although most attributions of anger as a motivation for disobedience are undoubtedly incorrect, are they always? Have you had an experience in which you had good reason to believe that your dog was irritated by your behavior? I’m curious.

MEANWHILE, back on the farm: Today is all about wrapping up work and leaving for the WWSDA herding dog trial up in northern Wisconsin this weekend. Willie and I run in our first big Pro-Novice course  against some of the best dogs and handlers in the country. The outrun will be 250 to 300 yards, the drives through 2 drive panels ridiculously far away and over my skill set, and the sheep have never been worked by dogs until the day before. If we get numbers (ie, a score) versus letters (ie DQ for Disqualified or RT for Retired) I’ll be satisfied. If we get in the top half (there are about 42 entries) I’ll be thrilled. If we do any better than that I’ll be over the moon. Tonight I’m going to work Willie when it’s cooled down, and just ask him to do some simple, easy outruns. Then tomorrow he won’t work all day, so he should get a good rest. He deserves it.

I know several of you compete in a variety of dog-related sports, from Agility to Sheepdog Trials. You’ll understand then when I say that all I really want is to not let my dog down.  I have worked with dangerous dogs for decades, but standing at the post about to run my dog is a million times more nerve wracking to me. I am basically a lousy competitor because I get so nervous, but yet some strange compulsion is getting me back into the sport. So cross your paws that I don’t throw up at the post in front of all the other handlers, and am able to keep my senses about me enough to handle my good dog Willie as well as he deserves.

Some wonderful things to report today. The first is that I had a restful and relaxing vacation. I saw lots of friends, gardened, cooked and got back to working sheep with Willie (more on that soon). I took an entire three weeks off, which felt terribly indulgent, but also desperately necessary. The last two years have included many wonderful things, but they’ve also included some major challenges, including Jim’s snapped bicep, surgery and recovery, my badly smashed knee, a summer raising a puppy who was (and is) better off another home, the death of Jim’s sister, moving his mother to Madison three weeks later, the out-of-the blue death a month later of Jim’s brother, Willie’s shoulder injury, surgery and year-long recovery, and a raft of my own health problems that I’ve been fighting in 2012. Among some other issues, I’ve been lame with an “about to snap” achilles tendon since January, and have worn the infamous “boot” for far too long. Living in hilly Southwestern Wisconsin in an old farmhouse with steep, narrow stairs is not ideal for healing an achilles tendon, just in case you were wondering. So it was truly glorious to take the time off, focus on my own rehab and be able to start working Willie again. Now I’m back in the office, excited about the new website we’re working on, getting back to writing a memoir and working on a series of fund raiser speeches for shelters this fall.

But enough about me. Willie is the one who deserve the attention here. Last weekend we entered our first sheepdog trial since his injury a year and a half ago, outside of Pigeon Falls, Wisconsin. In a way it was his first trial, since the only other one we went to was a “Fun Trial” in fall of 2010. So it’s our second attempt at working in a competitive environment, although both events were low key and very relaxed (and yeah for that). Willie did very well in the first fun trial, but he lost a tremendous amount of confidence after his injury and long period of restraint. Like many sheepdogs who have big, beautiful outruns and are easy to handle, Willie hates confrontations. His injury and endless period of inactivity just exacerbated it. Even at the fun trial in 2010 he refused to take the flanking whistles I gave him on the fetch, clearly preferring to follow the sheep along and not put himself in a position where the sheep would put a lot of pressure on him. This spring my flock leader, Barbie, chased Willie a good twenty feet when we first started working again. Gradually, over the last 2 months, I’ve been trying to build up his confidence, but even recently there have been times when he wouldn’t “cover” the sheep (meaning he wouldn’t move to where he could stop them from going in one direction or another.) But he loves to work, lives for it really, and I love working with him.  I will never forget Willie’s physical therapist saying to a vet student after his surgery: “We’re working on increasing Willie’s shoulder stability so that maybe someday he can work sheep again.” I blurted out “Oh no. That’s not what we’re working on. Willie WILL work sheep again, it’s just a question of what we have to do to make that happen.”

Life doesn’t always work out that way, but it did this time. He here is, working sheep again. As I’ve said before, I have accepted that he’ll never be truly sound, but I can manage him so that he can work sheep with little or no pain. Yes, our sessions are short, and yes, I wince when he slams to a stop on a downhill, and yes, he’ll need exercises for the rest of his life. But so what? I’m not in such great shape either, so we’re in it together.

Jim video taped Willie’s run, here it is for you to watch. For those of you don’t know sheepdog trials, a ProNovice course is as follows: The sheep are set out and held by a person and dog from about 200 to 600 yards away, depending on the class. (About 250 yards in this case, we ran in what’s called ProNovice.) Once the sheep are settled (as best as possible anyway), you send your dog to the left or right, your choice. Ideally your dog runs in a big, wide semi-circle that keeps him away from the sheep until he gets on the back side. Then he does the “Lift,” which is the point in which the dog makes “contact” (not physical!) with the sheep and takes control over them. Next is the “Fetch,” in which the dog brings the sheep straight to the handler, through 2 gate panels called the Fetch Panels. The sheep are then to be wrapped around the handler as close as possible and then driven away through the first Drive Panels, about 100 yards away. After going through those panels (theoretically anyway), your dog begins the “Cross Drive,” moving across the field to the second set of Drive Panels. You attempt to get the sheep through them, then straight back to you and into a free standing pen. Most trials are won or lost at the lift and fetch: Your dog needs to put just the right amount of pressure on the sheep to take control of them, but not panic them. Lots of trials are lost by dogs who go too fast and create wild, out of control sheep.

Willie couldn’t have done much better at managing some pretty difficult sheep. They tried their hardest to push to the left and get back to the barn, but this time Willie covered them perfectly. You’ll see we were working Suffolks, famous for not flocking and confronting and fighting the dogs, so I was extra happy about his work here. He made one major mistake in the outrun: he stopped about twenty yards out and looked backwards and then at me. I think, just guessing, that he was looking at sheep behind him, asking “Don’t you want me to get those sheep?” He’s a very strong-eyed dog and its hard for him to leave sheep close to him. But that’s just part of trialing and part of being an experienced dog. I said “Come By” again, and off he went. If you’re trial experienced, you’ll see that Willie did a lot right, and made very few mistakes. On the other hand, I can name several mistakes that I made, but I’m not beating myself up about it. It’s only my second attempt too after all. And I learned a lot, had a wonderful time, and left feeling so much love for Willie that it’s practically embarrassing.

It was a small trial, but there were some good competitors, and I’m truly pleased with how we did and what we learned. We even would have gotten first if (ah, those “ifs!”) I’d gotten the pen gate closed one second earlier, or they hadn’t changed the allotted time from 7 to 6 minutes partway through the runs. Being able to say you won is fun, but what mattered far more was me and Willie having a great time. And my good friend Donna and her lovely little dog Shae won the Novice class, so we all drove home happy and glad we had gone.

Thanks for the discussion about the use of Body Blocks for teaching Stay, and to re-iterate a comment I made, they work equally well with dogs of all breeds and sizes (but you have to be a bit quicker with some breeds and with small dogs).  If your dog is getting around you to the left or right, then you might be too close. It’s herding dogs that taught me that you have more control at a bit of a distance than if you are right up close. I got away with being quite close in the video in the last post, because the dogs were relatively easy to block, but if you are having trouble, try backing up a bit. It’s also a great way to learn to read dogs (what body part moves first when a dog starts to get up?) and to perfect your timing.

I mentioned in last week’s post that the video showed me working with dogs who had already been taught the first stages of Stay. Someone asked if I’d go over those, so here is me working with a Husky puppy, Anastasia, who has been taught to sit, but not to stay. The steps are simple:

- Be the best game in town with great treats and a lack of distractions that might overwhelm the dog.

- Ask for a sit, give clear visual and verbal signals to the dog to stay (note the drop in my voice) and then release before the dog has a chance to get up. Sometimes I’ll give a dog a treat as it is staying in place the first time I ask, even it is only for half a second, but often that distracts puppies, so with this pup, this first time, I released right away.

- The next times I asked Anatasia to stay I gave her a treat as she was sitting, and made the release boring. The key to a good stay, in my opinion, is to make staying fun, and getting up boring.

See either Family Friendly Dog  Training or  The Puppy Primer for a lot more on this topic, including the importance of working through what I call the 3 D’s: Duration, Distraction & Distance (from you.) Only work on one at a time, and do all you can to set up wins for your dog.

Here’s the video:

MEANWHILE, back on the farm: The trial was great fun. Good dogs, good people, wonderful hosts and a nippy wind that kept us all on our toes. As predicted, Willie and I suffered a bit from trial-itis, and our runs were much sloppier than when we practiced on the same course all by ourselves a few days before. I’d say we did well, but not great. We did get the highest scores of the runs in the Ranch class, which included a 150 yard outrun, a drive and short cross drive and a pen.  (I ran non-compete though, because in a moment of foolish optimism, I ran in Open 15 + years ago with Luke).

The Good: Willie got 30/30 on his outrun and lift for both runs, with a break-your-heart perfect outrun, way back around the sheep, stopping perfectly on balance, and lifting them slowly and carefully toward me. Several times during the runs I was able to whistle quietly and get instant responses. He was brilliant at the pen, doing everything I asked, instantly. We almost penned the first group (thought we had, and so did the crowd, until a little red lamb fooled us all and lept out, practically on top of me), and didn’t have a chance with the second, but Willie never put a paw wrong. (Out of 30 runs, there was only one pen for the entire day!)

The Bad: The Fetch on the first run, when the sheep are to be brought to you through two free standing gates, was not so gorgeous. On the first run Willie didn’t listen well, and the sheep drifted far to our right. This is a common problem with novice dogs: they are absolutely fixated on bringing the sheep to you, and check out mentally until they’ve had more training and experience. He did much much better on the second run, and brought the sheep directly to me, listening when I flanked him, and we made the fetch panels. We messed up too on the cross drive of the second run: Willie panicked and ran around to twelve o’clock rather than stopping at nine, clearly afraid he’d lose the sheep (who wanted to bolt toward the barn, which was a twelve o’clock). But I knew he did it because he was over his comfort zone, and I know what we need to work on next. For a first trial, he really didn’t mess up much at all. Okay, I’m a tad proud of him. He tried his hardest, and I give him lots of credit.

The Ugly: Happy to report I can’t think of anything in this category, except perhaps the one second in which Willie wasn’t listening and I yelled “Lie Down” three times in a row, until I realized that I could have set off fire bombs and Willie would have kept bringing me the sheep. I’m happy to say that I came to my senses early on, and most of our runs were relatively quiet and controlled. Not perfect mind you, but no chasing of sheep, no rodeos, and many moments of the sheep walking quietly around the course, with Willie listening and pacing well. [I'm laughing as I read this: working a dog on flighty sheep at a trial does not feel, internally, "quite and controlled." It feels like playing chess with fighter planes. Everything goes so fast you can barely think. The sheep are like deer and every move you and your dog makes is exaggerated ten times from normal. Me and my friends came off the course with our hearts going a mile a minute.]

Here’s Willie at his best, bringing the sheep to me on the fetch. Notice how quiet and slow the sheep are — just the pace you want to get the kind of control you need at a trial. Good boy Willie boy.

Ah, lucky me. Last week I had two half hour lessons with Alisdair McRae, who I used to call “the Tiger Woods of Herding,” but well . . .  you know. Alisdair won Open on both Saturday and Sunday at the Portage Trial this weekend, which is pretty much par for the course with him. He is also a clear and kind teacher, and he understands herding dogs as well as anyone in the world.

I write this because my lessons reminded me of the universal importance of creating a win for our dogs, and the universal difficulty in always knowing how to do that. I wanted to work on my timing; Willie and I are doing nice outruns and fetches, but our drives look like zig zags instead of the lovely straight lines we are all attempting to achieve. I felt like I was always one step behind, and never able to react fast enough to turn the sheep back to where I wanted them to go.  Alisdair said the problem isn’t your timing, you just need to slow down the pace. Miracle of  miracles, in a few minutes Willie and I were doing so much better, but not just because we had slowed the sheep to a walk, but because Alisdair had made it easier for both of us.

He set out traffic cones in a lane that made it easier for my mind to see a straight line, and he made the drive very, very short, to make it easier for Willie. Once a dog gets too far away from his  handler he begins to worry he’ll lose the sheep, begins to panic and either speeds up or flanks around to the other side and brings the sheep back to you, while you call and whistle yourself silly. He also set up a mini-trial course; I swear it looked like a trial course for a doll house, and told us to practice it until we were both comfortable at that distance, and then make it a bit larger overall.

“What’s important,” he said, “is that your dog is having fun.” And part of having fun is being capable of doing what is asked, yes? Such wise words, and true not just for dogs but for owners as well. I’ve found that so much of my consulting work was helping people understand the difficulty of what they were asking their dog to do, and helping them find ways to break it down into manageable pieces for the dog. But it was also my job to create exercises that were fun for the owners; things that they too were capable of, that made training fun for them as well as for the dog.

But it’s not always obvious how to break something into manageable pieces, is it? I knew to try short drives with Willie, but it never occurred to me to help my own brain with creating an alley-way, and the drive that Alisdair created was much shorter than I had been attempting. I drove home from the lessons thinking about the universal application of “setting our dogs up to win.” (And us too.) I’m curious now: Is there something that you’ve been working on that would profit by backing up, making it easier for you and your dog? Or do you have a story for others to help them find ways for both them and their dog to win? (I’ll be you do!) I’d love to hear ‘em.

MEANWHILE, back on the farm: I saw Hope this weekend at the Portage Herding Dog Trial, and it was wonderful. First off, neither he nor Willie barked or lunged at anything, not a thing. Hope was a happy little puppy and Willie greeted dogs and people alike beautifully. You would never know how they had been behaving weeks ago. Secondly, Willie wanted nothing to do with Hope. I was amazed at how clearly he expressed this: he sniffed Hope, Hope put his front paws on top of Willie’s shoulders, and then Willie turned his head as if to ignore him completely. Willie would not turn his head back in Hope’s direction after that or even to sniff him the next time they met up. Hope was happy to see me, and I loved seeing him, and then he was equally happy to go back to his new humans and lick their faces. I left feeling thrilled about how the two dogs are doing.

I also loved watching the Open runs. What these handlers and dogs are able to do is ridiculous. The outrun is 450 yards long — imagine asking your dog to listen four and a half football fields away. Here’s Alisdair and Star, beginning their winning run of the day. (And yes, those tiny little dots are the sheep, and they are actually almost halfway through the fetch!) (more…)

I re-read Seligman’s Authentic Happiness this weekend.  Ever read it? Seligman is one of the American Psychologists who decided to focus on mental health rather than mental illness, and yeah for him I say. I’m writing about it here because it got me thinking about our happiness and our dogs.

In the book, Seligman asks us to determine our “signature strengths,” and suggests that the road to happiness is to do what you are good at and what you love. (He has a questionnaire in the book to help you decide your strengths. Mine include Curiousity and Love of Learning. I’m not saying what my weaknesses are!)

So here’s my question related to dogs: Is that true of our dogs as well? Is their happiness, at least in part, related to having an opportunity to do what they love and what they are good at?  It seems intuitively that it must be true, and that like us, so many of our dogs are asked to do things that they aren’t good at. I know I spent a couple of years working with one of my Border Collies (Pippy Tay) on working sheep, until a sheep chased her across the field at a herding dog trial, and everyone in the stands laughed so hard they fell out of their seats. I may be indulging in inappropriate anthropomorphism, but I called Pip back to me and she walked back with her head and tail down, as if she was (dare I say it?).. ashamed.

I still feel guilty for not realizing sooner that, although she was brilliant at certain aspects of herding, she simply didn’t have the motivation and the courage to work sheep competively. I stopped training her on sheep, let her herd at home when it was fun and easy, and switched her to working with dog-dog aggressive dogs. She was brilliant at it, absolutely brilliant, and I truly believe she loved it.

As the years went on I saw so many people in my office who had dogs who, to me, didn’t enjoy agility or obedience or whatever, and yet their owners felt they “shouldn’t give up.” I’ll grant it can be a hard call to know if you should try to work through a problem, or decide that your dog just doesn’t enjoy a particular activity, but it seems to be an important one, yes?

Meanwhile, back at the farm: It snowed 3 or 4 inches, but compared to the blizzards and floods of other parts of the country, we can’t complain. The vegetation that has emerged is frozen solid, but tulip and other bulbs are amazing hardy, bless them, and I suspect they’ll be fine. But, with the snow, came new lambs… Lordy, lordy, I do love newborn lambs.

Here’s a bird’s eye view of Lady Godiva (daughter of Snickers and niece of Truffles, what else could I name her?) and her new born lambs. They are absolutely tiny (maybe 3-4 pounds?).. not so good when you are raising market lambs, but I love that they are all white and seem to be doing well.

Lady Godiva is a ewe lamb, meaning she’s just about one year old right now, and this is her first lambing season. What a good momma she though.. see how, in the photo below, she is flexing her back legs to make her udder more accessible to her lambs? Good girl!  The nursing lamb is wagging his tail–always a good sign, since they usually only do that when they are getting milk. The lamb on the ground has nursed less. I’m anxious to check him later this afternoon… he has some milk in his belly, but not as much as his brother. I’m hoping for a big, fat milk-filled belly this afternoon.

One last image from this morning,of the morning sunlight coming into the barn. Nothing special really, but I just love barns and old wood…