One of my favorite games with Willie is to put him on sit/stay and then hide one of his toys in another room. I release him and tell him to go find his toy. We both think it’s a hoot and get all waggy from the shoulders back together. We’ve played it on and off for months, but I started doing it on a daily basis in preparation for his surgery and restricted exercise. Until recently, Willie always looked for the hidden toy. It was overwhelmingly clear that he was using his eyes, and if he couldn’t see it, he couldn’t find it. However, after about a week and a half of playing the game 4-5 times in a row every evening, Willie completely switched strategies and started using his nose. The switch was absolutely obvious: he’d trot out of the room he’d been in with his nose in the air, sniffing with his nostrils flaring and his head up. Once I noticed his busy nose, I started hiding the toy in harder and harder places, where he couldn’t see the toy at all (or barely.. my favorite is to slide a thin, narrow toy between books in a book case).
Not atypically for a Border collie, Willie has always used his eyes or his memory to find things. Of course he uses his nose a lot, but this change in “find the toy” strategy seems to delight him as much as it does me. What I love most about it is how it reminds me daily of the ‘wonderful world of scent’— without having to lay a track. (I took one tracking class and was uproariously incompetent. My best skill was cracking up the entire class by wrapping myself up in the lead while juggling my map and flags and trying to place my feet in only the right places. Too bad there was no video, it was a Lucy O’Ball-ish moment of the highest calibar!)
Last night I hid the toy behind some objects behind a door, and at first Willie moved away from the door, part way up the stairs. I realized immediately that the currents in the house were blowing the scent through the crack in the door, through the living room and up the stair case. Will got about halfway up, found that the scent was disappearing and then followed it back down into the right room and xero-ed in on the toy right away. Too cool.
Shearing went really well. I have a great shearer, and I pay him almost double to come because he is so kind to the sheep. Once they’ve been shorn once, if it was by a skilled shearer, they don’t seem to mind all that much. I’m sure they’d rather not have it done, but I also wouldn’t be surprised if it doesn’t feel good to them to have all that wool taken off. The weather cooperated… it is sunny and warm and will be all week. That is such a relief, you never know what it will be this time of year.
After being shorn, every year, the sheep seem to behave toward one another as if they have just been introduced. Here are some photos of a great shearer, Jerry Ace just starting to shear the belly of yearling Spot. Look at how white it is under the clippers! The next photos are of Dorothy and Truffles competing for status, just like a couple of rams out of a Natural Geographic special.
Here are the battling ewes: Dorothy is the grey–the oldest of the herd and the one I have thought of as the lead ewe. Truffles is the brown one (a hair sheep, starting to shed on her own) with the white tail. Truffles is much younger (and the mother of White Dude) but is no shrinking violet. Willie faced her down on shearing day in a small, confined space and I was OH SO PROUD of him….Dorothy has just backed up and it starting to ram Truffles.
I the next photo the girls have rammed heads, and then slid sideways (I imagine to soften the blow a bit). Look at Truffles hind quarters, they are completely off the ground. Clearly she is not giving in much to Dorothy.
After 5 or 6 rammings, they began to just push against each other, and then would stand leaning against each other like tired boxers in a ring. What I love about this next photo is that the rest of the flock is watching just as closely as Willie and I were. (And the question, of course is: who won? I’m not sure, although I’m sure that they are! I’ll keep watching….)
Jennnifer Hamilton says
Love the “learning to use their nose” ah-hah moment. It’s one of my favorite experiences with my dog. Captain Haggarty wrote a great book about dog tricks and he dedicates a chapter to teaching your dog to use it’s nose. He says, and I agree, it is one of the most rewarding experiences you can have with your dog. Once a dog learns to use it as a conscious tool, a light bulb goes off and they never look at the world the same again!
For example, my dog now sits at the dinner table and moves from guest to guest based on the percent of meat/protein sitting on any given plate. I know she’s not queuing visually because we can have steak salads, and she can still tell how much meat anyone has left on their salad. As soon as someone eats the last piece of meat, she moves to the next best plate on the table. When all the meat has been eaten, she goes and lies down on her bed. She never would do this before she learned to use her nose. (My dog isn’t at all interested in carbs, fruits or vegatables.)
The way I taught my dog to use her nose, I used spices from the kitchen and put them in tiny little ziplock bags. I started with Thyme. Once she could find a small baggie of Thyme no matter where I hid it in the house, I decided to try scent #2. This is where my dog made me look like an idiot. Stupid me, I got it in my head that I needed to pick a spice that I could smell too. So, the next spice I picked was cinnamon. (Any of you you have done scent work with your dog are now cringing…trust me I know.) In my research I already knew that a dog can smell a packet of salt in a plastic bag suspended inside a drum of gasoline, so what made me lose my mind and think that somehow working with my dog I had to be able to smell the scent too is beyond me.
Well, I put my dog on her “mark” and held that tiny bag of cinnamon up to her nose (which is what I do to show her the scent I want her to find) and all of sudden she jumped back, turned her nose away and then looked back at me with this look that said “are you stupid…I could smell that thing across a football field. I might still be learning to use my nose but I’m not an idiot.” Boy, she schooled me good. The expression on her face was about the same as it would be if you asked a waiter to bring you a glass of water and he came back and dumped a cooler of gatorade on your head. I felt like the biggest idiot.
The next several spices I used were very bland (like salt, sesame seed, etc). It took a while for her to finally trust that I wouldn’t be so stupid as to shove an overwhelming scent up her nose again like I did with the cinnamon. If I was ever to do cinnamon again, I think I would only be able to use a couple of specks…certainly not a teaspoonful.
If you haven’t taught Will already, a fun scent game to teach while he is confined to crate rest is Three Card Monty. You put a dab of some scent on an Ace of Hearts playing card that is folded longways. Set it face down on the table or floor like a tent. Teach Will to tap it with his nose. Then add two other unscented cards to the mix and only click/treat when he picks the scented one. Voila, you have Three Card Monty. No matter how fast you move the cards around face down on the table or floor, your dog can always pick out the Ace of Hearts. Since your guests are basing the trick on visuals, they will assume your dog is watching your hand movements…never realizing that he is simply smelling the correct card.
(Special Note…make sure not to store the cards stacked together between training sessions…I always keep the scented card in it’s own baggie. If you’re wondering what scent to use…a rub of vanilla works great…although it doesn’t have to be that strong of a scent.)
I love how much my dog has taught me once I taught her how to use her nose. Thanks for sharing your experience with scent woth with all of us and letting me share my “ah-hah” moment with the group.
Nicola Brown says
I have always been grateful that I have had little to do with sheep – you make me wonder if I have missed out. It seems much more “All Creatures Great and Small” for them to have names & personalities – as opposed to the vast, half wild flocks we get in Australia. Do you know if there are behavioural differences between flocks which regularly deal with humans vs those left largely to fend for themselves?
Lori says
Not related to this post, but I just wanted to say THANK YOU. I had finished up your book Other End of the Leash a few weeks ago and was already putting it into practice with my dog, Kasey. But yesterday driving home from work a pretty little Brittany Spaniel darted out in front of my car on a back road and then proceeded to run across the main road and stand on the double yellow line just after a blind curve. I parked my car and slowly got out. I remembered your story about the dogs on the highway and how you go them to come across you using your body language. So I called to her to get her attention and clapped, as soon as I saw her paying attention to me I kept calling and clapping but I started to walk away from her. It took a few panicked minutes but she did come to me!!! I was able to pick her up and put her in my dog’s crate and drive her back home where her owner was running out the door to look for her. :O) So I thank you…and so does Tiger the Brittany. Probably Kasey won’t thank you when he gets in his crate next and smells another dog. But oh well. :O)
Kate says
I remember when my girl Sara learned to use her nose to find treats…or more likely, when I noticed she did. We play the hide-the-Kong game every day and for the longest time she wouldn’t use her nose so much as check all the spots we had used before. Now, she’s onto the Kong in about 30 seconds of tearing into the room when I release her. I’m running out of places to hide them now. I’m now trying to figure out how to up the ante without frustrating her (which is pretty hard; she gives up pretty easily).
Sabine says
A dog nose is indeed a wondrous thing. 🙂 I love it, when I walk in the woods and all three noses of my guys go up in the air at the same time because they got scent of some deer. (That is also my cue to put the leashes on asap. 🙂 )
I play the hiding game too and it is incredible to watch, how they get better and better at finding the object, once the game has become clear to them. I also have to hide my dachshunds favorite toy in different places of the house, because I use it as a reward when working with him. He would drop a cookie anytime for his cuz ball. It’s an obsession. He will find my hiding spots in no time and patiently sit in front of it to be praised for finding it. If I don’t show up to praise him, he’ll start trying to get to it – no matter what. It can ruin a good piece of furniture.
Thank you for showing those stand-off pictures of your ewes. It is a real interesting study in sheep behavior. They all look so fresh and clean now – just like spring ! 🙂
Betsey says
When I had sheep (225 ewes + rams, etc.) I was breeding in early October for March lambing. We were pasture-based in Maryland so I could go to pasture usually as soon as the lambs were up and running. I moved to shearing in September which worked really well. Of course they were in full fleece in the summer but it appears that they’re no hotter in full fleece than they would be with an inch or so of wool. I could do my paint branding and the rams left nice clear marks, etc. and the ewes were still pretty clean at lambing so I didn’t have to crutch many. Also my shearer was available on my schedule! The only downside was storing the wool all winter for our June wool pool. My sheep were mostly crossbreds of various sorts with majority Suffolk-Rambouillet bred to Suffolk and Dorset rams. I did have a few hair sheep cross ewes and a pure hair ram from Mike Piel who developed the original Khatadin sheep (we bought them in 1965). Anyway, fall shearing is worth a thought.
Joanna says
Thought you’d like this video:
Sheep wearing LED lights being herded into funny shapes!