Black Water Border Collies: December 2009

Mama Deal. Such a strong working dog, who has made great strides at becoming a team player I wasn't sure she would be. At a young age she was very willful, and we did not always see eye to eye. Talented from the beginning, and dead serious since roughly 12 weeks old. She is now nearly fully trained and will be ready to run in Open this spring. She has a wonderful, scopey type of outrun. Because of her eye, early in her training she had a tendency to curl in or check up on the lift. Now, she nearly always corrects herself, or freely takes a small flank whistle at the lift and does beautifully.

The photos below are of her nicely giving me an inside flank while driving the ewes down the fenceline. You can see in the first photo how her eye is curling her in slightly. The 2nd photo is her response to one quick away bump on the whistle. :-) Deal is a confident working girl who stands her ground and never stalls out or dives in. With age and experience she has learned patience. Early in her training she had little patience for stock that was not behaving as she felt they should. Her patience still needs just a bit more development during shed work. She has come a long way with this skill, and hopefully over the winter it will be fully developed! :-)

Saturday Deal and I worked on fine tuning whistle work and coming thru the sheep without the use of teeth. The field big was WAY too wet and it was full of hunters shooting away.

The weather was crappy on Saturday, but I refused to stay inside on yet another one of my day's off. I put the camera on auto because it was go from part sun to misting in a matter minutes all day long. So some of the pictures aren't too bad, and some are pretty gray. None are that great, but it was fun anyway. :-)

Ms. Gwen doing one of her famous stop-so-fast-I-roll-over moves! She is the most incredibly responsive dogs I have ever known. She is not at all freaky sensitive, but wow do you hardly have to ask her for something and you have it while the sound is still coming out of your mouth/whistle. She is like what I expect driving a 6 figure sports car would be like.

I love this dog, I love this dog, I love this dog! LOL! She is my absolute favorite to work and own. She is all heart and only stockwork makes this otherwise, goodtime-girl serious. She was a fun dog to start, and in hindsight I pushed her too much during that 10-15 month age. Thanks largely in part to my mentor, I backed way off when she was about 2, only going forward again this past summer. Gwen was a natural outrunner and was naturally square on her flanks. There is always a trade off, and the trade off was her getting bogged down on the drive. She would keep on if the stock kept on, but if they stalled, so did she. This was really only an issue because I asked for too much distance too soon. After backing off and building some more confidence up close and learning of a couple great tips given to me by my mentor that another top Open handler has had to do with her dogs, we are well on our way.

Saturday was a great session with Gwen. It was honestly the freest she has been on her drive work. As I mentioned, we couldn't work in the big field, and the small field here at home has a lot of pressure. I wasn't sure if I was even going to do any drive work with her, but she took to it great. I did a little corner work with her as well. Learning to relax and be confident in close/tight spaces is helping her drive work quite a lot. Having 3 week old pups doesn't seem to have set her back one single bit- mentally or physically.

Toss man worked like a grown dog on Saturday! LOL! He was able to contain his adrenaline and use his brain. Toss is a lot of dog, and when he's not using his head, things can get very fast, and rather spread out very quickly. Toss is learning to flank without leaning on sheep and to down shift sooner rather than later when asked.

Saturday's session mostly centered around whistle work, as I feel like getting him solid on his whistles is all that's keeping him from the Ranch level of trialing. His outrun work is wonderful, and he is very reliable on his stop at the top. His pace is rather quick on the fetch, but I'm okay with that. He is going in the right direction with pace and learning to read his stock better. Actually I think he has always read stock fine, it was simply that his exuberance over-powered his brain. He will flank nicely on the fetch or during the drive, needing fewer and fewer reminders to get off his sheep during the flank. He is beginning to listen for whistles and yesterday I started asking him for off balance flanks via the whistle and he did quite well.

Kit is going to end up working quite a lot like Toss. She is not as much dog to handle as Toss, but her working style is very much Toss. She is quite straight forward and confident. She has finally become mentally mature enough to take on real training. She was very slow to mature like Toss. She was immature in a softer sense, where Toss was immature in an intense way.

Kit covers nicely and has a good stop. Since she works like Toss, she will be a natural take to distance driving. She already has a stop, flanks, and inside flanks at a short distance in a drive with very little training. The flipside to that is she is going to take some work to put an outrun on. Toss was the same way- however once he could run about 75 yards from my feet he could immediately run 150 yards from my feet.... Now he is a very reliable outrunner. He is 2nd only to Gwen at spotting sheep, and rarely does he need an adjustment on his outruns of 200-250 yards. He will occasionally need to be reminded to stay off his sheep on the lift. Although I can't send her far, she has a nice stop at the top and a fast but balanced fetch. I'm enjoying her more and more as she gains confidence in herself

Ivy. My little happy girl. She is so much like her mother, Gwen. She also has a lot of heart, but was not as early-on keen as Gwen and I kind of stepped on her toes a little bit. I had to simply take her completely off sheep for several months. Again my mentor saved me and another dog by telling me I needed to back off and only do what's fun for her. I did that a few times and saw the light come back on. Yesterday was the first day in quite a long while since I have "played" with her out of the little paddock where I had been simply letting her cover the sheep. In the small area the sheep kept moving, so she would not hit the dirt and stick. I was a little scared taking her out of the paddock and into the bigger area where the sheep will settle and Ivy will lock up. I thought about this a lot and realized she is doing in a fetch what Gwen was doing in a drive. So I did the same thing to free up Ivy, and it worked. Will she ever fully mature out of this? Only time will answer that. She did very little of the photo above and seemed very, very keen to work. Like her mother she is a natural outrunner and square flanking pup. Gwen's reward for working hard on drive work that is slightly out of her comfort zone is to be sent to pick the sheep up, Ivy's reward for pushing the sheep forward when she'd really rather lock up is for me to step to the side so she can flank around them. It seems to be paying off. One of the most important and most easily forgotten thing about (at least mine) young Border Collies on stock is that they aren't trying to be wrong, so punishing them for not doing what you're expecting is really only taking your relationship in the wrong direction. And depending on the severity of your unfairness and the sensitivity of your dog, your relationship may never recover from being unfair and impatient. Your job as a trainer is to somehow (comfortably) get the behavior you want and then show them that is the behavior you desire. I have to admit I nearly ruined my relationship with Ivy several months ago by basically saying "you ARE going to get on your feet when I tell you to"... It wasn't fun for either of us, so what the hell was I doing? I was frustrated. (and disappointed) I let that emotion take over. I didn't want to have to handle her in what I considered kid gloves while she went thru some kind of funky stage (because she didn't do the belly thing as a year old pup)... Her reaction? "You suck, and I don't think I want to play with you". Justified. I did suck and I'm so grateful to have such a wonderful friend who has been around so much longer than I have and isn't afraid I'm not going to want to hear what she has to say when she knows she is right, but I probably won't see that for awhile yet... And this is one of those cases. She told me to make it fun, take the pressure off. I told her I wasn't putting any pressure on her, for goodness sake she doesn't even have a stop or flanks... That wasn't the point... So while I was soaking that in, and doing some soul searching (some dog related, some not) I decided to just put her "away" and be her friend away from sheep. When I did start playing with her again I did as my friend said and put her in an area where the sheep would be more "exciting". This also meant we were not working sheep in the same area where I was completely unfair to her. I love Ivy, and she is such a delightful, friendly, good natured girl. She is really just a baby, and I need to remember that.

Emma worked for a short time on Saturday and it will be the last time for at least a month. She has her grandmother's eye and I could not get her to cover. She just wanted to walk in and hold them against the fence, and if I let her go while they were in the middle of the field she would rush in and put them everywhere (because she wasn't casting around) then fearlessly try her best to right her mess. She is still fearless towards the sheep, but her response to my body language trying to get her to cover was to be intimated. She's keen, and that's all we need for now. If I can stand it, I really should wait another 3 months.

Cruz is such a man. Words just can't say it. He reads my mind and he reads situations like no dog I know. He is forever my "puppy helper" lending an eye and maybe some coverage from time to time while I work young dogs. I swear he learns each pup and as they mature he knows he can give them more and more "room for error". I also swear he knows my dogs names, and remembers who needs what kind of coverage. He lay up by the barn while I work a young dog and if the sheep start darting his way, he is on his feet ready to hold them off the barn for the young dog. Yet he can be in the same place and the sheep do the exact same thing with a more seasoned dog, and just stays put.... His stock sense is something I have yet to see in another of my dogs. He can handle everything and do it with that quiet power. He is never too much, and I have never seen him take a step backwards... His true skill is handling sheep that want to fight. He has that "baa-ram-you" gift. He will bite, but he usually doesn't. He has this gift that tells him just exactly where to step, where to look, when to bite, and when to back off. That's not training, that's just what God gave him. I have seen him so many times change a stubborn sheep's mind without ever having to lay a tooth. I feel like sheep trust and respect him. Trial sheep generally like him and that makes things like penning and chute work a whole lot easier! He is truly my once-in-a-lifetime dog. My only "regret" is that I didn't have him as a pup 5 years later. Although had I had another dog for my first Border Collie I would probably be writing a very different story. I owe Cruz more than I will ever be able to repay him!!! The photo above is the new ewe in my group and she had decided she was going to have a go at turning around, stomping, and even throwing her head down. Cruz, true to form simply said "just move along, it's really nothing to get your panties in a wad about..."