A to Z For Better Herding

Continued from the "Hot, Hot, HOT!!!" post...... 

  We then took our turn on the broke sheep. I have been trying to get more precise with Diva about "there" and having her do a straight "walk up" on the stock, especially into pressure. To practice a lot of these elements I wanted to work on alphabet patterns with the sheep. The idea is that I stand in the center of this square pen and have Diva move the sheep in the shape of a letter from the alphabet. I don't know if any has or has not done this as a training exercise with livestock but I got the idea from a book that does agility drills :-). To start with I am picking some of the easier letters like "L", "N", "X", and "Z". The point would be to smoothly be able to switch from driving down the fence line to going across the arena (from a fetch to the handler then back to driving) and then on to the next fence line. You would have to be able to work all your flanks smoothly and have a good there to make this happen. I hope that everyone can picture what I am talking about in your mind but if not, I do intend to do some diagrams of these exercises and post them on this blog. 

  "L" is of course not all that hard and is a good place to start. Diva was easily able to drive the sheep in the "L" pattern in both directions (I like to flip the letter as well to be even on both sides). Then I moved on to "N" which presented a challenge to us that we had a hard time with at the trial. After fetching the sheep to me across the diagonal Diva needs to walk up and push the sheep off to the corner beyond me. This is where a straight walk up into pressure is needed and we did struggle last night. I find that Diva wants to always move a couple of steps in one direction or another when starting her walk up. From what I can see this is her way of releasing the pressure she feels from having the stock being pushed into a corner and she isn't technically being bad or wrong for doing it. Working lighter sheep though a couple of steps can cause the sheep to move out of position, especially if she takes those couple of steps at a trot. So this is where we are at. I am getting technical and asking her to slow down. I know that Diva is a smart dog and once she learns that she can do this things are going go along nicely.

  I intend to continue working all of the letters of the alphabet as we progress and eventually I would like to start trying this with ducks as well. Next week we will revisit "L" and "N" but also add in "X" and "Z". Keeps the dog and the stock guessing!