From There To Here: April 2013

   Maintaining a blog can be hard work. Especially if you are trying to keep it fresh and interesting. I try to keep mine honest also but that doesn't always make for the most informative or exciting read. It is a struggle to decide what is "blog worthy" and what is just re-hashing the same ol' same ol' on a different day. I honestly wasn't going to write anything about our sheep working session this past Friday for a couple of reasons. 1.) I have no videos or working photos to share. I don't know why, but for me to want to present something to people I also feel like I need a visual aid to go along with it :-/. And 2.) Nothing exciting or new happened. This got me thinking though that not every time you work do you have a break through or do something new. This in itself is an important lesson for those who are moving up the ranks to learn and plays big into handler expectations. So Friday for me was neither an epic failure nor did any fireworks go off. We came, we worked, and this is the way it went.

    Hog Dog is down to just 7 workable sheep at the moment due to lambing. These 7 are all of last years ewe lambs that were not bred and though they have been worked regularly for many months without a more seasoned ewe, or two, to anchor them they don't always make the best choices. Nothing as wild and crazy as some sheep might do but they are lighter that what you typically get at Hog Dog. I actually love working them alone as it offers a lot of awareness opportunities for Diva who can get rather complacent working on what to us is home turf. I didn't have a set training plan for Friday but as usual we started the work session by going out and gathering our sheep in the big pasture. Once we had them gathered I had Diva drive them down to the lower fields and we split them into two groups. Diva doesn't rate very naturally and as we were driving down the field she seemed to have lost the concept of a straight line walk up in favor of flanking to make motion. I decided to put her in the field with the sheep while I stayed outside at the gate and just let her go do her thing and be "responsible". This is a great exercise for her and for me! I always want to say too much and she likes to look at me more than she should. As an extra bonus I forgot my stick over by my truck so I had nothing to wave around like a wild woman, lol!

   The first couple of minutes Diva just went and fetched the sheep to where I was outside the gate. Typical of her she just pushed them right to me and when they didn't stop she pushed them on past and was forced to get around them again and bring them back. I let her work at this for a few attempts before I pointed out that she needed to get back and actually watch the sheep to hold them to the gate ;-). Once I was sure that she was thinking more about her position I started having her drive them to various spots in the field and in particular to the one corner they don't like to get into. This was very hard for Diva because I wasn't in the field to help her hold a side and she lost them several times before we had any success. To get that success I was forced to move down the fence line to put myself in a more natural position (though I remained on the outside of the fence). After we accomplished getting them into the corner I wanted to practice a little exercise there using the gate to the small pen. Basically I was just having Diva drive the sheep into the small pen, then stopping at the opening to hold them in a down (or sit as directed), and then sending her in the small pen to bring them back out and do it all over again. She took them in and out a few times and I was happy with how she was able to work independently without me in the pen. To finish off we worked on inside flanks and getting some very direct straight line walk ups to drive the sheep away. As soon as I got a really nice walk up we quit and I made a big fuss about her.

   So there you have it. Nothing exciting happened...and that's ok :-). Also, I will leave you with a few non working photos to look at because I just can't seem to bring myself to have a text only blog post ;-).

Lambie cuteness. This ewe had twins but rejected the smaller one.