Obedience

Obedience is
The very best way
To show that you believe . . .

That's an old Sunday School song that's been running through my mind this week. In my mind, I want my dog training to be all about trust, the dog trusting me and me trusting the dog. Ironically this is probably the number one issue I have when I'm actually out with a dog. I don't trust my dogs, not really, truly, and they don't trust me.

If I ask a dog to do something, I'm instantly overcome with a wave of second guessing myself and the dog's ability to do it. Then the dog gets tense because that's a really strong vibe of indecision I give off at that point. It translates, for instance, into physical hesitation on my part.

Ted's a pretty eager to please kinda guy. He picks up on my signals really fast and he currently thinks it's his job to figure out everything himself. That's something we've been chipping away at, and now Robin thinks we are ready for the next step. I'm working him pretty much mechanically, giving him commands that don't feel "right" necessarily. He's still in control of the stock, but what happens with them all comes from me.

It's proven to be incredibly hard to make myself do this, until I thought of it in terms of allowing Ted to show me, one way or another, whether he trusts me. And it allows me,
to show him, that if he gives me a little I can give him a bunch back.

If he wants very badly to go one way, or the easy/correct way is in a particular direction, I send him the other way. And he's got to stop when I ask, not after or (more often) before. But, one thing I've noticed is that it's interesting trying to make this about just one difficult thing, not giving him a whole bunch of reasons to refuse in a row. Eventually (soon, I believe), he'll be ready for being sent where it's hard, and stopping off balance, and doing it in places that are scary, on sheep that are scary, but not now. When I get it right, I can see the tension melt out of Ted and he becomes "looser" - no hesitation about flanking or stopping or walking up when asked.

One time today, I was out working him and marveling that he'd gone so fast from very hard to move off balance, to seeming to enjoy swinging right around. In my usual way I was so busy thinking, "Wow, isn't my dog cool" and poor Ted was still executing my last command - "Come bye." I think he did two and a half complete revolutions before I came back to Planet Earth. So, that was good but a good example of too much of a good thing. We did some nice outruns and fetches and driving after that to cool things down. The ducks seemed very amused.

On that note, I quickly figured out one way to simplify this for Ted. Robin's sheep are, of course, lovely - mine, not so much. It's very difficult to translate something we are doing there to my sheep sometimes. But, I figured out my ducks are perfect for this sort of thing! They cooperate perfectly, since this is what they were raised to do, and they've never been significantly harassed.

I need to put a video up of one particular place where I feel I'm not quite getting it. It's when he's balancing them right to me - it's really hard to get him to flank off balance there. I accidentally got him going around a couple times but I'm not sure how or if it was right. I'll work with it some more and see whether it will just come out in the wash.