Hey, Look what Pow found!

Another piece of his brain! Pow's tending and boundary work has been missing since his stroke 3 yrs ago, as was much of his independent work and task based commands. But I noticed the other day that he was making his own boundaries when I was grazing by the road, so I recently plowed furrows in an area I'd been using to graze under supervision, and set him to it. And lo and behold, he picked up the boundary. Whoo hoo!

See, the deal is that poor Pow suffered from handler error and NQ'd on one of his 3 runs at the GSD nationals, probably 4 yrs or more ago. That kept him from getting his title. I was running him in Advanced C course, first time he and I had ever even seen the course run. So not suprising that I made a mistake. At any rate, then came the stroke, and with very few C course options out there each year, and none anywhere near me, I kinda set it aside as never again kind of thing. Pow's brain was broken, especially the part he needed for that task, and I didn't know if it would ever come back.

But it has - so now we hunt up a C course trial or two and make the drive up to the NE to see if we can finish it off. In the meantime, we practice! Working Brick too, who isn't very boundary sensitive, and probably everyone eventually.

The idea with the C course is for grazing livestock where you don't have fences - you might have your neighbor's garden, a road, a creek and some woods as your boundary, but how would you keep the sheep or geese in it? So you either mow or plow a furrow, making a boundary where you would put a fence, and use a dog or two. The dog has to notice the furrow and follow it, keeping the sheep in but not moving them or pressuring them to move once they enter the graze. There are also parts of C course that involve removal from a small pen, movement down roads, movement past moving vehicles, and passing over bridges.

In these pictures, you can kinda see the furrow Pow is following at a trot as he moves around the 80 x 100 ft graze area, which has a furrow on 3 sides and woods on the 4th side as the boundary.