Clinic

This weekend was the clinic for mostly English Shepherds, with a Malinois thrown in for spice. Not suprisingly, the Mal worked similar to some of the ES. Sophy, Tory, Ben, DJ, Amarillo, Montana, Kira, Shanandoah, Winston, and Ginger had a good time. Our working crew for Sat consisted of Kestrel and Whiskey, with Mikey, Howard, Jake, Ninja and a unnamed ram yearling as the dog testers. Sunday the work crew was Charlie and Brick, with the same sheep crew. Kestrel and Whiskey took turns sorting sheep, pushing them into the arena, or removing them from the repen area. There was a dog house in the hold pen for the dogs - Miss Whiskey did a great imitation of Snoopy lying on the doghouse most of the time. Marq says she was sleeping upside down against the bedroom door ( I went to bed at 7:30pm) last night - good sign she's bonding to me better with the work I've been giving her.

Several dogs would alternate between "la la la can't hear you don't care" and quite serious gripping and slashing - two sides of the same coin - dog is lacking confidence and fearful of the pressure from either handler or sheep or both. Getting some handlers to lighten up and learn how to take the pressure off their dogs gets very important with these dogs, and it can be quite frightening to some of the handlers to have to ignore their dog coming in with a volley of barking and gripping - but they bucked up and saw that their dog would indeed sit or down with a mere whisper and would back off and work calmly if they set things up right.
Sometimes, it is just that we sound like we are already mad at the dog when the first command comes out of our mouth, when all we are asking for is a down, and a happy chirp will get results better than a brick of pressure.