I have a new adventure on the horizon. In January of this year my new puppy was born. He is a Border Collie. He is the sixth BC that I have trained. The new adventure is that my goal is to have him compete in obedience and herding. Furthermore my goal is for him to be a HIT obedience dog (earning advanced titles such as the GMOTCH) and competing at the Open level in herding (the top level). I have been told that this can’t be done. But I am gonna give it a try. In April Jett came home with me from Calgary, well really Saskatchewan (where I was judging). He is proving himself to be a fabulous little guy! Yes I am biased, but too bad. He really is a nice dog. He is very easy to live with and loves to work. When I train with him, there is a lot of dog there. He is very keen and very quick to pick up on what I am asking. But I love just being around him. My friend Victoria commented, “He is very uncomplicated” – that is very true. My favourite thing about him is that when you interact with him he pays attention to you with every fibre of his being. I just love him.
What challenges do I think I will face?
- Confusion between commands that blend from obedience to herding. The “Come” command is the big one. In obedience it means come quickly and directly to me. In herding this command means to travel in a circle (or pear shape path) clock-wise. I wrote down every command that I will need for both sports and came up with an command to replace Come in obedience. Truthfully I usually say the word “Front” for my recall, but for drop on recall I sometimes use “Come” for the first half of the recall and “Front” for the second half of the recall (after the drop). I have been doing herding for about 5 years now, I have two other herding dogs Maddie (who is 141/2 and retired) and Jill (who is 5 years old and just moving up to Open) and they both are trained on the traditional command of Come bye or Come, so I don’t think I want to change that command. So for obedience instead of using Come I am using “Aqui”- which is Spanish for “Here”. I quite like it, the word has a lot of punch to it.
Wanting to look at me (who wouldn’t – ha, ha) This is the most common reason I hear that dogs can’t do both. I do see herding dogs look back at their handler’s from time to time, they look at their handlers as if to say, “You really want me to do that?” which usually gets a laugh from people sitting under the handler’s tent. But I think the real concern is that the dog looks back at the handler and doesn’t move away from the handler and onto the sheep or lack confidence working away from the handler because obedience skills are done relatively close to the handler. But in obedience we want the dog to look up at us for many reasons 1- it makes it easier to see the cues being given 2- vanity – it looks really nice when they do it. I spent quite a while thinking about this. All of my previous dogs had and have attention on command. When I say “Watch” or adopt heeling body posture they understand to give me 100% attention until I end the exercise. I have always wanted to train a dog without cued attention, but to be completely honest what I was doing was very successful for me. I wasn’t very motivated to change. However I knew this would create challenges for me down the road with my dual purpose dog, so I decided to try it. My plan is to put TONNES value of offering attention and when I put it in context (heel position) he will respond to the my body language. (the way I hold my hand, and how I walk when I need him to heel). I also waited to start Jett in his obedience training until he was about 6 months old. I was doing stuff with him, he knew about the clicker, I did work on his tuck sits and we played lots of games with food and toys, but I didn’t have him working on attention and heeling until I started my Competition Puppy 1 Class in July of this year (2107)
So far, he has completed one level on competition puppy class at my school, Companion Dog Training in Cambridge, ON. This class is designed to introduce puppies that are heading to the obedience ring to most of the exercises in obedience. We play a lot of games and do a lot of different skills for a very short amount of time (3-4 reps.) before moving onto the next skills. It is certainly one of my favourites to teach and it is really fun to take! He is keen to work and switches from skill to skill without a problem. I love how he can now switch between food and toy rewards and values them both equally. I am discovering many different things about him, how he learns, what he likes and dislikes about interaction between the two of us. Most importantly we are building a really great relationship based on trust and respect. We like each other.
In August I started him herding at about 7 months, under strict supervisor of the person who coaches me in herding, Viki Kidd. He did 3 10 minute sessions in a small pen- known as the puppy pen on a long line. This is done so that he doesn’t get himself into trouble chasing sheep, potentially hurting himself or a sheep! He is being taught to drive first, because going around in a circle gathering sheep in quite natural for a Border Collie, so it won’t be hard to get him to do that. The line gives so much control that everything is quiet and calm and he learns to keep his cool and when that happens he gets access to the sheep. He did really well, shows a lot of promise (to say I am excited is an understatement). Now he will be “put away” and grow up a little mentally and physically. Our obedience training continues.
So far this has been a pretty neat adventure. I’ll let you know how it goes.