August and beginning of September has been very busy and I haven’t worked Riva much with sheep, which shows, he’s rearing to go any time I pick up the crook and head to the sheep pen. Its not easy training a dog and trying to learn yourself at the same time, especially if you have a dog with plenty of drive. Trying to train my first herding dog, sometimes the progress has felt more backwards that forwards. This week I have worked him already a couple of times, more than in the last three weeks together. However, last night we took a big step forward .

I took Riva and we worked the sheep for a while again, it didn’t go particularly well but wasn’t a disaster either. Riva was still pretty “hot” and needed to run off a bit of steam before we really got to working. Luckily me and the sheep didn’t have to run and after a while I could see Riva was ready to listen instead of just running full tilt and barking. Basic stuff, flanking to both directions, keeping the correct distance, a little bit of fetch. Then I left the sheep to graze for a while and we went inside with Riva. His tongue was hanging but he still would have wanted to go on.

Later when the sheep were done with the grazing I thought I would take Riva with me to help in putting the sheep into their pen for the night. I let him go to the other side of the sheep and started backing up towards the pen, realized he was working real nice and calm fetching the sheep to me and RATING, the sheep were not on top of me but following calmly about three feet behind me. I turned around and started walking forwards and let Riva take care of bringing the sheep after me. We went all the way to the pen, about 60 meters, still nice and calm and put the sheep in. I was so happy I just couldn’t leave it at that (had to tempt faith…), so we took the sheep out of the pen, still nice and calm, did a little walkabout with Riva fetching the sheep after me and me walking forwards (watching him from the corner of my eye), Riva still rating & balancing nicely behind the sheep, and finally put the sheep back into the pen.

Wow, he can really do it! I guess he just needs to be worked more to get him to settle…

Hansu put up some herding pictures on her homepage. These were taken in May and that was Riva’s first exposure to ducks… and they survived it . The other dog in the pictures is Xena, you can read more about her at Snowtime’s pages.

Riva & Xena herding

Thanks Hansu!

The second week in July we attended a five day herding clinic with Maarten Walter. I like his way of teaching, it has helped me understand a lot of what herding is and how it works. It helps to understand what you are looking for, especially after you have to start training by yourself without the instructor next to you… Maarten concentrates in training the handler to train their dog, not on training the dog itself.

You also learn so much from watching other people and dogs work. It also helps a lot if you can get yourself on video and can later see how it went, where you did a mistake and where you had your timing right. While you are in there with your dog and sheep, there is usually plenty to do so you don’t have much time to think, even following someone else’s instructions is sometimes hard . Watching myself from the video, there was a time when I counted Maarten repeating an instruction three times before it registered in my brain and I followed it.

Riva did good and I was especially impressed with how he dealt with the training pressure, he kept on going even when I messed up and put to much pressure or pressured him at the wrong time. Also, five days of training without any time to digest all the new stuff was a lot for a started dog. Anyway, when I got my act together he did really nice, responded nicely to pressure when necessary but did have some natural distance in his flanks so didn’t need that much pushing out and even showed some square flanks. He was a bit worried about losing his stock so he was overwearing in fetch a bit and didn’t settle at the balance point but that should come with some experience and training.

The first couple of days went into getting ME to learn what to do. The third day I had a clue but I tried to force things too much and it wasn’t pretty and it wasn’t fun. On Thursday, the fourth day, the pieces suddenly fell into their place, I was at the right place at the right time. It felt incredible! The sheep, the dog and me doing this dance where everybody knew their steps. For the first three days Riva had been pretty one sided, he circled only to the clockwise direction (I never remember which is away-to-me and which is come-bye). The most he had been going in the counterclockwise direction was 1/8 of a circle (I checked from the video). On Thursday he suddenly went to the counterclockwise side several times pretty effortlessly. I had already started to suspect that he has some kind of a back problem going only to one direction but I guess it was me who was one-sided… Still, the counterclockwise direction is our weaker side so we will have to work on that.

Friday went along the same lines, making sure I had the basics figured out. I even learned to see the way he dipped his shoulder on his flanks when he was going to dive in for a bit of a grab and even got my timing right in putting pressure on him just when he was going to do that and push him back out to his flank. I was pretty proud of that . He wasn’t bad about the biting but he did try to do some, he definitely wanted to hit the sheep’s heels and I also saw him going in at the heads a couple of times, but no wool pulling or biting the sides of the sheep. I also saw more tendency to dive in for a nip in the counterclockwise direction which is the weaker side so I would expect him to stop doing it when he gets more comfortable when working.

I have most of it on video and will post clips, sometime. (I still haven’t edited all of the videos that I have from May…)

Before the clinic I had made arrangements to finally get some sheep, something that I have been planning to do for three years now. They came the week after the clinic, three Finn sheep wethers. So far they have mostly been clearing the bush that has been growing on my lot (I’m not that much into gardening) but when I get some proper fences we will start working.