MO after 3 months
MO has become increasingly focused on the stock and today had the best outrun, lift, and fetch ever. She ran wide enough, turned right on time and brought the sheep down the arena nicely. Over the last four weeks, since turning one, she’s become increasingly able to stay focused on working the sheep and shows flashes of form in the middle of her crazy cue-ball shenanigans.
Her typical three short runs seem to follow a pattern:
- Grip on the biggest, fastest sheep and hold on. Ignore the others until they move or whenever it seems like fun to gather them up again and then go grab onto the big one for more fun.
- Do some MO-style balancing and gathering with little gripping. Practice coming off the sheep and doing another outrun is no problem and while she gets distracted easily as she gets more tired she can stay on the sheep with some consistency.
- Do a good outrun and gather, balance loosely off the handler with no gripping but slightly unfocused. If we keep her in there too long she’ll stop working.
Our general practice for a while now has been to keep her runs very short, stop as close to her peak interest as possible and let her do just about anything she wants as long as she stays on the sheep. She’s easily distracted by stuff going on outside of the ring, both people and livestock, and having a back-up dog is still hard because the more mentally fatigued she is the more she’ll chase the dog instead of the sheep.
with both dogs we’ve been working on how the dog is positioned before we begin the outrun, or even release the leash. for MO she did her great gather today after we sent her closer to the fence to pick up the sheep. maybe that gave her a less chance to do the cue ball…
ps.
one brownie lamb escaped today as MO was chasing it around the arena. MO didn’t really know what to do with “a lamb in the wild” but she soon went through the fence just as Stevie came around the outside to help. soon with Dirk’s help they brought the many to the one and despite some very large cacti and Dirk having a senior moment the loose lamb was brought back into the fold.