1-18-10 & 1-21-10
Santa Fe (clear and cold, grey and snowing)
[Our first road trip with Stevie, we stopped overnight in Flagstaff and got to Santa Fe Friday night. MO had a poo explosion in her crate about 20 minutes south of Santa Fe, but the rest of the driving part went fine. Both dogs handled the hotel room great and loved romping around the snow behind the hotel in Flagstaff.
The day before we left LA MO had a freak mis-step in the park and tweaked her back leg. She limped around on it for a few minutes and then recovered but had periodic cramp-like seizures where she'd pull her leg up and limp around or stop and stretch it out. There don't seem to be many traces of the injury left, the car rest probably helped, but it's something to keep our eyes on.]
We are getting lessons/renting sheep from the Charlton’s in Santa Fe. The sheep are bigger and faster than what we are used to and are split up between a small round ring and small square arena.
MO
In the small round ring with about six sheep and she does great. We can’t figure out if it’s the cold weather or the faster sheep but she stays on them pretty well – only take a couple of pee breaks and one poo stop – and does a good job of turning them while going round both directions. It’s actually remarkable how different she looks compared to Acton and Malibu. She doesn’t show much concern for Mary being in ring with her (she paused briefly, but nothing dramatic) or even when Mary moved her stick around or raised her hands.
Time-wise I don’t think she stayed in especially long, and by the third or fourth minute of each second run she was definitely out of gas, but all in all it was a great time out for her everytime.
Stevie
In the bigger ring which is maybe 1/3rd the size of the big arena at Acton and she does mediocre. I’m pretty sure she started off fine, maybe a little spastic since we missed the Wednesday class before we left making it more than a week since she had last worked. After some time Mary came in the ring and thinking I had been too soft correcting something she whacked her crop-stick thing close by Stevie and from that moment on Stevie didn’t want to have anything to do with that woman, to the point where she would freeze up within about 6ft. of her regardless of where the sheep were. Basically we worked on the same sort of stuff we usually do but with a different teacher and a different perspective which confused me a little and maybe Stevie too since she wasn’t totally on her game.
One thing we did learn was some corner work where you walk the sheep up into a corner of the arena and practice having the dog move clockwise or counter-clockwise with lots of stands or lie-downs to keep the sheep calm. Stevie shows a lot of eye in these situations and probably doesn’t feel all that confident she’ll be able to keep her sheep, but she did ok at it and we could do with some practice at it.
This fear/freeze thing was a much bigger deal the second day we went out. Mary wanted us to practice a “slingshot” move she had seen on a video and explained the day we went to their house for tea (Tuesday). Her technique in general is that you have the dog lie down before the gate opens. The handler walks through and then lets the dog in and the dog must immediately lie down inside the arena while the handler closes the gate. To teach the slingshot you bring the dog in on a long line and walk halfway up to the sheep. Lie the dog down and walk off to the side of the dog making somewhat of an equilateral triangle between dog, sheep and handler then call the dog to you and use the line to enforce a straight recall and lie down. Between me not really understanding the concept as it applies to Stevie and Stevie not really giving a shit if she’s on a leash or not this unsurprisingly didn’t go that well. At some point Mary came into the ring which successfully screwed with Stevie’s head and got me a little more frustrated at the whole situation than I care to admit. With her in the ring the sheep acted like small asteroids in a strong gravity field and no matter what we did they would inevitably end up clustered around her, Stevie would freeze 6ft out and I would be trying to get her to move with no result and not know why because I had my back to the sheep.
The second time out we were on our own and did ok. I don’t know if it’s the sheep, the new arena, the weather or something in the sky but she was definitely a little different. Maybe less confident, definitely eager to work but it just didn’t feel like we were communicating as well as usual. For the first few minutes Mary took us into her pen area and we practiced moving some lambs around a very small pen. Stevie was on a short string and I would take her around using directional commands and lie-downs to move the lambs around. She didn’t seem to really understand what we were trying to accomplish, this was a completely new thing, but she did pretty good. After a few turns we went into the middle pen which has yearling sheep and we practiced the same moves for a bit and then Mary opened the gate and we practiced bringing the sheep in and out of the pen a couple of times. After this we moved back into the arena and did a very long run practicing all the usual stuff with some corner work and fence work thrown in to emphasize the need to take time and stuff. Stevie did alright for the most part but definitely gets pent up and crashes into the sheep when she’s feeling out of control or frustrated or something along those lines.
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And then the shit storm hit.
The whole time Stevie was working MO was going kind of bonkers and so once Stevie was done and Malcolm went into the ring we let MO off her leash to run a bit. We took both dogs back to the car (parked in the road because we were afraid of getting snowed in and stuck) and put Stevie in the back then walked back to the arenas with MO running ahead and said our good-byes. We started back to the car and MO ran way ahead seeming to look for Stevie and probably panicking at this point though I don’t think either of us realized it yet. At one point she could obviously hear Stevie yelping in the car, we all could hear it, and she went up to a large cattle-type pen hunting around but came when we called her and kept running up to the car. Still without a leash on, we opened the car and instead of her jumping in as usual she started playing keep-away, meaning you keep away from mo. We tried all our usual tricks but she was definitely freaking out by this time and so we both tried getting angry which didn’t work either. After giving her all kinds of time to figure it out on her own, and she didn’t, we both got in the car and started to drive away. She followed for a time but then gave that up so we stopped the car and tried again. We went on like this a few times, probably getting 1/2 mile or so down the road and were getting totally nowhere so we tried pulling Stevie out and walking her while the car went far ahead. MO trailed behind, kind of sticking near Stevie but definitely not getting anywhere near close enough to be caught and eventually pooed out a stress induced squirt which must have either hurt her back to normal or maybe settled her head a bit because we were finally able to get her to come and let us grab her collar about 10 minutes later.
The whole adventure seems to have taken it’s toll on MO’s little psyche and stomach. After resting through the afternoon she actually spent some time in her crate, something she hasn’t done in months, and then threw up a decent portion of her dinner. It would seem that a good part of her digestion trouble is stress related, but what to do with that information is another question.
