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.
We decided today to shoot for having Stevie ready to do a Novice-novice trial in the Spring of 2010.
Today we worked on her ’stand’, ‘that’ll do’, pacing and keeping the handler from getting clogged up in the sheep.
Everything went well, as usual, she’s got the ’stand’ and will come off the sheep reliably if the handler is between her and the stock. Her pace (trot) is quickening as long as the handler doesn’t get stuck in the middle of the sheep, she is still a bit tough on the Away side and will cut in if given the chance but a little body movement to cut her off corrects that easily enough.
She can do a 300+ yard outrun, but not widely, and she turns pretty well on a ‘there’ and she balances nicely. We’re going to work on getting her to take heavy sheep off a fence and get her used to regular farm work so she has more confidence in a variety of situations.
