Semi-tricky Barbados sheep
Yesterday Bryna and I returned to Mary Brighoff's farm to have another go at those Barbados sheep. We had some advantages compared to last time. The biggest one, in my mind (well, actually Bryna's mind), was that we had gone the day before to a herding fun day and worked some mixed breed sheep. So she was a bit mellowed out. The other advantage was that these 3 sheep were more dog-broke than the last 3, though still pretty fast and independent-minded. (You'll recall that very fast sheep re-awaken the chasing instincts that you need to suppress in a herding dog.)
Gratifyingly, we managed to sandwich our lesson into the one hour of good sunshine and clear skies that our area had yesterday. (We don't do herding in thunderstorms near the top of a hill -- no way.)
We began in a small pen. Bryna stayed, on the average, much farther out than she had the last time. Not as far out as Mary and I wanted, but much better. But she tended to circle the sheep not in circles, but ovals. (Can you "oval sheep"?) So I tried to work to make her get out more consistently, using a stock stick. Mary said that I was using the stick too slowly, so she took a turn with Bryna. Usually Bryna, if she will work at all for someone else, won't work very long. But 3 minutes was enough for Mary. She said it wasn't just me, but that Bryna had learned a bad habit of doing this, probably to make things more fun when she was bored.
"So," she said, "this dog needs some work to do, so let's give her a challenge." Let me describe the pen we were working in first. Imagine a figure 8, all boxy like the one on a digital clock, and then stretch it, top to bottom. We were working in the bottom (B) section, which was separated from the top (T) section by a 4ft gate, set right against the far right side of the 8. The barn (=food, buddies, and no dogs) was on the other side of the T section from B.
We stopped, Mary moved all 3 sheep into the top of T (not hard--she just opened the gate). Our first job was to go pick up the sheep, now by the barn, and bring them down through the gate (the very opposite of where they most wanted to go), leave the gate open and take them to the far end of B, oval a few times, and stop. Without my getting trammelled in the gate or anything. This sounds much like a PT, but here the sheep really, really, really had a preferred spot, and it was home.
We picked the sheep up, though I had given a waytome that turned into a comeby, unfortunately. But Bryna was very attentive, and she took her "theres" and "lie downs" much better than she normally does, walking up with no horse shoes around the sheep at all, and sometimes holding even 20 ft away. And she held them as I backed the sheep toward the gate and the B pen, where the sheep stopped and did not want to continue through. I had Bryna walk up enough to push them the rest of the way, and got her to lie down at the gate, even though from her point of view, the "SHEEP ARE ESCAPING, MOM!" That first time, I then sent her the wrong way inside the B pen, and we lost them almost immediately back through the gate and back to the T pen and the barn.
We did it again, but I lost Bryna as we approached the sheep, as she zoomed off without waiting to be sent. So we did a series of short approaches, with me blocking her, and not sending her until I was good and ready. When we got the sheep, it was still raggedy but not as bad. The trip down to the B pen was better than the first attempt. ("We're doin' it, we're doin' it!", I kept saying to myself.) We got them farther into the B pen and did a teeny bit of ovaling before we lost them. On the 3rd and last effort, Mary had me really working on not letting her go until I sent her, and our approach consisted of several steps at a time, with me blocking her if she started to go around me. We picked them up, and made a fairly nice trip down to the gate, if I may say so, and this time Mary said to have Bryna lie down just at the gate before leaving the T section, then come through, lie her down again, and get her to hold the sheep from the gate while I shut it. This required an alignment of gate-Lynne-Bryna-sheep. This is not at all comfortable for a dog with such a strong fetching instinct. Sweet Pea held her down Perfectly! And, as far as I could tell, never took her eyes off of those pesky sheep!
Smootches all over the top of her head, and a departure of the ring off lead. Wheeee! We're herders, Sweet Pea! (OK, OK, we'll deal with reality one step at a time.)
Anyhow, as Winston Churchill said, "It is not the end, nor even the beginning of the end, but it is the end of the beginning." We haven't mastered tricky Barbs by a long shot. But I think we outscored some non-tricky Barbs that did not wake up on the wrong side of the hay mow suffering from migraines like the last batch. We can't wait to try again.
Learning more slowly than Sweet Pea,
Lynne (and her teammate, Bryna)