Tuesday, September 8, 2009

Training The Dawgs

I have been working with Paris on the relaxation and trying to obtain quiet, some luck but she is still the barker of joy. I have decided to use my old "muffler" technique and will be teaching her to retrieve. This tried and true method worked wonders on my old blue dog, so Paris shall be conditioned to pick up an object when she wishes to bark. In with the new....ignore the old.

On another happy note I have been working with Hudson and his stock pen work. With a year plus off from my injured reserve he needed some work. So work we will do. I set him up at the take pen and with the excellent advice of my good friend Kathi, we worked on a figure 8 of sorts using the take pen. Go By into the Pen, Away To Me on the outside repenning the sheep. This has helped make him a calm pen handler as he is brings them out and rounds them up immediately. The idea is to have him calmly remove the sheep from the take pen, then bring them back under control while I close the gate to the pen. With sheep near and under control and the dog calm, we can then begin to move around the pen. We even worked both sides of our take pen so we could do this with gates that open both directions to avoid being "onesided' gate workers.

The true test is coming, as we are entered in a trial on the 12th and 13th.

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