I have pursued herding with my dogs for over a decade(!!!). Pursued, not necessarily caught. I took lessons for several years, and Kate became pretty passable at a sport she decided lacked the all important sheep-eating part that she had signed up for. Between her lack of enthusiasm, my lack of either time or money (depending) and life, I never pursued it as I wished, with weekly lesson, a 'real' border collie (Kate is probably a golden retriever mix with border collie coloring and neurosis) and a small herd of sheep of my own to practice on. But, I have geese, and with the sale of the goslings, an X-pen to protect them from hungry dogs, Dice and Cody who both did very well at their instinct tests, and just enough knowledge to know how truly little I know.
Bring on the chaos!! Cody is the best so far. Dice isn't certain what the rules are and when he is uncertain he disengages.
Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday I went through the huge ordeal of rounding up the extremely displeased and loud geese and chucking them one by one into a dog crate on the ATV. Once assembled, I drive them down to the x-pen and place them into it one by one. They are often wet, having fled through various water tanks in their efforts to evade me, and often have poopy feet. The wetter the ground the poopier the geese. The need for sheep seems more and more urgent.
After the geese have been duly assembled, I head up to the house to pull Cody out of the dog run and put Ketchum in. Ketchum, who is reliable and safe when the geese are out does not need to get other ideas about how to treat the geese.
Cody begins getting insanely cited about the geese the moment she realizes that they're not at the coop, but are instead honking and complaining down at the corral. She has to be leashed for the last couple of hundred yards so that I'm not constantly pulling her back like a yo-yo.
I place her in a sit-stay and walk around the other side of the geese to give Cody the idea that she needs to move the geese towards me. Once I release Cody it's off to the races!!
When I initially took Cody out to see my herding instructor she was very one sided and could only travel in one direction around the stock, so I work hard to help her understand that she can move in both directions.
In the middle of the corral she can move both ways with a fair level of competence, but the last time I worked her I let the geese loose (yes, it was a mess!) and the geese quickly ran to the edges of the corral where there was deeper grass. Cody could only move one way when dealing with these suddenly free geese, and in doing so, often moved them in exactly the wrong direction, causing cross-arena escape attempts that led to me telling Cody to down while I tromped through the grass and weeds, ducking through corral fencing and up the insane slope of the dam at the end of the pond to head the geese off before they headed for their coop.
There was a good deal of running - by me. And since Wednesday was actually nice and sunny, the geese were panting and hot. Uncertain how much running a goose can take. I let them take frequent and long breaks which coincided with my own gasping for breath.
I was absolutely thrilled with Cody's understanding of the game. Yes, there were geese stampedes, but usually not because Cody charged them, rather because the geese are not what is termed dog-broke, which means that rather than predictably heading towards the handler (me) they fled helter-skelter for safety. A lack of fencing certainly did not help matters much.
A friend brought out her corgi pup on Friday to see what he would do with stock. Both corgi breeds were initially herding dogs; Welsh Pembroke corgis (the ones without the tails) which my friend owns are supposed to have lost much of their herding instinct on the road to popularity and of course AKC beauty pagents.
Rye, the corgi puppy, was certainly enthusiastic, but he was mostly in full on predator/ prey-drive mode. My herding instructor told me that what she looks for in a herding test is a dog that instinctively gives the stock space, and circles rather than charges the stock. Even though corgis and border collies are extremely different dogs with different herding styles, I certainly saw what she was talking about with Rye. It took all of us with sticks to keep sweeping him away from the geese to keep them from hopping out and fleeing. In several spirited chases he did assault some goose tail feathers.
It will be interesting to see if my friend, who is an excellent dog handler and trainer, is able to find any nascent instinct in Rye for herding, and bring it to the fore, so that he is less predator more partner. I am not well versed enough in herding to know what is possible and how much work it takes. For all we know Rye was so excited he didn't have time to think, and with further contact with stock he will begin to express his instincts more clearly. My house is a hell of a drive for Rye and his parents, but I want to see how it works out.
Cody for her part impressed the hell out of me in the first four days of playing with the geese and I have to remember that neither of us knows what we're doing so that the experience remains positive and fun for her.
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