Chimps with Wolves

A couple of weeks back I got an email from my friend and CityDog trainer, Liz, asking if I’d be willing to help her train her Border Collie Rose learn how to herd sheep.

“Hang out with my bestest buddy Rose and a bunch of sheep at the same time? Jack pot! Count me in!” *

* Not my exact words, but it might as well been

So this past Friday I drove out to Belmont where apparently there’s a habitat area to help out. My role was that of a “Corn Gent,” as Liz put it; meaning I’d stand in the middle of a field tossing corn while sheep gathered around me to eat said corn. Nothing fancy, but it allows Liz to concentrate on working her dog instead of worrying about the sheep scattering. Also, it’d give me a chance to watch a Border Collie in action and see training work outside of the Sit/Down/Stay/Come taught in class.

It was quite a fun experience and I look forward to helping out again. Both Liz and Rose are new to sheep herding, only really starting this past Spring, but seem to doing well at it. Both are learning to read and communicate with each other better as well as learning to read the sheep and different scenarios better. Sheep are skittish creatures and things can go from calm to woolly chaos very quickly, so trust between Liz and Rose is also building. It’s also interesting to see positive reinforcement being used to train a BC to herd sheep as traditional methods are mostly used. Good to see you can teach your dog to do even complex tasks such as herding by using R+.

And thanks to the power of the iPhone I was able to capture some photos and a video of the event.

Pics and video after the jump…

Read more…

As I noted in one of my last posts (Winterizing your dog and avoiding winter hazards), I was dogsitting for a couple of friends over Christmas while they enjoyed their “second wedding” in Brazil. Their dog is Zach, a Lab-Border Collie mix that we like to joke has the intelligence of a Border Collie, but the attention span of a Lab. He’s a great dog who enjoys sitting on the couch, curled up in a big black ball of fur with his monkeys beside him. In fact, that’s mostly all he does.

Good ol’ Zach Dog has only two speeds — sit/sleep and walk. He’ll do anything for food and for a walk, but from all the times I’ve seen him he seemed to have no drive or impulse to play. Rope tug-o-war toys are merely just odd shaped pieces of twine  to him and if you throw a discs and or balls, he stares at you like you’re an idiot for throwing the darn thing in the first place. I even tried getting him to chase me after tossing the ball a few yards away and acting like the ball is the greatest object on earth in hopes to getting Zach to play, but nothing. He just stares at you and maybe yawn, bored by your tireless attempts to get him excited and interesting in the toy.

Never thought I’d see the day when a Lab-Border Collie mix wouldn’t want to go running after something… and yet, there’s Zach. Good ol’ Zach.

I tell you all this so you fully understand how important this most recent Christmas was for Zach… and for me as a trainer-in-training.

Kate, Zach and myself made the few hour trek to upstate-NY where my parents now live. Their part of town is pretty rural. Everyone’s backyards are huge and every other house has some sort of dog running around in the backyard. Pine trees line every yard. It’s like dog heaven and Zach being a city-dog must’ve been in smell bliss the entire weekend.

And me being the sucker for dogs that I am, bought Zach a few Christmas gifts — a new Kong, a bullystick (which he loved thoroughly all weekend) and some Bison Bites. Before one of his walks (and he got plenty of walking every day), Kate made him some treat concoction of Biston Bites smothered in peanut butter with some of his kibble sprinkled on top –  it looked like a canine version of something you’d see on Iron Chef America. After he devoured that we took him for a nice long walk, ending it by jogging around the final block (our attempt to get Zach to stop smelling every blade of grass).

When we got back to our house Zach continued to run around like a madman, actually taking part in a game of chase with me and stopping once in a while to fall in a semi-play bow. This went on for a few more minutes before we took Zach in where he continued to play (that’s right, I said it, play) chase in the house, chasing me up and down the stairs and running from one bed to the next and going into a play bow.

What caused Zach to finally play is a bit of a mystery to me. We couldn’t get him to run around and play chase the next day. Maybe it was the jogging at the end of the walk, Kate’s superdogtreat, all the smells and open space that upstate-NY provides, or some other unknown variable. Mostly likely it had nothing to do with me learning to be a trainer.

But, at least for a few minutes, Zach played.

It was a Christmas miracle.