10 September

Video: Working With Fate: Stay. Come Along.

by Jon Katz
Working With Fate
Working With Fate

This week, I’m working with Fate on three things: staying on command ( and holding the stay), responding to commands over widening distances and slowing down around the sheep. I started in the next pasture, getting her to stay as Maria trains Chloe. Good setting.

Fate has very powerful instincts, when she goes to work she is trembling, excited, aroused, she often requires five or six efforts to stay when told. Away from the sheep, she is responsive and focused. Around them, she is sometimes too excited. So I am putting her into stays and holding her there. She is great at responding to commands over growing distances. She is, like Red, a professional, she is always appropriate with the sheep, never inclined to harm them or use her mouth when she can try her eye.

And unlike many border collies in training, she is quick to lie down when asked. All good things. When she approaches the sheep, she circles them, sometimes this is good – if they need to be kept together – but it has to be controlled. As she gets older, she is maturing, slowing down, calming down, listening.

There are many ideologues and dogmatics – I think of them as snobs sometimes – who believe there is only way to train a dog, or one way to train a herding dog. I’m not one of those. Each working dog has their own individual style, and the job of the trainer is to find a balance, a common ground between what the dog is at ease doing and what the human or the farmer needs to be done. I’m not chasing after ribbons, I don’t care where her shoulders are pointed, I want a savvy working dog who can help us run the farm and move the sheep around.

I tell her to lie down and “stay.” Most times, she gets up when she hears the clank of the gate, and then I simply move her back to the spot where the command was given, wait a minute or two, and then tell her to “stay” again. She is getting it, this has taken a very long time and a lot of patience.

I do this calmly and continuously. I  want  Fate to love herding sheep as much as I love doing it with her.

I love watching Fate when I put Red away and see her testing the sheep, trying things out. My favorite thing.

Fate lacks only one thing for that, she is still a bit too young to command the sheep, although that is beginning to happen. For the first time, she can move around them and stop them or turn them around. She can also hold them in place. Good and important steps, but I want Fate to be Fate, not a robot dog fitting someone else’s pattern or rigid dogma. Like any dog, she does some things very well, is working on others.

Exciting and challenging stuff. I want it to be fun, for her, for me. It makes me a better human being.

I took this video of our work this morning, it shows some of the things we are working on. We’ve entered a new phase of our work, Fate is growing up, we are talking to each other very well. Come and see.

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