The Ramp

Dare’s knees started going bad around 10 years old. The orthopedic vet diagnosed partial ACL tears, but felt that management was the best course at Dare’s age. So I started NSAIDs and some moderate restrictions on Dare joining the more exuberant activities. I also put a ramp up to my bed. Dare liked to join me when I first went to bed to say goodnight, then hop off and stretch out on his favorite stretch of hard floor under a window. Each morning he’d be back up to wish me a good morning. At first I had to make him take the time to go around and use the ramp. As the years went by he began to choose the ramp himself. He also began to spend the entire night on the bed.

The ramp has its drawbacks. It took some time before I learned to navigate around it when I got up at night. Worse, it gives puppies access to the bed. Puppies who may not be fully housebroken and find the expanse of soft comforter a suitable substitute for soil. I can tell you that it takes forever to dry out an egg crate memory foam mattress topper, days. The good aspect of the incredible absorbent capacity of this mattress topper is that the mattress itself has always managed to stay dry. Small consolation when I want to go to sleep but instead find myself with loads of sheets and blankets to wash.

Despite the drawbacks of the ramp, I can’t quite bring myself to take it down just yet. It has been there for 4 years. I can still hear Dare’s footsteps going up and down.

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Fear

“Only Thing We Have to Fear Is Fear Itself” Franklin D. Roosevelt

 

Fear is the most powerful of our feelings. It is a link to survival. Fear holds us back from excessive risk, makes us think hard about the possible outcomes, risks and rewards of our actions. Fear in good measure helps us make decisions. Fear in excess is panic. It keeps us from thinking rationally. We become too busy running or fighting to look closer at the threat to see if indeed it is the evil we imagine. Adrenalin powers reactions, not thought.

 

Marketers have known this for years. Watch the ads for bleach laden cleaners with worried mothers trotting around behind their children in spotless homes, wiping every surface with disinfectant. To sell disinfectant they sell fear of sickness in children. People react, buy disinfectant, and seldom take a moment to consider if this is really necessary.

 

Internet information "gurus" have known this for years. Dramatic language whips up fear of vaccines, food ingredients, etc. Once people are engaged with the fear they begin to react rather than consider. The fear mongers reap their benefits in advertisements and products.

 

Animal predators have known this for years. A pack of coyotes will worry stock behind a fence in a small paddock, building panic until the stock goes through the fence that had kept the coyotes out.

 

Preachers of all faiths have used fear to control their congregations. Salvation is offered by striking out at that which you are taught to fear.

 

Politicians have known this for years. A powerful speaker can tap into fear then invite the audience to join them in battle against whatever scapegoat has been chosen.  The speaker offers to save us.   The unified surge of adrenalin brings people to battle, not to thought. Who looks at the story and the faces of the enemy when the bugles are blowing?

 

Maybe we should.
 

Road Crossing

I need to start carrying the GoPro in the van because life gets interesting without any warning when you have livestock. 
 
I went out to move sheep to a new graze. Enroute I get a call and end up diverting to gather a couple loose lambs from a neighbor's front yard. I'd sold them to someone this past weekend and they'd escaped the fence and gone walkabout. Getting a pair of weanling lambs back through the thickets was not easy.

That done I head back to move my lambs. They... need to move across the road to a new field. The problem is the road is Route 113, very busy, fast, and the crossing is fairly blind. I need traffic stopped to take them across. On my way there I pass one of the Dunstable police officers. I ask if he can swing by and stop traffic when I'm ready. We set a time and I go prepare. We have a great police force. At 7 PM two cruisers show up and we make our plan. I'll move the last piece of fence and call to them when I'm ready. Then I'll wait till they have the cruisers in place. They'll hold traffic till all stock is across the road and down past the the little red one room schoolhouse that sits in the middle of the new field. I've already got the fencing ready. My only concern is that I must bring the sheep off a field and into a narrow band of woods and brush by the road that has a steep drop over a stone wall to the pavement. I'm not sure the stock will be comfortable traversing this. I did leave a few adult ewes in with the lambs knowing I would be making this trek. 
  

Fence moved I let the officers know. They parked the cruisers diagonally across both lanes on either side of my crossing. I sent a flank whistle over the knoll where Song and Levi were parked watching the sheep. They brought the flock with commitment. I was across already by this point, watching the sheep flow down over the wall into the road between the two cruisers with blue lights brilliant in the low light. What a picture it would have been!

All sheep were across with the older ewes kicking it into overdrive as they saw the familiar net fence and thick grass of the next graze. I was a bit worried as Fluffy the llama was just getting to the thicket on the other side. She was not thrilled but did pick her way through the brush, over the old wall and down the bank to the road. Then she put those long legs to use sailing across the grass to catch up.

The Strawberry Festival is held on these grounds late June each year. They like having the sheep there. I hope I've timed the grazing so we'll have cleaned out most of the field and be in the back corner where people can see the sheep on festival day. The officers checked in to make sure all was set and we chatted a bit. Did I mention the great police force we have? Boy I wish I'd been wearing my GoPro to get that photo of the sheep pouring down that bank onto the road between the two cruisers with the lights flashing.

Spring

I love the woods in spring.  The new growth is iridescent.  Looking through the trees the light is suffused with the glimmer of spring green.  It is the kingdom of fairies and unicorns.  Where summer provides an endless canopy of green, spring frames each bright new leaf against the backdrop of the forest floor.  Nature is delicate and intricate where it soon will be robust and abundant.  You easily see every detail, an unfurling fern, moss brightening a decaying stump, lichen on an old wall.

The Raspberry Patch

My raspberry patch went wild, as raspberries tend to do.  I put these plants in about five years ago.  They were pressed on me by a friend who had to reduce his patch.  I was hardly consumed with enthusiasm to receive a bundle of sticks, bare roots wrapped in wet newspaper.  I had nowhere to put them so dug up some land by the kennels, the easiest solution at the time.  I was quite sure they would die, but not only did they all survive, they produced a decent harvest the first year.

Raspberries are imperialistic.  They annex adjoining land freely.  Little else can grow where they establish themselves.  Stalks are short lived, a couple years, and in death continue to reinforce the prickly fortress with their bones.  Within two years my raspberries began jumping their boundaries, marching across the ground like an endless army.  Kill one and two more appeared in its place.  They surrounded kennel doors, swarmed the fence, advanced on flowers, relentless in their expansion.

The harvest was epic, hundreds of berries sprinkled through the foliage, sparkling in the sun.  Fueled by greed for the ruby fruits I turned a blind eye to the transgressions of the bearing plants.  But as the years passed more and more of the fruit was inaccessible in the thicket.  Picking berries required long sleeves, long pants, and maybe a machete.  I considered buying a pith helmet to complete the picture. 

The patch needed to move, a big job that I postponed regularly.  Finally I laid out a new location and began digging.  The new habitat is bigger, more room for walking to harvest, and more accessible for pruning.  Most of my feral plants are coming with little argument, but a few have required a high powered rifle and tranquilizer darts to wrestle them out of the jungle.  I’m about 2/3 of the way through.  I’m a bit late with the transplant.  I should have started before the spring growth began.  The stalks have buds and some small leaves.  I think they’ll be okay with plenty of water and TLC.  A new kingdom that I’m already picturing covered in ruby red berries.

Good Enough

What is good enough in dog training?  It is vast gray area that we need to pay attention to.  Demanding  perfection in every move will sour a dog quickly, eating away at initiative, instinct, and desire.  In training stock dogs we are constantly accepting performances that are less than perfect.  A young dog who is a bit unsure will get more leeway in being a bit rough when handing challenging situations.  A dog just starting to find it’s outrun will be left to figure it out through some tight and wavy casts.  A dog with a naturally careful pace will be forgiven pushing too hard (or even encouraged).  We give green dogs room to work out the moves for themselves, find their style.  We give room for dogs to explore methods they are uncomfortable with, such as pushing or extracting stock from tight places.  As long as the dogs are trying to solve the problem,  there is room to let them work it out and disregard errors along the way. 

We regularly take “good enough” as the dog learns the job.  What we accept today we may not accept next week.  We take “good enough” when the dog has a bad day, or we’re having a bad training day, end the session rather than fight.  We take “good enough” when we are asking the dog to apply what it has learned in a new situation.  Again, giving the dog room to work it out based on its current skill set.

Perfection is in the eye of the beholder.  We all have our preferences for work style in a dog.  Sometimes we get a dog that has a different style, and risk degrading that dog if we cannot adapt ourselves to this new dog’s methods.  Sometimes we need to step back and realize our demands are more directed at the innate style of the dog than the quality of the work.  We need to accept the different style as good enough.  The more dogs you have trained the easier it is to recognize the natural style of the dog as it evolves, and adapt your criteria to that.  Or, if the dog is truly unsuited, find someone more comfortable with that type of dog.

When you are working on skills that do not come naturally to a dog then there is not much room for “good enough”.  You need to be entirely consistent in your criteria or the dog will not figure out what the requirements are.  Examples are dogs that are difficult to stop, dogs that don’t turn off the stock on their flanks, dogs that are overly flanky and substitute a flank for a walkup.  With each of these you have criteria that you need to enforce virtually every single time.  You will need more time on simple foundation exercises to be sure the dog understands the requirements.  If you accept “good enough” because working on these basic skills can get boring or you are not paying attention, then good enough is what you are teaching your dog. 

Currently I’m working a very direct young dog.  Getting him to turn his gaze from the sheep to flow by them on a flank is like getting a toddler to walk past a plate of Oreo cookies.  Every time we come out to train it seems he has forgotten that “away” and “come by” mean turn your head and release the sheep then flow along them.  Once he begins his flanks properly the shape and speed are quite good, though he is prone to turning in early.  He’s a talented young dog, biddable and determined.  I am so very tempted to go forward and spend time on more advanced exercises.  But if I allow him to learn that my flank commands mean anything less than to break his gaze and turn to flow along the sheep then his weakness will become a long term liability.  If I persist and teach him that those commands have a clear and distinct meaning then we will have the tools to succeed.  Because he is not naturally inclined to break his direct mode, he has needed quite a bit of work on those flanks, often boring or frustrating.  I’m not expecting any miracle breakthroughs.  This will take work, and will take maintenance.  His flanking exercises began when balancing the sheep to me, then on the fetch when he is working further off, and again for inside flanks.  The correct flank has needed to be taught in each scenario separately, particularly inside flanks.  Certainly I’m enjoying some more advanced work, lengthening his outrun, the occasional split, allowing him to drive for longer stretches.  In all of these I’m careful to make sure any flanks are correct.  For if I accept “good enough” because I’m “impatient enough” then I’ve taught him that “Come by” means move to the left and march on.

Pay attention to "good enough", your decisions on what less than ideal work you accept, and where you intervene.

Bits

Life is made more of bits
than great shares of splendor.
The soft caress of dawn
A joke, smiles, and laughter

Some bits we craft ourselves
Alchemy of delight
Others are strewn as gifts
Mere moments shine bright

We sift the bits like gold
Wash mud and silt away
Prospectors panning life
We seize the bits each day

©2016 Maria Amodei