Wolves in Washington endangered, again

I was so excited to hear about the confirmed presence of wolf packs in Washington. Now some state legislators are trying to strip them of protection. If this interests you and you are a resident of Washington state, please write your representatives and urge them to vote against these bills.

If you're a resident of other western states that have wolves, or likely soon will as they slowly reestablish their ancient territory, then I urge you to think about to coexist. There's room for both wolves and people if we set aside our prejudice and fear.

According to Conservation Northwest:

Washington's Wolves Under Fire
Urge state lawmakers to support wolf recovery and to oppose efforts to strip wolf protections

One would hope that state politicians are hard at work solving our state's economic crisis, but instead some are hard at work stripping protections for endangered wolves in Washington. We need your help to protect wolves. Three extreme, anti-wolf bills have been introduced into the state legislature this session, all of which can be stopped with your help.

Representatives Taylor, Shea, and McCune have introduced bills (HB 1107, 1108, and 1109) that together would harm wolves and wolf recovery. They propose to circumvent a collaborative process to develop a balanced, scientifically-based wolf management plan for Washington; challenge the authority of the US Fish and Wildlife Service to protect wolves in Washington and make it virtually impossible for the state to work with the US Fish and Wildlife Service on wolf recovery; spread unnecessary fears that wolves carry diseases that are harmful to humans and other wildlife; and permit wolf poaching by prohibiting the citation or arrest of anyone who illegally kills a wolf.

If these legislators get their way, they plan to quickly move these bills to a vote before the public has had a chance to weigh in.

Please send a quick letter today for Washington's wolves. Urge your state representative and key members of the House Committee on Agriculture and Natural Resources to do all they can to stop this backdoor attempt to harm wolf recovery efforts in Washington.

Training solo

Unfortunately Brian is laid up for a little while, having torn his meniscus last week. Hopefully it’s not too serious and he’ll be back out there soon.

On Tuesday this week, I made an appointment to conduct an interview with an executive at the biotech company Allozyne in Seattle, and I had scheduled it for a Tuesday afternoon with the idea that I’d go to our sheepherding lesson, then hop back into the car and drive to Seattle for the appointment.

So in the absence of Brian, I decided to stop in anyway and do some training on our own. I did some driving with Rodeo, and he did well. Not too hesitant. A couple of times he looked back at me and then turned back into the sheep on his own without any encouragement, which I took as a good sign that he is gaining confidence.

Open-field shedding

This week we worked on shedding, which we’ve only done a few times under Brian’s supervision, and a few times on our own.

The object is to split a packet of sheep into two groups, and in a trial the target sheep may be painted with a mark or wear a collar. Today, Brian asked me to try to shed a group of lambs off from adult katahdins. There were about 15 sheep in total.

Brian wanted me to put the lambs into an adjoining field, accessible by a small gate.

I knew this was going to be tough, and it didn’t disappoint. The lambs have a tendency to stay together within the flock, so it was possible to create a gap that would remove most of the lambs. The original idea was to split off one group of lambs, move them off a ways, and then return to split out the rest. This is what’s done in the ‘international shed’ in competitions.

another sheepherding video

This one isn't mine, but it's brilliant. I like to think I wasn't this naive as a beginner. At least, a little less naive than this.

http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/8019485/

movie: Sheep vs. Dog

The conversation we handlers don't hear...

Outrun Shenanigans

This week’s lesson focused on outwork. We’ve been working nearly exclusively on driving, and he’s improving nicely, but neglecting outruns has led to some problems – one in particular, which showed up on Sunday, was his tendency to go to nearby sheep in a pen rather than going out into the field.

“This could be a real problem with him at trials. He has a tendency towards it,” Brian said. It’s a common problem. Dogs that watch previous runs will see where the sheep go at the end of the run (the exhaust), and will naturally tend to go where they think they’ll find sheep.

Fido's Farm Fun Trial

Sunday morning, I awoke at the painful hour of 6 am in order to drive 2 ½ hours to Fido’s Farm, in Olympia. We arrived to simultaneous sunshine and rain that is quintessential Pacific Northwest, and the weather managed to remain comparatively fair throughout the day.

We were there for a ‘fun trial,’ which had drive panels, a shedding ring, and a pen set up to simulate courses including Open, Pro Novice, Ranch, and Novice. I had entered Rodeo twice, and we were up 14^th and 20^th. The runs started at 9 and we rolled in a little after 10.

This was my first trip to Fido’s Farm. In addition to raising sheep and other livestock, they do boarding and every kind of dog training imaginable, from herding, to agility, to flyball and tracking.

They also have a sweeping vista of fields with a variety of sheep, and an info station where the various pens are labeled as holding ‘medium’ or ‘heavy’ sheep, or lambs, and handlers can freely move about between different pens, working different types of sheep, which is critical because it’s easy for a dog (and handler) to fall into lazy habits that get exposed when working unfamiliar sheep. For example, sheep vary dramatically in how readily they’ll move in response to a dog. Sheep that see dogs frequently – ie, the sheep you’re likely to be training on – may be forgiving of a dog that flashes in too tightly at the top of an outrun. The same path taken on flighty sheep will send them running for the hills, starting a race that the dog is almost certain to lose.

The fun trial was set up like any other trial, with a handler’s post and drive panels, and a handler’s shelter with plastic chairs set up, and a coordinator who ensured that handlers stuck to the ten minute time limit.

On our first run, I chose to run Ranch, which basically meant that we walked out past the handler’s post and about halfway down the field, in order to reduce the outrun to the appropriate length of about 150 yards. I sent him on the come by side (left), which put him between the sheep and the set out pen – that is, into the ‘pressure,’ because the sheep will tend to want to run back in the direction they came. Sending the dog into the pressure prevents them from doing that and gives him a better chance of exerting control.

But the strategy can backfire, because an inexperienced dog can get confused by the presence of the sheep in the setout pen and the sheep in the open field in close proximity, not to mention the setout crew and dog hovering nearby. That’s exactly what happened to Rodeo, and he stopped at about 10 o’clock, unsure of what to do next. Since this was a non-competitive trial, I could leave the ‘post’ to help him, so I walked forward and repeated commands until he completed the outrun and brought them to me.

I had him turn them around the post and begin a drive, which went fairly well, even if the sheep never came close to the drive panel. I retreated to the pen and we succeeded pretty quickly.

About an hour later, we had our second run, and this time I requested a Pro Novice course, which meant that we stayed at the original handler’s post, for an outrun of about 300 yards. We immediately had a problem in the sheep were being exhausted about 50 yards to our left, and Rodeo had fixated on them when they left the field after the previous run. He doesn’t understand yet that when I’m facing a direction and I send him, that there’ll be sheep there for him to find. Instead, he turned and ran towards the exhaust gate.

So I walked with him down the field until he saw the sheep in the field, and then I sent him. He ran into some trouble at the top, circling around the sheep some, but he brought them back without too much fuss after that.

He really improved in the drive the second time around. He took control of them and moved them with little hesitation, and was very responsive when I gave him flanking commands, both inside and outside. He easily drove them to the fetch panel, but I micro-managed him with flank commands and the sheep missed the panel. Still, it was clear that with a better job on my part, he could easily have made the panel. I was very pleased.

Rather than go for the cross-drive, I decided to move on to the pen to make sure that we could complete that and the second outrun before our allotted time was up. The pen again went off with little trouble, except that the sheep weren’t perfectly settled and they circled the pen once before we got them in, which would have been a deduction.

We did the final outrun, again walking down the field until he spotted the sheep, and then exhausted the sheep and retired. I ate some chili, chatted with some of the other handlers, and then headed to the dog washing station in one of the barns before loading him up in the car and heading for home.

It’s clear that Rodeo is making strides with driving, and equally clear that there is a lot of work to do on his outrun. Not surprising, really, because we’d been focusing so much effort on driving lately that he was bound to slip a little on the gather.

We really enjoyed our first trip to Fido’s Farm and will definitely be back. It’s a great facility for training – you can train all day for a modest fee – and it’s close to Mima Mounds, which is a great botanizing destination. So this Spring I foresee some weekend trips combining the two.