Spring Trial Season

The spring trial season is nearly here! It's been a busy few weeks around the farm and with the Shoofly pack. Lambing started about April 1st and just finished up this week. Final count out of 22 ewes is 19 ram lambs and 11 ewe lambs. It was mostly an easy lambing, only a little hiccup here and there. It's pretty amazing to look out on the farm and see about 70 sheep hanging out. That's a lot for my little place, for sure! I'll be having a big sheep sell-off after the Whistle for a Cure trial in June, trying to get back down to about 30 sheep total. It'll be tough picking out that many to sell but it's got to be done. Reserve yours now! ;-)

The dogs are doing pretty okay. Zac has been getting the lion's share of the work and is loving every second of it, in true Zac fashion. Lambing has been good for him. He missed a lot of this kind of work when he was younger and should have been getting it, due to injury. So better late than never i guess. He's not always completely confident he can handle cranky mama ewes but he's always in there trying his heart out. And he's learned to push silly baby lambs around, even if he does have a somewhat disgusted look on his face doing so. Jet is cranking along, Bill's been gimpy but i'm hoping/planning to run him at the upcoming trials anyway. Tug is cute as ever and still on hold for starting his sheep training. He's really rough on the sheep and i'm hoping to get a bit of help with him on our upcoming trip. Dot is settling in well and working more nicely all the time.

So speaking of the upcoming trial season, we're off to KY, leaving next Thursday. First stop will be the Shaker Village trial in Harrodsburg. This is one of my favorite trials, with a gorgeous field. Since there's a 2 dog limit on Open, i'm planning to run Zac and Jet in Open, with Bill in Nursery and Dot in ProNovice. Following the trial, I'm going to pull the camper over to Vergil and AnneMarie Holland's for a few days of visiting and working dogs around Lexington, and hopefully visiting my brother and his family in Louisville. Then we're off to Mike and Laura Hanley's Chinquapinwood trial, where all 3 Open dogs get to run, and Bill will run Nursery. Following that, we head to the Bluegrass Classic SDT. It looks like i'll only be able to run 1 dog in the Open this year, with my current spot very low on the waiting list for the second one, and I plan for that to be Jet. Bill will run in the Nursery and I'll have Dot in PN and then move her up to Ranch for the final 2 days. I may shift my plans on which Open dogs run when, but this is my current plan. Bill's been gimpy since injuring his rear leg in January and seemed to tweak it some last week, so it will be a late call on running him. I may sub him in for Jet if she doesn't run well at Shaker Village, and if the heat is getting to her at the Bluegrass, i may run Zac in the second round. I'm especially looking forward to the first 2 trials. It's a little harder to muster up excitement for the BG this year, with just one Open run per round. I know they have to limit the trial and this is the most fair way to do it, but i have to say, if i didn't have dogs to run on the novice field as well as the Open field, i probably would skip it. I don't see sitting around for 4 days (2 days for each Open round) to get only 2 Open runs in as a good use of vacation time and travel dollars. So, let's hope Bill does well in the Nursery and Dot gets off the waiting list (I expect she will) for PN and Ranch and does well there too!

I should have internet access on the road, and will be posting trial updates as often as i can here and on Facebook.

Slacker

Boy have i turned into a slacker about this blog. It's been almost a whole month since i posted, hard to believe. I did start on a new training article but haven't quite found the motivation to finish it. Maybe soon.

Winter is turning to spring around here. Temps are up, the grass is turning green and starting to grow, and the early flowering trees and bushes are coloring up. I'm still waiting on the red buds but the Bradford pears and forsythias are doing their showy stuff right now. It's nice at the farm right now as we're mostly past the mud season and haven't started the battle against the summer weeds. The sheep are fat and happy and look to be about ready to burst with lambs. Pre-lambing vaccinations have been done, we sheared the wool ewes this past weekend, and will do a last minute worming in the next week or so, and then lambing should begin around April 1st. I'm eager to get started with it after hearing of lambs all over from so many friends around the country on Facebook. I've also made arrangements to buy in a small flock of katahdins, so the ovine population at Shoofly is getting ready to really explode. They look to be nice sheep and i'm looking forward to working them while everyone else is off on maternity leave.

The Shoofly dogs are doing pretty well. It's been a very laid back winter for them mostly. Zac and Bill have both been on extended rest to recover from injuries. Both are just now coming back to work, and we have a job ahead of us getting ready for trial season. It's coming on fast, with our first trial being the Shaker Village trial, May 1st & 2nd in KY. They'll bounce right back to working okay, but we're under the gun on conditioning. Jet has been doing the lion's share of work this winter at the farm but it's not enough to keep a dog fit, and at almost 9 years old that's a pretty big consideration for running her. Right now, if everyone is sound and fit, i plan to run Bill and Zac at Shaker Village and Chinquapinwood, and Jet at the Bluegrass.

The puppies are doing well, growing up and mostly looking like dogs instead of puppies. Well, little fluffy Tug still looks puppyish sometimes, but Moon looks all grown up. Moon came home with me for awhile, but it became obvious that she and Tug really needed to be separated. They play too rough and are way into each other, and oblivious to people, when they're together. So this past weekend Moon went to her new permanent home with Laura C. According to Moon, that's where she belonged anyway. She just loves Laura and her pack, making that obvious when she squeezed through the fence wire to run and jump in Laura's van the last time she was around. It looks to me like a match meant to be.

In other Shoofly dog news, i've added a new dog. Dot is a 4 year old, fully trained dog who was having some trouble meshing with her owner at sheep work. Sometimes it just goes that way, and it's really quite nice that Dot's owner recognized this and let Dot go to a place where she might fit her handler better. I know it was hard to see a dog she'd raised from a baby puppy leave, and i respect her for doing what she thought was best for the dog. Hard to do! So far, Dot is fitting in very well and she seems to like working for me. She's a real love personality-wise and i hope to run her some at the spring trials. I'm looking forward to spending time working her and getting together with her on the field.

That leaves the Shoofly pack at 5 dogs, a nice number to be taking along to the trials in KY this spring. Right now i'm planning to go to the Shaker Village trial and stay straight through to the end of the Bluegrass. It'll be quite an adventure living in the camper for that long!

Family Pics

I got a nice family picture of the "Spottie Family" yesterday. From L to R: Zac and Nan (Spottie x Link), Spottie herself, then the Zac x Chris pups, Ranger, Moon, and Tug.

This is a shot of the 3 pups, looking pretty grown up at almost 7 months old. All 3 are very keen for sheep. They're sweet pups, outgoing and friendly, and getting very curly!
I liked this picture of Zac and his sister Nan - someone said it looks like a prom picture. It makes me think "big brother, little sister". Nan was spending the weekend for a little training tune up.This is what most of the pictures turned out like. Who would think you could make six dogs *not* look at you, all at once!

Snow and Hill Training

The winter weather here provided us with a nice training challenge that i thought i'd share. Last week we got several inches of snow and i grabbed the dogs and went out and worked in it. It's cold and miserable, but the weather provides a challenge that can be hard to find on a small farm with a well dogged flock of sheep. That challenge is the opportunity to make sheep go somewhere they really don't want to go, and allows the dogs to dig down and really push into some heavy, stubborn sheep.

My farm has a fairly steep hill. It's not huge but rises somewhat steeply. I love that hill, it's wonderful for training dogs. It's an excellent place to tap into natural sheep behavior and use it to my advantage, and to train dogs naturally. Sheep don't care for going straight up a hill, they prefer to amble on a diagonal up a hill face. Look at the sheep paths in a field - they're never straight up and down. If your feet were split in two right down the middle, you wouldn't like going straight uphill either! This is especially true with big wool sheep. Hair sheep have smaller, more trim feet so it's not as big of a deal to them, but they still don't love it. I use this natural tendency in sheep a lot in training. For example, when teaching a youngster to drive, i do a lot of driving back and forth across the face of the hill. The sheep tend to be happy and calm, not too heavy (as going uphill) and not too light (as going downhill, with gravity and pull to the barn at work). This is just one way i use that hill, there are many.

Back to the snow days. At the bottom of my hill, there's a runoff stream cutting through the pasture. It's dry or only slightly wet 90% of the time. It'll run after a big rain if we're not too dry out. But in winter it runs pretty frequently, especially in a wet winter such as we're having this year. And with a wet winter and a big snow melting, it's running pretty good. So, add a wet area with running stream and a snow covered hill to go up, and 40 sheep, about half of which are wool, and it's a very good opportunity for the dogs to get in there and really have to push and figure out how to *make* sheep move from the bottom area to the top. Other times, the dogs are mostly guiding the movement of the sheep, controlling the leaders, with an occasional push at the rear to keep the stragglers up. With this winter situation, the dogs have to figure out how to push sheep from the side and the rear, and it takes a good bit more oomph.

It's interesting to me to go out and do this with the dogs, and to see how their methods work or don't, and how the different dogs will adapt to it. If a dog is having trouble moving the sheep, i'll try to make it a little easier by asking them to take a more diagonal path. I'll also let the stronger dogs have the first shot at it, as it does get easier to move the sheep uphill once they've done it and broken up the snow some. Sometimes i'll do this as a drive, and sometime as a fetch. It's always easier to fetch than drive, so i'll add that variable to my training plan. It's a fun and interesting thing to do on a snow day.

Winter Drags on...

It's really dragging this year, that's for sure. We've been getting a lot of rain, and even a pretty big snow (for this area) this past weekend. It makes training dogs a challenge when everything is so slippery and muddy. The farm drains pretty well but even with that, it's been pretty soupy.

Tug and Moon are growing up and getting big. At 6 months old, both are right around 30 pounds. Moon is still with Laura and i have Tug with me. It's really worked out well for me, as it's so much easier having one puppy at a time. And it's been good for the pups, for sure. They were way too into each other. Tug's a nice guy to have around and mostly is pretty calm and well-behaved. He has his moments of course, but he's handled all the indoor time this winter remarkably well. I've had him on sheep a couple of times recently and am impressed by his "want to" - he wants desperately to get into sheep. And he doesn't seem to have any "back down" to him, but yet he's fairly responsive to body pressure. He's a long way from ready to train, and i'll be curious to see if my early impressions hold out.

The big dogs are doing all right. Jet clips on along, sweet girl that she is. Zac is still on rest/rehab time. When weather allows, he and i are marching up and down hills at the farm, trying to calmly get him back into shape. I'm hoping to start working him soon, well, as soon as the snow and ice is gone anyway. I noticed some blood in his urine recently and we're trying to figure out what's causing that. I should hear something from the vet in the next day or two. Bill has been loosely on quiet/rest time. He was off on his left rear a few weeks ago and it seemed a good time to rest him.

We're off to the Lazy J SDT this weekend in Carnesville, GA. I'll be running Bill and Jet in the Open, in hopes of picking up some points towards qualifying for the Finals this year. Zac has enough points already that i can relax on running him. I would really like to get Jet qualified. She'll be 9 years old in April and is my best dog on tougher wool sheep. I plan to run her at any wool sheep trials i can get to this year. Here's hoping we get a break on the wet weather for this weekend!

Tug on Sheep

He's surely keen at not quite six months old! Thanks to Christine Henry for the pictures.

Catching Up Again, Edgeworth Winter SDT

Sorry, i've been slack lately on posting here. There's not a whole lot going on but i can do a Shoofly Dog update. The puppies are 5 months old and growing up, wild little creatures. Moon is a real sweetie pie and is spending time with a friend so she and Tug can learn to stand on their own. Together they are a 2 puppy wrecking machine and go completely deaf to outside influence. She'll come back in a few weeks but in the meantime is having a good time and stealing hearts. Tug looks more like Zac every day and is just the funniest puppy. He's really a good boy. We tried them and Ranger on sheep again recently and they still look like they'll be working fiends, keen keen keen. Just what i like to see at this age. Gael is still out on loan and working very well, behaving herself nicely. Zac is on enforced rest again, as i try to clear up a nagging soreness he was having. Hopefully he'll be back to work in a month or so. Jet and Billy continue along, no big news there, they just wish there was more sheep work to be had this time of year. Short days keep that from happening much though.

I took the dogs up to the Edgeworth Winter SDT this past weekend and ran Bill and Jet. I thought both dogs worked very well and handled the sheep nicely but just some little errors on my part in all the runs cost us placements. Both dogs were just out of it the first day, by a couple of points. Second day was the same story, after i had trouble penning on both runs. I ran Bill's Nursery run at the end of the second day and he did something that i thought was pretty spectacular. At the pen, a ewe decided to challenge him and he just hung in there, walking slowly forward, very calmly. Finally this ewe decided she was trapped and butted him. And he just stood there, calm as could be, as though a fly had just buzzed around his head or something, no big deal. I don't think anyone has ever tried to butt him before and he just stood in there like a very experienced, confident dog. Really, a pretty special sort of natural reaction on his part. The group calmly turned around and walked in the pen afterwards. That was worth all of the effort of getting there! It was a really nice trial as usual, though really cold out. The sheep were lovely and a lot of fun. I wish i'd been sharper but it's the off season and it surely showed. I don't know about the dogs but it sure seems i'll need a little tuning up before spring!