Finding What They're Meant to Do II

    I was hit with a new level of understanding about Brockle and his bolt.

   When he charges, barks and jumps at a dog, he is doing naturally what is expected of him in Schutzhund competition, except it's not happening at my command and it's not appropriately directed.

When a setter gets out the gate and takes off through the neighborhood for a jaunt, his head is down and he quarters each lawn,  actively hunting for fun like he would in the field for his owner. The zig-zag is bred into him, along with the desire to find it and point at it.

A cow horse turned out in a pasture with cattle will work them freely. The stop and turn is bred into him and the desire to boss those cows around is his idea of fun.

Brockle, mixed up mutt though he may be, drives across the fields at those dogs with all of the eagerness, speed and straightness of the competition dogs.

Now I know why HMT wanted me to hold off on the shock collar. If I use a shock collar to stop his drive it will create a hesitation in him. Part of him will be wondering, "When am I going to get zapped?" as he flies along.

What I need to do is shape his direction and control when he gets to satisfy this natural desire. If he's directed correctly (which is where I need help from HMT), I'm guessing Brockle will also understand there's a proper time and place for his lunge and run and wait for me to tell him when to use it.

This will give me the means to redirect him.

I got pretty excited and let this line of thinking roll around for awhile. It's not like shaping an animal's behavior to suit my needs is a new concept. I was thinking about shaping behaviors vs. creating behaviors and when we make roadblocks for ourselves and our animals by not understanding exactly the consequence of our actions.

Then I jumped to breed influence. Shaping behaviors that come from a dog/horse/pig/chicken breed vs. creating behaviors to divert the nature of the animal.

Let's take the instinctive flight/fight response horses come with. They all have it. How we shape it determines the horse we end up with.

Ideally, we want to train our horses to carry us along, go where we point them, stop when we say stop and not kick, smash, buck, bite, throw us into trees, in other words, let us live.

By it's nature a horse will run first, fight second when it feels threatened.

Fight comes first when flight won't fix it. Defending young, territory, mares etc.

My personal thoughts while training a horse are that a flight response doesn't hurt me or the horse, but a fight sure can. So I'd rather not fight.

This is why I always offer an escape to a horse. Even one that's securely tied to an iron rail with a rope halter has the option to move it's hip away from me and get a release of pressure.

Having an escape available for a horse is so automatic for me I don't have to think about it anymore, but it took a lot of years. I rarely get in fights with my horses.

All horses have a flight or fight response and I have chosen my path to begin all horses by shaping the flight response to my needs.

Now we can get into the automatic responses created by breed influence.

My first successful reined cowhorse was Sonita,  a handful of a mare that taught me more than I can say. She was so geared to work she would cut anything. Llamas, kids, kids on bikes, flags, balloons, blowing plastic bags, dust devils, absolutely any object waving in the breeze that stood out from it's environment was something she would work. This was with me or without me BTW. If she couldn't control it's movement she would lose interest, but it was very clear she had been bred to work cattle.

On the flip side, that same hyper awareness made her afraid of tractors, indoor arenas, anything happening over her head, white spots on walls, odd patches of snow, I could go on for hours. Her breeding had done that too.

Shaping man-made behaviors is both easier and harder than shaping the ones that nature gives all horses. I think it's because we're not as good at it as Nature is. People breed to enhance performance for themselves rather than survival for the horse. We forget that for every spectacular new response we breed into an animal we are going to get a balancing response along with it, which will be equally unspectacular.

It was easy to get Sonita on a cow, it was a near death experience to get her past a tractor.

Man-made behaviors don't always make sense to the horse either, we tend to breed things into them they don't understand. I'm willing to wager Sonita's compulsion to cut a plastic bag stuck on a bush didn't make sense to her. It probably contributed to her craziness though.

Then comes the third response we put into our animals. This is the one that I really started thinking about while working Brockle. This response is all about us, it's the response we want from our animal that has nothing to do with their natural or man-made self. Dog Dancing comes to mind. Now there's a competition made entirely for our amusement. I'm not saying the dogs don't love it, they seem to think it's as funny as we do, but it's based on nothing but our will.

This is one of the coolest training knots I've ever come up with. I'm thinking the clearest, cleanest communication between me and whatever animal I'm training will come from beginning to shape the instinctive behaviors that come with the animal first.

If I can channel an instinctive response to work in my favor it will lay the groundwork for the next step, shaping the man-made bred in responses. The animal will be open to my training in this murkier area because of the clear relationship we've already established. If I'm on the look-out for the balancing behaviors that come during this phase, and don't look at it as a negative, but just another, expected response to shape, will I get a better animal? I don't know yet, but it makes sense.

If I've been successful in all of this shaping and modifying, the third phase should be cake. We should have our minds tuned in enough for my trainee to accept my request whether it makes sense or not, if for no other reason then the trust and understanding built by that point.

I understand horses better than dogs, so my example is equine.

1. Start a colt with the standard round pen type thinking (even though your pen can be any shape or size). Restraint is voluntary, flight is always possible.
As the colt's training progresses, the flight response is honed until a foot step away is as much a release as blowing away from a flag was at the beginning.
2. Bring in the bred in behaviors. Begin to shape the speed, cowiness, elasticity, whatever your breed offers.
3. Now it's time for double bridles, spade bits, jumps that are higher than the horses head, dancing, talking to Wilbur, whatever.

It's going to be interesting sorting this out with dogs...

Finding What They're Meant to Do

I've been worried about my blog.
When I worry, I float away.
Part of it is evasion, but most of it is letting things percolate in the back of my mind, until they sort themselves out into coherent thought instead of a vague, smoggy cloud.

I've worried about the blog because it's become so much about theory, instead of actual doing. I'm not riding enough horses to come up with interesting problems and solutions anymore. Madonna is pretty much who she is, a decently trained, keen eyed cowhorse. Odin is coming along as fast as my riding time allows, but he's an amiable, competent, easy to get along with horse, so I don't have a lot of stories coming from him.

Riding them is a joy for me, but not particularly the stuff of interesting training knots. I miss those knots. So here's my question to you guys. Should we bring the training questions back to the main blog? I've been neglecting the training page something terrible. If anybody has a training question, they can bring it up here, I'll reach back in the dusty archives and answer as best I can and we'll go from there. We can move conversations back to the training page, chances are I'll remember it's there that way.

Anyway, let me know-- now onto my post.

How often do we read, hear or say,"I have to find what my horse, dog, self, child, wants to do,"?

The theory is sweet, kind and open-minded. Thing is, I also think it's suspect.

I suspect it REALLY means, "What can I find that's easy enough for me to handle?"

Does jumping my warmblood scare the crap out of me? As a rider, if I'm scared, my horse is going to perform poorly.  If I don't want to admit I'm scared, it's easy to justify all by saying, "He's much happier since we started riding Dressage."

Which, up until recently, didn't bother me.

Except I've been learning something  from my dogs. Actually, I've been learning lots from them lately. This particular instance is finding what they are meant to do, by learning what they were bred to do.

Many of you know, I have four dogs, Charlie, a rat terrier (9), Dinah a corgi/JRT mix (15), Snocone, a mostly maltese (100), and my newest addition, Brockle, a big hairy GSD something or other (1).

Brockle is a wonderful dog. He lives life large, has become my devoted guardian and assistant, and has a wicked sense of humor. He is also a rotten, bumbling, arrogant, dominant, willful teenage boy.

Brockle is not the most dog I have shared my life with -- that would be my wolf hybrid Scott, from twenty years ago-- but he is the smartest, at least from a human perspective. He is still a lot of dog, and in order to avoid the mistakes I made with Scott, I went to a professional dog trainer for help.

I was lucky enough to have made the acquaintance, through my job at the FV newspaper, with the Colorado Springs newspaper's dog training columnist. He's a GSD trainer who specializes in Schutzhund training and I have always liked his philosophy on people and dogs. So he was where I went to for help.

We're a good match, he read Brockle where I couldn't and was able to help me understand how he ticks. He also plays some pretty hard core heavy metal and shouts "Free beer!" every time Brockle does something spectacular. Hard man not to like.

It became clear very quickly Brockle is mentally all GSD. Physically, he moves and responds the same too, so he's been an easy read for my trainer. It's been harder for me, I'm not familiar with the breed, other than admiring the working shepherds at the FVPD. Needless to say, I've been having a blast, because I get to untie knots again, and I'm learning something new.

I have learned Brockle is a sensitive, dominant dog with an unusual focus on all things Mugs. HMT (Heavy Metal Trainer) told me he has only come across one other dog in his career with such single minded focus on his owner. This is good and bad, good because I always know where Brockle is, bad because he is so non-responsive when being handled by others.

HMT starts new training with games and treats. Really, really, good treats. Brockle will play them with him, but slowly, and he looks back at me every two or three seconds. Within a minute or so Brockle breaks away from the task and comes back to me. This makes it hard for HMT to teach me our next step, because like the Big K, he's more of a "show it" than a "say it" kind of trainer.

We're getting it though and Brockle is sharp enough and motivated enough for us to continue on into the actual Schutzund training. One of you guys suggested I look into Schutzhund when I was first wallowing around for training help, whoever that was, THANK YOU!

Anyway, I really do have a point here, bear with me.

Brockle still charges dogs. His recall is perfect...unless he sees a dog. Then his eyes glaze over and he's gone. Straight as an arrow he flies with astounding speed, straight at his target, and pounces on it. He hasn't hurt one yet, but there is a lot of snarling, snapping and slobber involved and completely freaked out dog owners.
Then he spins around and flies back to me.

He's doing really well as far as ignoring them on leash or his 30 foot training line, but I still don't have him off leash.

He understands and obeys "Leave it!" for people, livestock, birds, anything and everything, but not other dogs. It's driving me nuts.

HMT is not a Positive Response only type trainer. Like me, he believes animals need to understand the concept of consequence. He didn't faint, freak or stone me when I asked if we needed to try a shock collar.
He did however, tell me to hold off. I didn't get an explanation, but being well broke by the Big K, I didn't question him, I just did what I was told.

I also started watching Schutzhund competitions on Youtube. At first I just watched with my mouth a little open and the thought, I'll never be able to get him to do this. After a while though, I started to really see the dogs work. I watched them over and over, until I felt like I was getting a feel for the energy. I'm not even close to understanding good runs vs. bad ones, unless they're obvious, but I'm beginning to see the forest.

The next time I lost Brockle to a dog launch it was a poor unsuspecting little brown dog and her owner at least the length of a football field away. As he blew off my "Leave it!" and took off like he'd been shot out of a cannon, I had time to admire how fast and true he was flying at the now screaming lady and her dog.

It hit me like a coyote on a cat. Brockle looked exactly like the dogs in the Schutzhund competitions during the protection tests. Straight, powerful and %100 percent focused on the task at hand -- taking out the bad guy.

He wasn't being bad, he was doing what he has been bred to do (however haphazardly), protecting me.
It was suddenly clear to me why HMT didn't want me to use a shock correction and why I couldn't break through Brockle's obsessive need to launch.

More tomorrow, I've got to take Jim to the Doc.

Try, Try Again

Man, oh man.

Life can sure bite you in the butt, can't it?

I haven't been neglecting only you.

I haven't been writing at all. For anyone, including myself.

I have been almost, barely, been keeping up with my column. At least I haven't been fired yet, but I have been struggling mightily there too, and it's my job for goodness sake.

It's all about distraction.

Any of you who get to live with ADD -- whether in yourself or someone close -- know about distraction. It's not like we ADD folk fly around from subject to subject, jump with abandon from thought to thought, well OK, maybe it is, but not all the time, and usually, there is reason behind all the jumping.

Our mind will skitter here and there when we try to focus on a subject, it will refuse to grasp it and work at it, instead, we find ourselves doing this crazy Vitus dance around whatever we're trying to grasp and each random jerk of our head, or foot, or arm launches us onto another thought, then another...

After living with this unusual way of thinking (unusual for you maybe, same ol', same ol' for me) without medication for more than 55 years now, I have finally begun to get it.

ADD has also given me an incredible gift, known in the medical, psychological, and exhausted friend and mom world as hyper-focus.

When those of us of the ADD ilk sink into the luxury of hyper-focus, our mind becomes razor sharp, and can see only the object or thought in front of us.

When I go there, combined with a mildly obsessive nature ("ahem," interjects Damn Therapist, forever known as D.T.), I live, breathe and function with the thought or object as the only thing I see.

For years, it was learning about Working Cowhorse. The sport, the method, how it affected the horse, the rider, where it came from, mechanics, all of it, everything. It was the only thing on my mind for years.

Think about it, I was what, 40 or so when I got into it, maybe my late thirties, and I immediately learned it was a sport for the wealthy.

A single class  at a small, state club-sponsored, NRCHA approved show runs about $180.

This year, the great big, lots of added money, nationally attended show had an average price of $1100 per class. FOR A SINGLE CLASS.

You can see where you quickly find yourself saying, "Oh, good, I can afford this one, it will only cost me $400 or so" That would be for 2 classes on one horse, or 1 class with two horses and gas. No stalls, bedding, trailer fees, overnight fees etc. I was and am a poor person. This was and is an insane amount of money.

Being the ADD person I am, this little hill meant nothing to me in my road to learn cowhorse. I was an open rider, like it or not, because I gave riding lessons and started colts for a living.

This was fine, because I couldn't afford to be a non-pro, the only way I could show was to learn to train it myself. The only way to learn was to ride multiple horses, the only way to ride multiple horses was to go pro....so I did.

This was at the same time I met the Big K. He was 15 years younger than me and had twenty years more experience. As time went by he became as focused on helping me learn how to train cowhorse as I was. Why? Because we're twin sons of different mothers (killer 70's reference for all you youngsters out there).
We are obsessed with horses, what makes them tick and how to tune their tick to ours, and we are crazy intent on riding cowhorse.

I raised my daughter in this environment, dirt poor, scraping together money for show after show, she slept in the corner of many an arena, was "home" with the flu more than once on a cot in the tack room with a space heater and micro-waved cup-o-noodles. We had no money, no insurance,shopped at the ARC and the U-name-it-mart and ate very simply.

She didn't have many video games or extra curricular school activities, but she did have a horse to ride, and lots of time with me. Quantity, not quality, that was my credo. She missed too much school (at least as long as she had good grades) because we were on the road, hauling to arenas in Colorado Nebraska, the Dakotas, Wyoming,  or New Mexico.

In the end, I got what I wanted, needed,  to be able to train a good cowhorse.

Did I o the right thing?

Don't know, hope so, but can't promise I could have put it down, if it had been wrong.

So now I'm on the next chapter and I don't have a focus. Writing was there, my two lovely horses, the dogs, you guys, but I've been jumping, here there and everywhere, my Vitus dance becoming wilder and the ensuing thoughts spiraling off into space instead of telling me where to go.

Maybe it's because I didn't choose this life. I have no interest in paying attention to Parkinson's or Jim's stroke. I don't want to learn to live with my new reality... skitter, skitter.

I have learned over the years to accept and release my distractions. I don't let my hyper-focus go there, because it could be twenty years before I come up for air.

One by one, I let the distractions go, it feels like they seep away on their own, but I've learned that it's me shoving them away. My life becomes smaller and I can start to glimpse the thoughts I need to be turning my attention to.

This last month I was down to bare bones.
No writing, hardly any horses. I didn't go out, started shutting out friends, both on the 'Net and at home, no reading, no cooking, all of my escapes were peeled away and discarded.

These past few weeks I have begun to get my house in order. Setting the priorities I need to balance myself and my reality. Ew. I'm hating that one. But my wise and crazy brain has been peeling away my random thoughts and making me recognize them as distractions until I finally saw what I needed to be working on.

It's falling into place. As I have begun to get things squared at home-- I won't bore you with the details, but it has to do with taking back my life--  Jim and I have been able get on with our new reality.

So, the writing is coming back, I have lots of half-written posts to revisit and share, my horses are getting ridden and I'm bumping up into some collection issues with Odin. I've had some great big leaps in horse/dog training perception, am excited to share and get your input on these, and the stories are finally, finally coming back.