A new language

I got home from work and it's still light out. Woo hoo! I had thrown a stew in the crock pot last night, so I didn't have to worry about cooking tonight. I cracked a Corona, grabbed Echo and headed out to the pasture to work on whistles.

I am down to 11 sheep. 4 of them are lambs that I can work. The rest of them are pregnant ewes. The lambs needed to be sorted off, so Echo and I put everyone in the round pen. I know some people would have waited for just the lambs to magically walk out of the round pen, I used it as a training session for Echo. She was a bit too tight and a bit to excited at first, but I calmly backed her off, and she quickly figured out what I needed and decided she had much more control from a distance. In no time, we had just the 4 lambs in the main area. The lambs quickly figured out what was going on and headed for the open lambing pens. Cool. This is something I haven't worked on much with Echo yet, and will need to know how to do for the Washington trial in March. To see where we're at, I sent Echo into the 3' by 8' lambing pen to see how she'd handle it. She went straight up the middle with her mouth open, out popped 4 sheep with a black dog hot on their ass. Effective, but ugly. Deciding to leave THAT training for another day, we drove the sheep off to the big pasture.

From this point, I decided that everything I communicated to her was going to be via whistle. Everything. If I had to add verbal commands, that was ok. But the first time a command was to be given, it would be a whistle. The main goal of the training session was to continue to work on the down whistle, but I expanded it on the short walk to the field. And am I glad I did. She took more whistle commands than not, and when she wasn't right, a simple correction did the trick. My whistles suck so I feel bad for her, but as Patrick always says, it's her job to figure out what those screeching noises are coming from her person. I guess it's better than my screeching voice.

So I have a bit of a ray of hope that we'll get our down at the top of the outrun at the trial this weekend, and hopefully be able to fetch the sheep at a little less than light speed.

Happy tails,
Jodi