Getting Motivated

Thanks to the German Shepherd Dog Club of Atlanta and its Versatility program (not to be confused with the AKC Versatile Companion Dog titles), I'm feeling motivated to get off the couch and work the dog now and again.

This copy is slightly out-of-date, I think. The copy for this year included the optional titles in Obedience. This turns Obedience into the great spot to get points, it looks like. It's not completely un-doable to charge in with the CGC, then pick up the full sweep of seven titles -- assuming, of course, that your dog can do all the exercises. It wouldn't hurt to throw in the Rally titles as an excellent place to practice heeling with lots of upbeat chitchat and fun.

Tracking and Herding are the big instinct outlets for German Shepherd Dogs, of course. Once upon a time, the forebears of the breed pushed the sheep out to pasture, kept them in line without fences all day, searched out and brought back any sneaky strays, then pushed them all home again and rounded up the children. Now we have to get formal. In an ideal world, C course herding (tending) would be easier to find, but we have to pretend our dogs are designed for chute-and-gate work instead. The other big outlet for shepherdy drives is Working Dog Sport, which involves tracking, obedience, and protection work. The national breed club still supports it, but the AKC does not.

The remaining AKC performance category is Agility, which most dogs love much as most children love a playground. It takes a solid, sound body, so it's a good idea to have the OFA certification on hips and elbows before getting too heavily involved. Puppies, though, are happy enough to learn the contacts and to step over a little jump. It's a good idea to teach as much precision as you can cram into your shepherd's head before you try to speed up, as most of them seem to want to run wild over every square foot of the equipment -- including parts that were never meant to contain a dog! Sunny, gonzo gal that she was, liked to jump between the tire jump and its supports rather than through the tire. You lose qualifying runs that way.

A huge portion of the Versatility program rewards health testing and responsible ownership. Microchipped? One point. Health test made public regardless of result? Point. Altering an animal you deem unlikely to improve the breed if it passes on its genes? Point. While getting the particular point profiles to match the club's title descriptions isn't easy, getting a decent point total isn't terribly hard if you actually do stuff with your dog. Your dog can even pick up a point by living past the age of ten. An altered ten-year old rescue with a microchip and a CGC qualifies for the club's Versatility Started certificate.

Dustin also qualified for a certificate, but I am feeling ambitious, or greedy, or motivated, or all three. I tell my husband titling the dog doesn't cost that much more than a gym membership. He tells me that he'd rather I had the gym membership, but I can carry the kid in a backpack while I lay and run tracks, or do obedience, or teach basic agility. He'd get squished if I did bench presses with him in there.

So, we're tracking. We're herding when possible. We're jumping at height, now that the hips and elbows are clear. And believe it or not, we're even working obedience, though the dog is in it for the cheese and it's not my favorite school subject either. My son is learning hand signals.

If you live in the area and have a shepherd, come join the club -- and me! We can get into a happy and productive title war.

Tracking and Herding

We're getting back to our instinct outlets at last!

Dustin's run a couple of 75-pace tracks lately, one with four articles, one with just one at the end. He's doing them well, and I think we're ready to start doing longer work at last. His concentration is better. He's also finally getting over his pine-needle hangup.

After Sunny died, the last place he smelled her away from home was at a local dog park, where she'd loafed on pine needles the week before. Since then, he wouldn't work them. Just wouldn't. He didn't mope the last few times I tried, but just wandered off dinking around. Finally I phooeyed him, put him back on the line, and gave him a really high-value treat for completing the track which had ended under the pines. Now I randomly use the higher-value treat at the end of some tracks and he works wherever I put him.

We're also going to get back to non-grass surfaces pretty soon. He's used to driveway crossings, but working along a sidewalk is something else again. Training Sunny, I gave her a couple of tracks laid barefoot with twig-sized scent articles in the sidewalk cracks, and that appeared to work. The best articles appeared to be foil gum wrappers rolled up to toothpick size, which slipped in well, were overlooked by local custodians, and weren't too hard to remove.

Bruce is also getting back to his tracking, to his delight. I'm still trying to get through to him that it's good to stop at the articles. He happily goes from footprint to footprint and keeps right on going past anything that might earn him a treat. It won't be a problem to take him to greater distances, but I'd really like to be certain he'll find the final wallet or glove and let me know about it, rather than carrying on through the tracklayer's subsequent motions and then barking furiously upon finding him or her.

And Dustin and I are also herding again. He's getting taken back to the very beginning of all things, in hopes of improving his outrun and getting rid of his overflanking, and in hopes also of getting him to stop working brilliantly for a puppy and start just plain working brilliantly. Besides, (confession time!) his handler has forgotten a lot.

Herding Sheep

Dustin and I went to work sheep for the first time in months and the second time in a couple of years -- poor dog. We used to go several times a week.

This time we went to a different farm with a different variety of sheep, smaller than we were used to and much, much faster. They wouldn't let Dustin work in his usual method, which resembles something out of the movie Babe, cuddling up to them and whispering his directions into their ears. We spent a certain amount of time racing up and down a very hot long pen before Dustin settled to his satisfaction that these were stupid sheep, he wasn't going to get near them, and he could still control them through action at a distance. Once he got the hang of being able to move them from fifty feet away, in fact, he seemed to rather like it. For the first time in his life, he could tell that "Walk up" meant, as I told him, "Not me, them!" because I wasn't anywhere near the silly creatures either.

Most people who try to trial on sheep use a lot of Scottish (or, given how German most German training commands really are, pseudo-Scottish) phrases like "Away to me!" and "Come bye!" when they're working. Most people then forget which is which, or stand there yelling out "Way! Stay! Lay!" and wondering why the dog isn't obeying those three loud Ay!s from a hundred yards off. Dustin and I do try to learn our ways and byes, but we do far better if I tell him what I want in plain English. "Bring 'em. Put 'em there," with a point of the stick, generally gets me a flock of sheep brought up to me and then stuck wherever "there" might be. Pushing the dog over this way, then over that way, as though the sheep are a little ball bearing I'm trying to trap in a hole by tipping the field, generally gets me sheep everywhere, an annoyed dog who figures it's all my fault with perhaps some justice, and a laughing coach leaning on the fence.

I say cooperation works best, regardless of linguistic origins. It's not like the dog cares whether I command him in English, German, or Choctaw. If he were herding German-style, there would be very few commands or large gestures. Too, if I'm just saying "Push 'em through there," I tend to say it calmly, which the dog and sheep all respond to. Come to think of it, so do herding judges.

Retrieving, Thinking and Philosophy of Mind

Quite a long time ago I read a philosopher's paper which I do not remember well. I think it was Dennett, and I think it was on decision-making, but what I do remember vividly is that he wrote about throwing two tennis balls for his Labrador. The dog would race back and forth between the two for quite some time, then choose one apparently at random when he was tired enough.

Now, what is surprising here is that I didn't try this on one of my own dogs sooner. I think this must be a paper from when my husband was in graduate school, when we had a dog who didn't care to fetch, or from my undergraduate program, when the dog was at home with my parents and school had nothing to do with my retreats there. However, Dennett was recently brought back to my attention by a secondhand social contact, and I tried to recall if this was his story.

Then I formed a hypothesis. Not all dogs are Labradors, bred to take directions. Some breeds, particularly herders, are required to make snap decisions on their own, and the German Shepherd Dog is one of those breeds. I expected that one object would bounce more or further, and that my dog would go after that one. Then, of course, I whistled for Dustin.

His current obsession is magnolia cones. They bounce and skitter tolerably well, and saved me the trouble of finding two reasonably well-matched balls in this chaotic household. Also, it's not too hard to fit two in one hand to throw together. And it turned out I was right: one cone always activated the naughty-sheep protocol by bouncing further, and he chose that one without hesitation every time. At first he would bring it to the less-traveled cone, good herding dog that he is, intending to bring both, but then he would switch to retrieve protocol on realizing only one would fit in his mouth. Then, of course, he brought the bouncier one.

I suppose the moral of the story is that before one generalizes about the simpleness or complexity of canis lupus familiaris minds, one must first examine multiple breeds. Labradors, as my friend Mary is wont to say, were bred to do what they were told, however it might be conveyed, by men who went to the training field with a six-pack and a gun. Those who stayed in the gene pool were the ones who could figure out how to what they were told, not those who made up new ways to do things. Herders, on the other hand, have to make snap decisions on controlling the individual sheep (or ducks, cows, reindeer, what-have-you) to conform to the large-scale directions given by their handler. Two or more lambs (see previous parenthetical) may take off in different directions at once, and the herding dog has to have a plan for that or devise one on the fly.

Of course, that does lead to an inventive streak the rest of the time. Sunny took to doing her obedience exercises with flair, and I suppose that the AKC guidelines don't say the dog can't walk from front to finish on her hind legs while whooping to the ceiling. At least, they didn't before she came along. I haven't checked the handbook lately. Dustin, asked to herd ducks, decided it would be more fun to push them into a group if he could then excite them into standing tall and quacking wildly, then do a sort of Evel Knievel routine over them. He seems to feel that it's rude to boss around such small and harmless creatures -- give him a good big rude sheep any day.

Or, of course, a naughty magnolia cone.