Lilly, our intrepid canine heroine, is an avid hunter of small game. Mice and voles, mostly. In spring 2009, we posted an hunting instructional video — master class, if you will — of Lilly at work. Today, we share the winter edition of Lilly hunting. Her initial pounce alone is worth a chuckle. (Don’t worry. She doesn’t catch anything.)
Subtitle? How Lilly spent her holiday vacation. Being a crazy-smart girl, Lilly knows how to ride a snow sled while being pulled along, but she also sometimes rides down the hill with me. Over our holiday break, we enlisted Mr. Champion of My Heart to shoot some video.
I’m not keen on being immortalized in video bundled up in my bulky snow suit. We thought you might enjoy seeing what we did with all the snow that fell on the Winter Solstice.
Happy Thanksgiving. To celebrate this festive occasion, we have two videos to share. The first shows Lilly howling on cue. The second shows Lilly “laughing.” This noise has been isolated by researchers and deemed dog laughter.
Despite having ZERO time to read for pleasure lately, I’m making my way through a sheepdog book that our herding trainer recommended. It’s called Talking Sheepdogs: Training Your Working Border Collie (by Derek Scrimgeour).
While the book primarily deals with training a working / herding dog from puppyhood, I figure its good to know things from the ground up.
I still have a lot more reading to do (even though it’s a short book, just 128 pages, with lots of illustrations and diagrams), but here are two things I wanted to share.
Yesterday, I reported on What Went Well in Lilly’s second herding lesson. Here is a recap of what didn’t go so well.\
Last Thursday, Lilly and I hauled ourselves out to Valdemar Farm for our second official herding lesson. This I know … I’m probably the worst goatherd on the planet. Lilly loves bossing goats around.
Because no one could come with us and because we don’t (yet) have a TV crew following us around (ha!), I have ZERO video to show you. I did take a couple pictures, and I’ll again to my best to convey the outcome.
Today, I’ll explain what went well. Tomorrow, I’ll tell you what didn’t go so well.
Now that you’ve seen all the videos, read my accounts of other herding lesson events, and considered my ideas on possible causes of Lilly’s relatively poor performance in her first official herding lesson, I’d like you to vote in this poll.
Let’s resume our discussion of Lilly’s herding lesson with some reflections on the overall experience. As promised, I’ll also clue you into to a couple of details that may shed light on how things went.
The third and final time Lilly worked the goats during her one-hour herding lesson, we tried something different. Oh, I still played the role of newbie goatherd, but we asked Lilly to FETCH the sheep and bring them to me.
After taking a break, during which Lilly smiled and panted wildly but refused to drink any water, we took her back into the training pen. EXCEPT, this time I got the chance to be the shepherd. Goodness help us and the goats.
Clearly, I could not muddle my way through my first attempt at herding with Lilly AND shoot video footage at the same time. A friend who had hoped to meet us out on the farm for Lilly’s herding lesson ended up stuck in a meeting, so there is no video coverage of what came next.
I’ll do my best to paint the tableau.
In today’s goat herding lesson video, Lilly works the goats in the larger training pen. Again, I don’t want to influence your impressions of what you’ll see, so I’ll let the video footage speak for itself.
This is the third chunk of video (about 2 minutes) from Lilly’s FIRST herding contact in her one-hour lesson. She did all the work in Monday’s video, Tuesday’s video, and today’s video … before taking her first break.
Our herding story continues this week with a video showing Lilly chasing and/or letting the goats go hither and yon. Yes, they ended up spread across three pens, so we asked Ben, an experienced herding dog for help.
Between bouts of silly cold and small-ish snowstorms every 1-3 days, we finally squeezed in Lilly’s second herding lesson on Friday. The weather was clear, with temps in the 60s, which was great. So, all this week, we’ll be talking about herding.
We’re suffering a long, cold, windy start to the year here at Chez Champion of My Heart. Thanks to strategies we learned at a recent American Treibball Association event, however, we’ve been playing with the sport of ball herding.
Most nights, we work at home in the basement with a clicker and high value treats, but we also gave it a try outside in the “middle pasture” this week. This Remedial Treibball Video below shows our results.
Dear Sam (and others who are longing for dog training news), I wish, wish, wish I had the time/energy to work on new things with Lilly, but I just don’t with all the family medical dramas that have been brewing non-stop since summer 2009. We have high hopes for spring 2011, though. So, don’t give up on us yet. While I called it an update, it’s more like a wish list.
