This is another (short) installment in Spot's Progress. He is at the stage where I am trying to convince him that it is OKAY to drive the sheep and not just to gather and fetch them. He is a gathering fool, now, even though when he was a puppy all he wanted to do was drive them to the fenceline and hold them there. All has changed now! He has seen the light of gathering and wants to do just THAT.
Ahh, another lesson in patience for me. Yesterday evening we got a good flow of driving going. Whee! I was happy to be behind him watching him work and yes, DRIVING. The sheep were flowing, and I had a rather large group out, which is what I like to use for training a younger dog. It keeps things happy. I was walking, Spot was driving, and the sheep were flowing. And when I laid him down and called him off, a very happy Spot.
And I should have stopped there, on a good note. Sigh.
When will I learn? :) When I work on new concepts with Spot I need to do just a little and then quit. That is what has worked for us to get to this point.
But, we still had a great time in the cool of the evening, with a nice breeze blowing in off the Laguna.
Postscript: There are a lot of bad things happening in this world. It has been a tough week for many. Some really nice friends had bad things happen. Some awful things happened that we saw in the news. It is touching many people, in fact most of us, and might make us lose hope, or get cynical or even hateful. But there are still good things in this world. There is still music. And there is still working a good dog on a Friday night after a long hard week at work that didn't have the greatest of news.
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