Spot's Progress, 11-05-2014

I haven't posted about Spot's progress in a long time, it seems. There for a while in the late summer/early fall, it seemed like we were treading water, again. I was just waiting and hoping, for another breakthrough in his understanding, and meanwhile we just kept plugging away at the work with the sheep. He wasn't doing anything bad, but it seemed like we weren't getting any better.

My patience is being rewarded. :) In the last few weeks, Spot has really started to come on again. He is just about two years and two months old, plus. We are making progress in his outruns, fetches, and drives. He's learning the whistles and doing much, much better. It feels like I am working a real dog. Yeah! He flanks, he stops (most of the time). He helps me to feed the sheep (which he loves to do because he gets to push).

I took him to the workday at Covelo and the sheep there were somewhat hard to move on the first day. They had their heads down in the lush green grass and did not want to go very far with dogs behind them. But, Spot had no trouble picking them up and driving them in a line as straight as a ribbon. Wow. It was as if it was something he'd been waiting for his whole life.

We've had a couple of lessons with our trainer lately, and in the bigger spaces without nearby fences to create pressure, it's neat to see the dogs bloom and blossom into real sheepdogs. I am super thrilled with how Spot took to working out in a more open space and also on the hillsides.

If this sounds like an enthusiastic report about Spot, that's because it is. Woo hoo! I'm hoping to get more done with him, over the winter. The only down side, is the time change, and lack of daylight. So our practices will have to be better focused because the quantities of sessions will have to be fewer, out of necessity.