Thank you everyone, will take a look at Derek Scrimgeour, Wigton is do-able, and I like "approachable!" :-) Is he nice to his dogs? I've met some very un-nice gundog trainers with some un-nice trainng methods :-(
It's what I like most about him. 99.99% of the time, you are asking the dog, not telling; using your tone of voice to praise, never ever shouting at the dog.
When starting the dog, he'll get it running round the sheep simply by the setup he has - habituated sheep, and an older dog at the ready if necessary - and his own body movements, then as the pup goes clockwise he'll get you to say 'Bye' or whatever your clockwise command is going to be. He'll use his body and knowledge of sheep to get the dog to turn and go anticlockwise, and get you to say 'Waaaayyyyy', or whatever your anticlockwise command is going to be. As he puts it, "When the dog is doing something you will want, put a word on it."
He won't teach a lie down for quite a while; you don't want to discourage the dog at all in the early stages. If you read his books or watch his videos, you'll see that when he says 'Lie down' to a dog, he's telling it to focus on the sheep from a stationary position. So it's not something you teach them in the kitchen, away from the sheep, they have to learn it when they are with the sheep. If you've already taught 'lie down' separately, then have another command for a stop when they are working the sheep.
What he will do as a next stage is get the dog to widen - they tend to run tight round, in close, at first, by instinct. He gets them to widen by pointing a stick at the ground he doesn't want them to go on, and using a gruff tone saying, "Ah" or whatever your 'no, not that' sound is going to be. As they widen, you give them a word that will be your widen command - I have one for each direction.
Watching him do this is like magic at first. I could watch him all day.
The trick of pointing at a place where you don't want them to go and making a 'no, not that' sound is very powerful. You soon get good at predicting where they are about to be that you don't want them to be, and pointing at it before they get to it!
Derek calls it "telling the ground off", emphasising that you do not reprimand the dog, you make that bit of ground an uncomfortable place for it to be. All you ever say
to the dog is positive
Many dogs, started early and correctly, never ever need to be shouted at, much less hit. Dot has never been struck in her life. I'm not perfect, so she has been shouted at a very few times - but she gets so upset she can't work, so I've learned to control it. Mostly
. What I've realised is that the dog is
always doing what it thinks is best; if that's not consistent with what
you thought it should do, then the solution is more training. If you shout, all you do is reprimand the dog for doing its best, which just demotivates it.
Having said that, Derek helped me with Skip, who came to me as a part-trained two-year old, and had some opinions of his own about how to work. We tried all the nice ways, and then Derek gave Skip one single short sharp lesson in listening to that, 'no, not that' command.
He's never needed telling again. (Although he does sulk, sometimes, when he thinks his idea was better. lol)
I could write pages...
Topic: Sheep dog puppy - early training (Read 10162 times)
