I apologize if I'm not very coherant. I'm a bit brain dead after spending the afternoon and part of this evening at the e-vet with a rescue who went into seizrues this afternoon. He's stable but we still don't know what was causing them, so I'm pretty worried on top of being emotionally and phsically drained. But I'm too wound up to sleep, so here I am . . .[8|]
Anyway, busterTSD has covered much of the general territory. "Pressure" in my way of thinking, is exactly what "P" would mean in an operant sense - something that would tend to inhibit the dog's behavior.
Very, very few respected trainers actually do anything that contacts the dog, these days. Well, except for when the dog is endangering the sheep. Physical pressure, for most purposes in this discussion, means "not verbal."
One of the things that has been a huge revelation to me when transitioning from strictly companion and sport dog training, to training to work livestock, is the importance of assessing
all posssible sources of pressure when introducing a new concept. It applies to both working livestock and training non-working dogs, but it's something you deal with more in working with livestock because you can shut off ALL pressure from you, and the dog's still got to deal with things you can't control 100% like what the livestock are doing, and the effect of the training environment - other livestock calling their friends, a gate in an inconvenient place, spooky shadows the stock don't want to cross, the fact that sheep want to go downhill in the morning and uphill at night, inclement weather.
The last two pups I've trained learned first thing to respond to a verbal correction. I've only raised Border Collie puppies and one litter of rescue lab mix puppies, so I don't know how widely applicable this would be to, say, a Boxer puppy. But I do a lot of walking with the pups right from the start, and they learn to follow. If they don't, I'll say HEY, and call their name really sweetly when they make some kind of signal that they heard me. If they just completely blow me off, I'll walk Pup down and give him a little scruff. They might need a couple of those, and then after that the voice correction is sufficient.
After that it depends on the dog, the situation you are dealing with, and how well the dog learned their early lessons. I did a whole lot of work with Rocky, my older pup, than with Ted, my younger pup, so I can walk out with Rocky and pretty much never make a move in his direction. He takes very gentle voice corrections as well as my older dog Cord. Actually, he responds much better because Cord is still recovering from being pushed too hard, too fast as a younger dog, and gets nervous if I need to speak to him more firmly.
Ted, um, is a lot more enthusiastic, plus I wasn't as faithful with his early training as I was with Rocky. He hit adolescence right when I had a lot of other stuff going on, unfortunately. He's also a little trickier to handle - if I give him a correction I've got to be sure to follow up with a TON of freedom and an invitation to come right back. Ted gets some corrections that are more physical, which I'll describe next.
What happens, ideally, is that Ted should leave my feet, go around the sheep, stop at the point where the sheep's heads all turn away from him and towards me (balance) and then start moving them straight to me. In our minds, it all looks like motion in space, but to the sheep and the dog, it's the give and take of physical forces, a game of mental chess, cat-and-mouse. I think of it sometimes like the hawk riding the currents above us - we see nothing but the hawk flying in circles, while the hawk's brain is being bombarded with information about the air that's keeping him afloat.
A pup is developing these senses, but he doesn't know what to do about them. Like a seven year old kid has all the mental capacity and physcal senses need to read, but needs some schooling and a ton of practice to become competant.
Unfortunately, sheep are not books - they don't sit nicely and wait for the dog to learn how to read them. And we can't tell the dog how to learn that either - we have no idea, not even the most talented trainer, of what exactly a dog needs to do at any one moment to control livestock.
So the dog has to be encouraged to experiment. But he also needs a way to learn that some "experiments" are unacceptable. The good stuff, the stuff that feels wonderful and right to a well-bred herding dog, doesn't happen right away - the dog has to go through some stages that aren't quite right.
So, we step the dog through those stages. We try as much as possible to make what's right, easy, by doing things like working in a small space and using sheep that are very forgiving. Then we step in with corrections to help the dog learn more precise control while it's still easy - kind of like making the training wheels on the bike uneven so that if your child rides straight he's actually balancing on two wheels and can get the feel of it.
So I send Ted and he blows into the middle instead of going around. He does it every stinking time, the first time I let him go. I finally figured out this weekend why - he's not really feeling the sheep right yet. I thought he was, but he isn't.
So what I'll do this week is first work on getting him to the other side, any which way, and then once he's settled the sheep on the other side, we'll walk the sheep around and do little turns. If I turn so that he's got to go between the sheep and the fence, he either does it right, making a nice arc around the very edge of the ring, or he'll drop his shoulder and start to dive.
If it were Rocky, I'd just say, "EH!" or speak his name, and Rocky would bounce back out like he'd hit a wall. Ted, on the other hand, if I spoke would say to himself, "She's not really serious" and dive anyway. By diving, I mean, come in and bite, so we're talking injury to sheep here. Also, potentially, me, Ted, and anyone standing nearby if the sheep crashes the fence in a pnaic and runs someone down.
So, for some reason, that first time, Ted needs to have a stick thrown at him when I see that shoulder drop. It's a light fiberglass stock stick, and the idee is to drop it behind him and startle him.
At the same time, I BACK UP - anytime I put
pressure on the dog, I relieve it immediately - plus backing up gives the sheep somewhere to go, giving the dog room - becuase he made things all hot and bothered in the space where he is now. I also have some other physcial corrections that sometimes work if all the stars are in alignment. I can raise my hands to the side or over my head. I click my fingers to block a side - which is sort of a weird audible/physical correction hybrid, I guess. I can push on, into, or tap the sheep to split them up and get the dog's attention. Last but not least, for a dog that's just plain not listening, I will step forward with a quick sweep of my crook or stick until the dog says, "Whoa!" and then back up again really quick.
None of this is to punish (in the ethical sense), teach a lesson, make a connection, or even entirely stop the behavior all at once. It's just to create a moment where the dog remembers I exist so he can think again about what he's doing. P+ to extinguish what he was doing at that second, but then he's got the hugest self-reinforcing smorgasborg right in front of him, so he doesn't mind as long as I get out of the way quickly and let him try again. Soon he learns that
no matter what, P+ just means, "Try again," not, "You suck. Just give up."
Once I get Ted's attention those first couple of passes, I can just use verbal corrections again. If my timing is right, I can keep going down the scale until I'm working with just suggestions of corrections. I can do this with Rocky. Not quite there with Ted - he's just so darned fast. I'll get there, though - we were almost together this weekend before I pooped out.[
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Ideally, if you correct the dog
while he's thinking about something, rather than when he's in the middle of it or even when he's starting to do it, the dog can correct himself. This is an excellent thing for a dog to learn, because a lot of times there will be situations where the dog will start to do something, and if he's learned to be flexible and "give" to pressure, he'll self correct.
For instance, our large field has a small "pan-handle" which extends up one side, behind a tree line. Sometimes some of the sheep will go back there to graze. Cord had to learn, mechanically, through our guidance, that he's supposed to look for sheep up there. He doesn't self-correct, so if he starts in that direction, he'll take the whole trip up into that corner before coming back down and getting the rest of the sheep.
Gus, on the other hand, never had to be taught to look back there. The first time he saw that corner, he widened out until he could see there weren't sheep back there, and then cut back down into the main field. Conversely, when there are sheep back there, he maneuvers correctly in order not to miss any that might be in the woods or the very back corner.
Both of these dogs have to do this without our help because the corner is a couple hundred yards away, is out of our sight, pretty much, and there's a big dead spot for sound right in front.
I think I've wandered a bit off the main topic. Most of what I've seen in terms of
fair physical pressure in a training situation is the "sweeping" that a lot fo trainers use, that I'm not a huge fan of myself - in this you get a paddle, a rake with soft tines (kiddie leaf rakes), a stock stick, or a pvc pipe, and you position yourself like you are the hand of a clock with the sheep in the middle and the dog running around the numbers. The stick thing would prevent the dog from getting to the sheep, encouraging the dg to run in a circle instead of straight at them. Some people sort of sweep at the dog, some just point it, some touch the ground in front of the dog.
The reason I'm not a huge fan of this is that it actually just makes the dog go in the right place, but never teaches him to feel out the pressure from the stock. It tends to make dogs that can't find sheep (or geese) in the big areas I work in.
A similiar thing is what I call the "golf swing" approach. You position yourself, again, between the sheep and the dog and start the dog around the sheep, swinging at the dog as he goes by, to push him out. Lots of really, really, top notch trainers start dogs this way. Again, not really a fan - super enthusiastic dogs tend to sneak around the top of the swing and flatten out at the top of the curve, behind the sheep. Then you have to teach the dog not to come in close at the top, either.
A couple of overseas trainers (and some here now, too) use long lines to settle the dog behind the sheep. The pressure on the rope comes off when the dog chooses to settle. These trainers often teach the dog to move the sheep away from them, first - even Border Collies. There's a couple of trainers who I respect very much who do this and they are revolutionizing the way people have assumed Border Collies "had" to be trained. I like them for that though, again, I'm not a huge fan of the rope thing.
Ron, Laura (dogslyfe) and mrv (I apologize, fried brain, can't remembe whether you go by your real name or not) also work their dogs on stock. Laura's got sheep - can't remember whether mrv does.