Must every dog fit into the mold of of the chosen training pattern or can we adjust the training to fit the chosen dog?
It's been a herding roller coaster these past two days. Does that even make sense? Yeah ok, sheep are not a funpark ride, but we are certainly down and up, left and right, high and low. I think I might have whiplash, and it's not the good kind.
Monday it seemed like everything was wrong. Wrong dog, wrong trainer, wrong handler, wrong sheep. It was a tough session and I spent the rest of the day frustrated but more so than that, I spent it confused. Self doubt is the mother of all evils when it comes to herding, I have decided. As for doubting your dog, well, that's just pure Hell.
The moment you have to decide just how far you want your dog to go and just how much training you are willing to invest on this journey can be very overwhelming. In order to get JohnnyCash competing in Open Trials I would have to change his entire lifestyle, our entire lifestyle together.
The first time I disciplined him for being himself and he seemed so hurt I didn't feel like I was doing the right thing. This is a young energetic dog with so many future possibilities in all dog sports; would I wreck his chances of being a succesful agility dog by molding him into a farm dog? Probably not, but my mind was out of whack from all the deliberating I had been doing.
So, I resolved that I was not going to fight against his core being and that I would talk to our instructor about altering our exercises to more suit our needs. Maybe JC and I will only ever trial on Novice courses and maybe he only ever remains a mediocre herding dog, but I will work with the dog I've chosen and together we'll go as far as he can take us.
Of course, as soon as I made this decision to stand firm by dog, he rewarded me with a fantastic training session the very next day. In fact, the class was spent working on my shortcomings as a handler which was absolutely wonderful!
Possible first place in a Novice Division herding trial, here we come!
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