Ferraris and Sedans

I said in my last post that I felt like there are some Aussies that are Sedans and some that are Ferraris. I wanted to elaborate a little more about this.

A Sedan is a class of car that gets you from point A to point B. Everyone thinks of Sedans as some kind of curse, but looky here:

This here, my friends, is a BEAUTIFUL high quality, sexy little machine. But it lives on the roads, keeps the family together, and has a little room in the trunk for your goods. If you park it on the street, no one is going to look twice. And you can let your 15 year old with a learner’s permit behind the wheel.

So when I say that some stockdogs are like Ferrari’s, I’m not insulting the Sedans. You gotta be a special person to handle a Ferrari. You have to have the right environment to even consider getting one in the first place, and you have to be willing to be able to learn as you go with it – and be invested enough to do big-time fixing when you mess up and end up in a ditch.

This, my friends, is what I’d say a high-powered stockdog is.

Now, what is a high-powered stockdog? As with everything, there’s a range of dog personalities out there. We have protective, not protective, friendly, reserved, shy, fearful, funny, mellow, even, creative, whatever. There’s a range. With stockdogs, this is also true.

Some stockdog lines are pretty low-power. They get the job done because they work with easy livestock and generally have a lot less instinct and hot-to-work drive than they do “willing to please” drive. They won’t think for themselves and they won’t work aggressively (not mean-aggressive, I mean assertively, with power). These are the kind of dogs that do great on many sheep and ducks but you probably don’t really want to put on cattle. The cattle will call their bluff.

Some are medium-power.

And then there’s high-power. Instinct to work and hot-to-work are about even in the way of “willing to please.” These dog work great on their own because they think on their own. They don’t need handler hand holding if they know what they’re doing. They’ll also ignore their handlers from time to time because their instinct is louder than their training. These dogs are pretty great doing open range work and such because they get the idea and they’ll work it out.

There’s also dogs out of balance who have no instinct to work. Or have no drive to work. Or who have no will to please. I’m simplifying things, of course. There are so many traits that go into making a stockdog (instinct to bite, eye, balance, instinct of position, movement, squaring, fight instinct, man . . . I can list a whole pile of things), that just saying it’s three is stupid. I’m just trying to make a generalize point, though. It’s a perfect storm that stockdog breeders try to get the balance that works for them.

Smaller farms are not going to need the high-powered dog. Most triallers don’t need the high-powered dog. And, if you’re like me, most trainers can ruin the high-powered dog because it is working so hard to work with its instincts, and you are working so hard to work with your commands that it has a hard time figuring out a happy medium and so . . . what was once raw talent is a Ferrari wrapped around your neighborhood tree.

Why am I writing about this? Well, because what’s happened with Daca is the Ferrari-and-the-Tree. Why do I know that Daca’s fear aggression issues aren’t just her? A few reasons:

When I bred Fury, I knew I had a problem with her instinct to control things. When stuff gives her pressure, she moves into it. Not having managed it correctly because, at the time, I was used to driving a Sedan, it became an issue. I didn’t understand the need to move into pressure until I understood what high-powered stockdogs need to have into them: the instinct to move into pressure. If a cow charges Fury, she’ll do everything she can to stop it before she’ll give up. That’s moving into pressure. How many dogs out there will do that? Most turn tail. That’s a key thing about what makes her a born cattle dog. It also makes a heck of a time for a greenhorn like me to manage.

At seven years into our relationship, she and I have it finally dialed. There was a lot of pain and learning along the way. But knowing what I knew, I did a lot to make sure the puppies didn’t have this happen to them: I socialized the heck out of them, I did “puppy torture” (ie, the Early Neurologic Stimulation), and I placed them in homes who had experience with tough stockdogs (either Aussies of the same or similar lines or cattle dogs). The only exceptions I made were for Moto and Daca. Moto, I had had for more than twelve weeks and had done a lot of urban socialization with him. As you’ve seen, he’s adapted fine. He was a very easy-going boy and I knew he’d be fine.

Daca, however, went to a home that really doesn’t have the kind of experience she needed. She is definitely a high-powered stockdog puppy. She has that instinct to move into pressure, and whatever traumatic thing happened to her during the fear period she was with her first home, she learned to preemptively move into that. On all other fronts, she’s fine. She isn’t overly protective of the home (ie, when the other dogs bark at stuff, she would watch them and think, “You fools!”), she adapts well to change (including new home environments and new physical environments), she’s a love to the people she knows, and she’s not “reactive” – ie she doesn’t hear a noise and flip out. It’s a predictable fear reaction she has, but you have to know what you’re looking at to see it.

The first home had already had bad experiences with puppies of the same lines and just wasn’t up to the crash-and-burn Ferrari. I’m not trying to be flippant here – that home is a successful home to multiple competitive Aussies, but the behavior knowledge you need to handle Daca is not where the current home was at and I was grateful that the home recognized it early and sent her back rather than let it get worse. That home simply didn’t have the support system that say, I did when Fury was growing up.

The next home is sort of in the same situation. They were confident they could work with her, having worked with Aussies with temperamental problems in the past, but none as high-powered as Daca. Working with a testy Sedan is doable. You can still roadtrip if it’s making some troubling smells and noises. A Ferrari? It catches on fire!

Daca’s new home – well, soon, we have to wait for a foster dog to vacate and the temps to drop – can do it. They are experienced with testy Ferraris and run a successful frisbee troop out of their repairs. She says all the right things – that the fear aggression is just a non-issue if managed properly, that she won’t introduce her to her other dogs until Daca is fully bonded to her so that when she says “NO!” Daca will respect her Alpha status. No gimmes. No mistakes. No public forays unless she’s ready for 100% success. Training, correction, structure, and reading the behavior and not expecting immediate change. What the new home does understand, however, is the underlying causes and steps to fix that. Homes like this don’t come along very often because it is such a specialized type of home. It’s what she started with and it’s what she knows. The kicker? This home thinks Daca is just being an Aussie – the kind of Aussie she likes and she just is not in a situation ideal for the kind of temperament she has.

The other homes wanted to, don’t get me wrong. It kills me that she’s been bounced around and it kills me that lots of people have been hurt in the process, but it’s a learning curve for me. I didn’t get that the current home really understood what they were dealing with, but my thought was that, like me, if they wanted to, they could learn. They have told me that if the new home falls through they will work with a behaviorist and learn how to manage her. But they fear her potential won’t be realized where she is – and I support that fear. I want the best for everyone, including Daca.

But what Daca needs even I can’t give to her – she needs a controlled environment set up for success. She needs to learn that she can also activate the “flight” instinct and make her own space away from the offending thing rather than forcing space by “fighting” the thing. She needs to know her place in her dog pack (but she does like being a part of a pack, too) with consistent reinforcement both from the dogs and from the human leaders. She needs control with regard to uncomfortable situations. You need to learn the fine tuning of driving that Ferrari before you can get it out into city streets: that takes time and passion and an appreciation for what makes it so difficult to handle.

There is another part to this story that bothers me, too. The current home invited a trainer into their home to evaluate Daca. I wasn’t there, but I guess he stayed there for forty minutes trying to handle her before telling them, essentially: “This is a dog bite liability. I cannot fix her, but I can help you learn how to manage her. But if she was my dog, I would put her down. You don’t want to lose the house because of this dog.”

He also talked to me and told me by his estimation that Daca’s issues weren’t “my breeding” but a clear case of early puppyhood trauma. He said she was handshy and clearly had been hit before. Now, knowing that neither I nor Yishai inappropriately punished her before or after that first home – that isn’t the case on my end. And I also happen to KNOW that the first home didn’t hit her, either. She just isn’t they type.

These are red flags of not understanding the underlying causes of why this puppy is like this: saying “my dog was abused” when you adopt a dog because it’s shy or quirky is such a cop out. Your dog might just by shy or quirky. Him assuming she’d been beaten simply doesn’t make sense. Not in the way she reacts. Not in the home situation – if her first home had beaten her and she chose to react with fear aggression, her current home would not be safe with her – yet they are. Why direct it at strangers? And knowing where Daca was exposed – in no such public arena could she have been beaten.

I liked her new home’s reaction to his estimation of her: “Dog bite liability? Put down? It’s her home’s job to PROTECT her from biting situations.” You see why I am so confident with the new home? EXACTLY.

I won’t lie that putting her down became an option when the current home said they’d appreciate if I put feelers out. At some point you don’t want to break anyone’s heart anymore. Much less my own. I can’t bring Daca back here because there simply isn’t a manageable space for her the way that she is. But the fact is this: Daca is a good dog. She’s trainable, sweet to those she knows, and super willing to please. She’s great on stock, and she is by far the most adorable puppy you have ever seen (go ahead, I dare you to deny it): how do you put that down? I also know, especially given my management issue experience with other dogs including my own, that given the right handling, she’ll come around and be someone’s beautiful friend and working partner. And her new home agrees, even after full disclosure. There’s a lot of big hope for that puppy.

Anyway, it still kills me that this happened. Daca is a resilient and happy puppy under it all. As the new home said, she’s being pulled out there because that’s what was meant to be, and all involved had to learn the hard way. In the end, however, I’ve not felt so good about a home as Daca’s new one – and soon she’ll have a new name again - “New life, new name” is her new home’s motto, even though, she says, “I really like the old one.” :)

The irony in all of this is today Rippa was at our climbing gym and the landlord was there. She asked Yishai if we had any more “of them.” She told me, “I really like that dog. I like her size, I like her mellow temperament.” And while Rippa was really just pretty tired from playing all day with her border collie neighbor, it still astounds me how fundamentally all the puppies are a lot more solid/mellow than I was expecting (well, with the exception of Piper – but that’s only because Bekka ENCOURAGES it!). Genes or early puppy socialization?