Keen

Bud stalking me from a distance. Moved the sale lamb troughs today to clean ground to stop them poaching it. I used Breagh to re-gather them as they had run off with all my faffing, apart from the pet lambs they remained to make the job more difficult! This gathering in the sale lambs is improving Breagh nicely. She has strong collie eye and can get fixated on one group of sheep and cant see the bigger picture. She knows look back but is very reluctant to leave a group she is on and gets stuck so I have had to change this a bit to get her moving. We now have a new command which is to leave the group she is on and head out on a send to another group I use the direction command followed by back. She is not on the traditional "away and come-bye" but on right and left. So to leave a group and flank out to the away side she now has "right back".  If she would see the whole picture I wouldn't need to use this as often but in 3 separate sends we got all the sheep to the troughs. I forget she is only young yet as far as experience and training goes she has such a mature head on her and is generally my all purpose go to dog.

In the afternoon I did some more clicker training with Dris and it must be third time lucky as he got it this time and was wanting to work for his treat. He is a funny boy. I also did some with Pip, she is funny as she gets very excited about her treats and before she realises she needs to do something she spends some time looking at the treats and looking at the clicker and wondering why its not clicking and rewarding then you see the cogs turn and she does the behaviour. At the moment her default is to offer lie down as that was the first thing I taught her with the clicker. All very cute and very interesting to watch their thought processes. Only thing is I need to make more treats now. Got some smelly stag liver defrosting then its liver cake making time, must be done in a well ventilated kitchen! The dogs love it!

12c sunshine am with some cloud about.