loosen eye exercises

[Guest elayne]

Hi Albion,

 

In your last post you write:

 

To loosen the eye, you need to keep the dog moving as much as possible, even on the drive, and try to keep the line with steady commands rather than stops. You can also try to free him up a bit by having him work a larger flock.

 

I think I need exercises to loosen my dogs eye. I'm thinking that maybe it will help on my shedding attempts (which I am still working on) and pen too.

 

As a N/N handler, I of course use the lie-down as a crutch.It has finally dawned on me that the only way my trial career might work is too speed it up a bit, but of course if things are going over 2 miles an hour I get nervous.

Are there any exercises that you can suggest that *I* can do to help us both work together?

 

Thanks again for your assistance.

 

Elayne

[Guest aurdank]

Hi Elayne,

With a strong eyed dog that sticks, you can work on a largerflock, say, ten sheep, and either keep him or her circling, while also changing directions, or by doing balance exercises [walk-abouts] in which the dog is fetching to you, but you are continually changing directions, forcing him to do the same, but without stopping vry much at all. Here you would walk backward, suddenl do a square turn to the right (military style almost), walk back, do the same thing to the left, walk back, do it again to the left, etc. In this exercise you can also force the dog to do off-balance flanks, which will help loosen the eye further. if you only have the dog balance, you'll tighten the eye, and if you stop him/her too much you'll do the same. So you want to keep the dog moving and integrate off-balance flanks into the exercise. Essentially, you do this when the dog flanks to cover the sheep as you turn in a different direction, but instead of letting him turn onto the balance point, you step inand raise your crook and say, perhaps, "get out" or "keep" which will widen him/her and allow the dog to continue past the balance point. This will also improve the dog's ability to flank wider in general. Soemtimes doing this sort of exercise on cows or calves makes loosening the eye easier.

 

You can never take the eye out of the dog completely; nor should, in my view, you want to because there are some situations where it can be helpful. One is at the shed. A dog with eye, when placed in a stand at the head of the next-to-last sheep can ussually hold the last two sheep better than a loose-eyed dog and by doing so can help the handler make the hole more easily.

 

So, by all means loosen the eye a strong eyed dog, but don't take it out of him altogether.

 

Yours,

 

Albion

[Guest aurdank]

PS I meant to proof-read that last post before sending it (as I type quickly), but I hit the wrong button. Please excuse its inelegance.

 

A