Working two dogs

[Bart]

Does anyone have experience working two dogs at the same time?

[L and M Ranch]

Hi Bart,

I work multiple dogs at a time on an almost daily basis. Of course this is all ranch work and I've never run in a brace competition. (Of course I've never been to a trial where it's offered either.) I find that dogs with different traits work better together. My two males are both very pushy and so working them together is usually done when I'm close to them as they can get to competing to see who can push harder. When I'm sorting or counting sheep (we don't have sheep facilities so it all gets done in the pasture) I will sometimes use 3 or 4 dogs. 2 or 3 of them basically form "the fence" and I have one up front with me acting as "the gate". I also use at least 2 dogs when we're moving cattle as we can get done more efficiently with more legs to cover country.

I start the young dogs out with one older dog. I let the older dog work while I ask the young dog to lay there and watch until told differently. This can either be on the ground near me, on the back of the 4 wheeler or pickup. Takes some reminding but they soon learn that if their patient they'll get to work as well.

I do have a couple of dogs that are on the same whistles so when I work them together, I use their respective names before the command. Seems to work okay for me anyway.

Hope that helps.

Laura

[Bart]

Just today I was out with them and I noticed they are starting to listen to their name. That was my thought, their name and them a command, what else could you do if you want one to wait. I wasn't thinking of brace, just wanted a way to work them more efficiently. Having 0ne tied up and watching the other work was so distracting since I couldn't get them to stop barking. This way they both work and they don't seem to mind the other dog is with them.In fact I have two that really don't get along but work great together.

[Bart]

by the way how old are your dogs?

I have three, 2 are under 3 and 1 is about 1.5 years

[L and M Ranch]

The dogs I'm using on a daily basis now range from 3 to 6. I've been working this bunch (4 dogs) together since they were a year old on up though. My youngest male, took a little while longer before he could really be trusted to work in the "team" as he was convinced he should be doing it all.

I still tie young dogs up while waiting their turn to work if I'm just out training. I think it's good for them to learn to wait quietly as well. Then I have them lay on the back of the 4-wheeler (I have them on a line at first) while I work an older dog. Once they relax and settle, I usually take them out to work on their own for awhile. I don't want my dogs to get overly dependent on working with another dog. My younger bitch would prefer to keep all the corners tucked in while my younger male would prefer to just push and let her keep things on line. So, I think it's very important that they learn to do the job on their own first before working too much with another dog.

Good luck with your dogs!

BTW, not much dog work today. Blizzard conditions.

[Sue R]

This is a thread of great interest to me because I use both my dogs on the cattle.

 

My problem is that, even when I preface commands with the particular dog's name, they both seem to respond to the command. If I lay Megan down, and then command Celt, Megan will get up to respond to the command, and vice versa.

 

Short of putting them on different whistles (they are not on whistles yet) or different words for each command, what can I do to get them to respond only to commands prefaced by their names?

 

I have trained them separately, and now work them together. I too have the problem of the tied one barking (in Megan's case) so I usually put her in the house when I am training Celt. Perhaps I need to work/train them both separately more.

[Bart]

how old are your dogs. I am hoping it will get easier as they get older. I have noticed the more I do it the better they seem to work as a team. When one is in front of the herd and the other is behind pushing I notice he will drop in place and wait. He hasn't learned yet to get behind, maybe he is waiting for a flank command from me. I think I need to do more with the name first and then the command.

[NancyO]

H Glyn Jones has a chapter in his book "A Way Of Life" where he discusses training dogs for brace work.

Nancy O

[PennyT]

You might tell us why you want to work 2 dogs together. If you work them regularly together on a fairly small group of sheep (under around 150-200 and that's fudging numbers down for simple jobs like gathering fenced and uncomplicated fields) just for practice and you want to trial each dog individually, then you may be making trouble for yourself later on. This is even more true if you're only moving very small numbers.

 

It sounds as though you don't actually need to use both dogs on the stock except for the sake of peace and quiet. If that's the case, you might think about threatening mayhem until the dog not working shuts up.

 

Laura has pointed out how to teach a dog to wait.

 

The person I know who works two and sometimes three dogs uses different whistle commands for each and for voice uses away/come-bye, right/left, and Spanish derecho/iziquerida (pardon my spelling of Spanish for left and right).

 

I love it when a dog will stay by the four-wheeler without being chained when the dog's handler is working another dog. I don't train for that myself because I figure I have enough to worry about. Training one dog to stay while I work another is one of those "maybe someday" things that I never seem to get around to...like cleaning the venetian blinds or keeping the all telephone books in one spot that is not the floor.

 

Personally, I don't much like prefacing every command with the dog's name because it teaches the dogs to look at me. I use names too much anyway, and the result takes their attention off the stock. I think this is partly a genetic tendency to peek (somebody told me it's called "keeking") and partly something that training can make worse.

 

Some work situations with multiple dogs probably won't do much damage in terms of making the dogs too dependent on each other's presence for confident stock moving. If you work them together on cattle when you have to, but not on sheep together unless you have a large number to move, then confidence may not become an issue.

 

What can happen is that one of the two dogs will not have its work alone affected but that the other will not work as well without another dog around. This is fine if you don't want to trial the less independent dog and have jobs that require more than one dog. I am simply pointing out there is a risk involved in terms of confidence.

 

Penny

[Bart]

I gave up trying to keep them quiet. I tried everything including a shock collar. I doubt if I am going to trial so the problem is how to get 3 dogs time on the sheep everyday in the most efficient manner and to keep it interesting. I have noticed they are trying to work together and don't mind if another dog is out there with them but can't stand it if they are tied up and have to watch.

[PennyT]

How many sheep do you have?

 

If you're working 2 or 3 dogs on a small number, you need to rethink why you're working your dogs at all.

 

12 sheep? Get one dog worked every day and leave the others kenneled if your time constraints are that serious.

 

You are not doing your dogs any good working them all together on small numbers. I promise. You need to learn to train a dog on sheep. Trying to work two or three dogs at once won't help them or you.

 

Penny

[kajarrel]

One of the major problems that can occur if you try to train multiple dogs at the same time on sheep is that (at least from my experience) when you give a correction, both dogs get the correction. I've got one sensitive dog and one hard headed dog and find that the poor sensitive one is affected everytime I correct the harder dog. I wouldn't recommend trying to train two dogs at the same time.

 

I have about 80 ewes, a handful of rams and, of course, lambs and find WORKING 2 dogs to be helpful in a number of situations. I rotationally graze my flock over a couple hundred acres of property. Moving them to and from pastures often requires going through brush/woodland, narrow areas or down public roads. In these situations I use one dog to keep the sheep moving forward and another to keep the front of the flock from running ahead. Two dogs are also helpful to keep mixed groups together -- e.g., mamas with small babies and other sheep that move at different "speeds".

 

Kim

[Bart]

Don't know if you can make anything of this but here is what happened when I quit working two dogs together. I am not sure what i was doing really qualified as working two dogs but because it was inconvenient to work the dogs separately I would take two dogs down when i grazed the sheep in the AM. No real training just moving the sheep and containing them with two dogs. In fact they were sort of working together and I wasn't really doing any real training and since I had decided to abandon trialing I didn't really care. But one of them had torn a pad so I took just Jeddy down this AM. I had been getting annoyed with him since he hasn't settled down considering how much time on sheep he has had (sometimes an hour a day) probably more than most dogs ever get. I cursed my self over and over that I was a failure at training. But today I took him down by himself and he performed better than I had ever seen and better than I could have expected if I he had been in training all this time. I won't bore you with what he did but we were out 1 hour and he was a little intense but did well. Worked Bart next and had the same experience, he worked better than ever, then I got Reilley to work last and what do you know he worked better than ever as well.