Riva is rating stock!

August and beginning of September has been very busy and I haven't worked Riva much with sheep, which shows, he's rearing to go any time I pick up the crook and head to the sheep pen. Its not easy training a dog and trying to learn yourself at the same time, especially if you have a dog with plenty of drive. Trying to train my first herding dog, sometimes the progress has felt more backwards that forwards. This week I have worked him already a couple of times, more than in the last three weeks together. However, last night we took a big step forward :-).

I took Riva and we worked the sheep for a while again, it didn't go particularly well but wasn't a disaster either. Riva was still pretty "hot" and needed to run off a bit of steam before we really got to working. Luckily me and the sheep didn't have to run and after a while I could see Riva was ready to listen instead of just running full tilt and barking. Basic stuff, flanking to both directions, keeping the correct distance, a little bit of fetch. Then I left the sheep to graze for a while and we went inside with Riva. His tongue was hanging but he still would have wanted to go on.

Later when the sheep were done with the grazing I thought I would take Riva with me to help in putting the sheep into their pen for the night. I let him go to the other side of the sheep and started backing up towards the pen, realized he was working real nice and calm fetching the sheep to me and RATING, the sheep were not on top of me but following calmly about three feet behind me. I turned around and started walking forwards and let Riva take care of bringing the sheep after me. We went all the way to the pen, about 60 meters, still nice and calm and put the sheep in. I was so happy I just couldn't leave it at that (had to tempt faith...), so we took the sheep out of the pen, still nice and calm, did a little walkabout with Riva fetching the sheep after me and me walking forwards (watching him from the corner of my eye), Riva still rating & balancing nicely behind the sheep, and finally put the sheep back into the pen.

Wow, he can really do it! I guess he just needs to be worked more to get him to settle...