One of the things we did over my Summer of Covid And Thesis Hell was, more or less on impulse, adopt a ten week old cattle dog puppy. (His name is Benton Fraser, because he appeared very focused on what we all wanted out of him at the time but let's be real: he's a cattle dog and therefore has a very real creative asshole streak.)
You can have a picture, and then I'm going to cut this because I'm going to have myself an indulgent ramble.
He was and is intended to be T's dog first, which is fair because Tribble thinks the world rises and sets on me. But because we live together and are both dog nerds and also because he's a tiny cattle dog and therefore powered by glee and rocket fuel, having him has really gotten me back into dog training and thinking about dogs again, both with him and with nine year old Tribble. Especially after my PI tried to push me so hard that I cracked, snapped, and forcibly took a couple of weeks off to try and recover some of my mental health in August, then tackled my defense. I'm still... more fragile than I want to be, but I'm clawing my way back to maybe sort of looking at okay.
I'm fascinated by a lot of things as I dig into dog culture and training work again. One thing I've been appreciating is how much training and handling a dog is forcing me to be present in my body again. I've been spending a lot of time dissociated over the course of the past four years, as it turns out, and that means that I haven't been able to respond as quickly as I might want to the behaviors my dog is producing. Practicing that again has done wonders in ways that still surprise me. I also wind up fitting myself into a more praise focused mentality, because it's important to me to train like I teach: set achievable parameters for success, find honest things to praise, and try to minimize confusion on the part of my student. It's a lot easier to praise a puppy than a me.
Because Tribble's nine and clearly going to slow down long before Benton will, we're looking at adding a second cattle dog (or similar type) in between one to three years, to be primarily handled by me. So I've been trying to spend some of the time when I'm not finishing my thesis or teaching on attempting to figure out where cattle dog people are talking about working with dogs.
I don't really have specific ambitions beyond agility, maybe a bit of flyball, and maybe, maybe, some service work: med alerts, nudging me if I zone too badly, that kind of thing. But I want to listen to cattle dog people talking about working their dogs and learning from them, and--
There's a couple of corners of herding people that talk quietly in a Facebook group, and reading what they have to say is really interesting and keeps making me think about the parallels between herding stock and teaching various audiences (both human and not), although I haven't crystallized that yet. But so far I can't find anyone in cattle dogs really talking about running them in sport, which is weird: they're infamously bright dogs, they have tons of drive, they're absolutely capable of being fast, and you really should give them something interesting to do before they figure one out on their own. Probably something involving teeth.
Instead it seems to mostly be oddballs running a single, often rescued ACD in agility and often doing really well. The breeders I can find, as I'm beginning to get a sense for politics in my hunting, seem to largely focus on conformation with a sizeable minority working for herding ability, and the conformation folks seem to only be working on conformation.
IDK, it's weird. Benton is already notable for not liking repetition but he's so bright, and he clearly wants to learn, and I can't figure out why there are so few breeders comparatively speaking with these dogs who compete in anything but the conformation ring. Especially those who aren't personally very into herding for its own sake!
I'm still hunting for pockets of the discussions I want to sit and listen to, largely on Facebook so far. I've found a couple of breeders who have me impressed, all working primarily with herding in the dogs, and I figure I'll wait until I'm properly done with the PhD before I delve into actually talking to people and reaching out. But it's definitely a really interesting place to be sitting and thinking about options.
