Article: Evaluating Young Dogs

By Nicole Rhodes

8/10/2015

I like to take a look at pups and young dogs regularly on stock to evaluate what sort of instincts manifest naturally and where a pup's maturity level is at to determine when and what kind of training they're ready for. I also use these looks to determine which pups will likely grow up to be the type of dog I like owning or training. Not every dog is going to suit every person and after you've worked many dogs you will find that you prefer certain working styles and personality types to others. Picking those out as early as possible can be beneficial so the ones that don't suit your goals can move on to a situation where what they are will be appreciated. Seeing just what is there can be a very complicated thing as you are not only looking at working traits but at temperament as well and temperament can affect what traits are displayed and vice versa. It takes experience to recognize what you're seeing but I will try to explain what I look at and give you video examples to watch.

When evaluating a puppy or young dog one of the most important things is to have appropriate stock and enclosure for their age and physical ability. Don't put your pup on stock that can outrun it or in a situation where the stock can hide or escape in the terrain, or on stock that is going to take advantage of and pummel the pup. Getting your pup defeated from the start will create bad habits, damage his confidence, ruin his trust in you, and otherwise cause you to not have the working dog down the road you might otherwise have had. Remember, every experience your pup has your pup is learning from it. You are training your pup every time you do anything with him or even when you allow him to do something by not stopping or preventing it. It doesn't take very long for an action to become a habit in a smart pup. This is why you should never leave your pup loose unsupervised as he will be out and about devising his own fun without you. Inserting yourself into the picture later can be difficult and one often needs to undo many bad habits that could have easily been avoided by kenneling the pup.

Not all puppies start working at a young age. They could start as early as six or eight weeks! Or they may have no interest in stock until a year or so. What bloodline your pup is from may give you some indication as to whether to expect he will turn on early or whether he may be a slow starter. The age your pup turns on will not necessarily mean he will train up any faster or better or easier. With some of the early starting pups it can actually be easier to burn them out as they look so good so fast you are tempted to push them and wind up putting too much pressure too soon. For those of us who keep all our pups until they are working stock it sure is nice when they turn on early so we can pick out which ones we like sooner but it doesn't always work out that way. These early looks are sometimes messy and hectic but if we look close we can get glimmers of what the pup will grow into, what things we are likely to have to work thru with training versus what will be instinctual to the dog.

As long as I have appropriate stock I'll take a look at pups as young as eight weeks. You don't always learn much from these little pups as often they aren't turned on yet and just want to play but they're cute and it's fun. The video below shows a nine week old pup on lambs for the first time. This pup is not working! She is running around playing. She is treating the lambs as if they were other dogs, running up to them and licking their faces, her tail wagging happily the whole time. This video tells us absolutely nothing about her as a working dog. This entire litter looked similar at this age. Happy-go-lucky pups checking out everything in their environment. It wasn't until sixteen weeks that these pups started to turn on and the male didn't turn on until about twenty-five weeks, or five months old. The male may be the best of the bunch, or at least the one with the best natural feel for stock.

For small pups, under five or six months, I think that young lambs or goat kids are best. Some people use ducks which can sometimes create more excitement in a pup because of their flapping and quick movements but I don't necessarily feel this is beneficial. Ducks are also so small that pups wind up jumping on them. You want to put a pup on stock that isn't going to injure him but that he also isn't going to injure. In the above and in the next videos you will see a puppy on small lambs that I pulled off their mothers just for the occasion and returned them to them afterward. The pen is small so they can't easily out distance the pup.

You should also take note that at no time during these sessions, even with the older pups at seven months, do I ask for obedience to any command. I never tell them to down or anything else even if they know down off of stock. Asking for obedience is adding a lot of unnecessary pressure to a pup who is just getting a feel for the world. I want our sessions to be fun and the pup to see me as being on his team and helping him be successful. I will discourage things I don't like with a verbal correction or by nudging a pup with my foot or a stock stick. If whatever the pup is doing wrong will take more than that to fix or would require obedience to fix I just pick the pup up and quit. It can wait until the pup is ten months to a year old and we start training for real, when the pup is more mature, and can handle it. Sometimes the problem even fixes itself by the time they're ready to train anyway.

The very first and the number one thing I'm looking for in a pup is whether or not he desires to control livestock's motion. It's this desire to control motion that is the biggest clue as to whether the pup is working or not. After that I look at how he offers to control motion. Will he make the stock move or is he only trying to prevent them from moving. Does he just flank around or does he find balance. I look for whether he is looking for or feeling the stock's flight zone and if he recognizes the points of pressure and does he leave this pressure or hold it. Does he arc around or go straight to stock. What about his attitude? Is he moving calmly and smoothly, with his tail held down, or is his tail up or winging around excitedly as he moves. There are many things I'm evaluating here, notes I'm taking in my head, about the things I like and don't like.

Chasing or playing with stock may be the pup running behind or splitting the stock but it can also manifest as a pup going after a nose in a single minded fashion or to the exclusion of keeping the stock together and controlling their movement. Remember that herding in a nutshell is all about the control of movement. Some pups have an excitable temperament, and or high prey drive, and this can mask herding traits that a pup may otherwise have. Some will chase when first introduced to stock but with maturity will switch over to working naturally. Other times it takes handler intervention and training to get the dog into the right mindset to start working.

Another very important thing I look for are avoidance behaviors. Avoidance behaviors will show you a lack of maturity, or a lack of confidence, that the pup isn't real keen, or that he might not be as strong as we would like. These behaviors include disengaging from the stock or being easily distracted by other things. He may turn or shy away from the handler or from the stock when he gets close. He may stop and sniff things or eat poop when he feels pressure from handler or stock. When presented with livestock standing and looking at him he may bum rush them or turn and avoid them and go to a different animal or to the other side of the group. He may strafe the group and run past rather than deal with pressure. Sometimes when we see these behaviors we need to just put the pup up and let them grow up or we may need to modify how we interact with the pup as a handler and tailor how we train to help him. Or these may tell us this isn't the type of pup we want to put our time and money into raising and training.

I'm going to link to videos of various puppies and then talk about what I'm seeing in each one. What they do that I like, what they do that I don't like. Where available I'll link to videos of the same pup at different ages.

I wanted to start with this video as it's a fun one where you get to see the exact moment this pup goes from playing to working. The puppy in this video is sixteen weeks old. This was his second time to see these lambs. The previous time was several weeks before and he showed no interest in them, just happily followed me around, trying to play. The beginning of this video looks to be much the same. He sniffs and walks around the lambs, checking them out and finds interesting things on the ground, bounces along as I walk wagging his tail, just being a happy puppy. Until I grab a lamb by the leg and suddenly the light bulb clicks on. Now he's working and showing us what traits come natural to him. Notice that the lambs also react differently to him once he starts working.

The first thing he shows us is a desire to run to the front and stop motion. I worry a bit here that he is just wanting to chase but then at 2:14 he comes around and stops right on the pressure on those two lambs, he stays facing them and walks straight in, until the one lamb turns and runs and the pup's instincts tell him he needs to run to the front and stop it. I'm not going to worry about or try very hard to prevent him from running thru the middle of them at this point but we're not going to let him have many chances to do this either so he doesn't think it's okay to do it. He bites which is fine but if a pup didn't bite yet it's not necessarily a bad thing at this stage. From there he shows us intermittently getting too focused on a single and at other times looking at and going around the whole group. When he gets locked on to a single I try to bump him with my foot or clap my hands to distract him. This early in the game I am careful not to do too much and it's best just to pick up these small pups and quit rather than try to put too much pressure on them to be correct and confuse or make them quit. He doesn't show any avoidance behaviors toward me or toward the stock. There is nothing in this session that makes me think he won't make it as a cowdog.

A month or so later I put this pup on four much older lambs in a bigger area. He was quite excited and just wanted to circle them as fast and tight as he could and grab their noses. He ignored my flag when I tried to guide him into breaking out and around to where he could find the point of balance. I elected to pick him up and put him away rather than push on him as hard as it would take to get his attention or to let him get into this bad habit of zooming around not thinking. I unfortunately don't have a video of this session. The next time I put him on sheep was at seven months old and I do have a video of this one. As you will see, with some maturity he gained some distance all on his own and is now often breaking out laterally to cover the front rather than running straight and tight to the nose to manhandle them into stopping. He is also a much more thoughtful pup and it takes very little effort to get him reacting appropriately to the flag.

It's unfortunate that I'm holding the camera so you don't get to see all the action but I think most things are clear enough. The session begins with the flag on the ground and I pick it up shortly after the start as we see what he wants to do on his own. I don't make a big deal of him coming between me and the sheep, he is arcing around them and blocking the heads even tho he is coming on my side, so I will just work on it as I go and show him when it is okay and when it isn't. I do give him some verbal corrections and or slap my flag on the ground for biting and hanging on, I don't mind him biting, but I do want to discourage the hanging. He is such a thoughtful pup and wants to be a team player that it's fun to watch him puzzle thru things and figure out how to bring the sheep out of the corner. At 2:35 he 'gets it' and goes in the corner and holds pressure and walks the whole group straight out. As the sheep speed up he speeds up and we go from walking up to flanking around. That flank was really nice and proper so I labeled it with the 'come by' command. When he starts getting excited and fast, splitting the sheep, I opt to quit before things go too far down hill. Always try to end while things are positive.

This work session reinforces what I already knew from his very first work: he goes to the front to stop stock and when he does he makes it to the front of them and then turns in toward the nose. He feels the stock's bubble and will break out, find balance, and pause or stop on his own. He handles pressure from the stock and shows no avoidance issues. He wants to work with me and will be easy and great fun to train. I had this pup on some calves at eight months old and he looked good there as well, I didn't get video as I was concentrating on making sure everything went right, but it looked much the same as his seven month video on sheep. The things we saw from the very beginning are panning out as true for this pup. I will update this article in the future with a video of him on cattle.

Edit 1/11/16 Ugy on Calves

The next pup I'll show you is completely different.

This pup was about five months old at the time of this video. If I recall he had shown a little interest previously but nothing sustained. His work here isn't anything to get excited about either. Every time he gets close to the sheep his tail goes up, he looks tense, and he picks up speed. He tends to either crash into their backsides or bounce off and lose contact as he goes around. He never gets to the right spot and pauses or holds pressure. He always strafes past it, attacks, or bounces off. If you watch from .54 you'll really see a distinct example of him bouncing off pressure. As he comes around to the left of that lamb he starts feeling it and ducks hard to the left. He demonstrates a lot of avoidance behavior, looking around, sniffing the ground, coming up short on the hip of the sheep rather than getting out in front. He doesn't look like he will have the working style that I want, nor does he look like he will be confident on stock, and therefore not likely a good cowdog prospect. He also appears sensitive which will make him problematic to train since he will need a lot of handling to get him to go to and stop in the right places to be useful.

Fast forward to eleven months old on cattle. The ugly tail is still there, the avoiding, strafing past, or bouncing off pressure is still there. He shows us all of this within the first ten seconds of the video. He is exactly the same dog at eleven months as he was at five months. This is the kind of dog that might make an okay sic 'em dog in a feed lot situation or as a helper for other dog(s) who will be doing the heavy lifting and keeping things under control. He was not likely to make a good pasture dog on fresh cattle.

This next pup is one I bought from Deb Meier. His name is Bart and this is a video of him that Deb took of Wayne working him while he was still in Iowa. He is thirteen weeks old in this video:

He is steady, finds balance on his own, and shows a nice natural pace while holding pressure. He has no qualms about walking right into the sheep calmly. He has some zoomy puppy moments but for the most part acts like a grown dog! Just an all around nice pup.

And here is Bart at eleven months old. What a huge difference between him and Teddy. They do share one similarity: what we saw in their first videos reflected what they were at eleven months old perfectly.

The next video is Bart at seventeen months old on pairs for the first time.

While looking at a pup's early works can give us a lot of clues as to how he will likely work as an adult it doesn't always tell us how strong he will be. Sometimes a pup that looks really good on sheep may fall apart later under pressure from cattle as he gets challenged more. Other times a pup that may look wishy washy on sheep may turn out to be a nice dog. Good training and handling can bring a lot out. This is part of where temperament comes into play. Those that are really people oriented, want to work with you, and try their heart out will often succeed in being indispensable working dogs even if they aren't the strongest or most confident dog out there. Natural ability will also often make an otherwise mediocre dog extremely useful: a dog that may not be super aggressive but if he's always in the right place, at the right time, can sure be a useful dog.