We did a stock introduction/assessment on Hazel yesterday.
I’ll be honest, our expectations were low. She’s a great dog, but she’s a versatile hunting dog, not a herding dog.
We’re no strangers to training dogs for jobs outside of their normal breed expectations. It comes with an interesting set of challenges, but it’s something we enjoy. Both Sawyer (lab) and Dawson (husky malamute) were trained in personal protection and narcotic scent detection, and Whistler (husky) was our pick for nursing home visits. This is also something we’ve done for clients in a variety of ways over the years.
Could we get a dog suited to this work? Absolutely. And almost definitely in the future, we will. But right now we have two aging dogs retired in the house, and two high caliber hunting dogs that would gladly work more, regardless of whether or not it’s pointing birds in a field or blood tracking downed deer. At this point in our lives, and especially after the losses we’ve had this year due to our dogs being so close in age, we aren’t ready to add a pup while Hazel and Banjo are still so young.
Of the two, Hazel is more suited to this kind of work - in general she is calmer than Banjo, has more interest in cooperation, and doesn’t have the cerebral challenges that Banjo has 😂🙈
It took Hazel a minute. She knew we wanted something, but wasn’t sure of the expectations. But it came together quicker than we could have hoped, and she showed us much more than we expected to see. I didn’t film because I really wasn’t anticipating how well Hazel would do.
She grasped very quickly that we wanted her moving the stock, but calmly. Her prey drive shifted into something workable for this purpose. And beyond that, she loved it!
Assessment passed. Next step - a whole lot of work!
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