CONFOUNDED BY COMMANDS AND CORRECTIONS?
PART 1: THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THEM

From the Unpublished Works of El Rojo

by Red Oliver

DO NOT confuse commands with corrections. Commands have very definite and precise meanings while corrections are physical or tonal in nature, a "growl", a "uh uh", or an "eh", expressing pleasure or displeasure with the pup's behavior. It is as important to let your pup know he is doing right as it is to let him know he is doing wrong. If properly applied, neither praise nor correction has to distract the pup from carrying out his next move properly.

CORRECTIONS
Hand/Staff signals and body blocking. Physical; arm waving, pounding staff on ground, waving staff or actually moving the body to block. At the very first, you might use about 70 percent physical cues and 30 percent vocal (corrections). When starting a pup on stock, take advantage of his breeding (herding instinct and desire to work) as the force that makes him do both what you want him to do and what you do not want him to do.

We use these physical gyrations in the beginning of training to help our pup coordinate his actions with his instinct development -- to keep the pup on the opposite side of the stock and fetch them toward us. Later, we will introduce the vocal corrections to teach him right from wrong. Once our pup is beginning to understand the vocal, we should begin weaning ourselves from giving the physical cues and encourage him think about what we are saying to him -- which he'll never do as long as we do not require him to.

Tonal corrections. When our pup does the right thing, we reward him by letting him work and denote approval by the tone of our voice. When he makes a mistake we give a correction. That is, we let him know through a negative tonal sound or a physical motion that we do not approve of that behavior. All training is based on this premise (i.e., reward when doing right and correction when doing wrong).

COMMANDS
These are not just words and sounds. They are the stimulus that initiates a specific behavior from our dogs. They are the communication link between our pups and us. In training, commands should be of two syllables: two words or the dog's name as the first word. The first word is to get his attention and the second is to tell him what you want him to do. Commands must have very distinct meanings and should be very clear and not garbled. Until the novice trainer has his dog pretty well trained, he should restrict his commands to: "Come", "Down", "Away to me", "Go by (or come bye)" and "Walk on".

All but the command "walk on" are positioning commands. Think of them as tricks, nothing more and nothing less. We first teach our pup to follow these commands so that we might position him around stock. If we did nothing more but perfect these commands, our pup would soon become mechanical. Therefore, as he matures, the positioning commands become a form of communication so we can direct our dog to go somewhere -- where there is a problem or a task developing -- and, once there, he will use his instinct and experience to correct the problem or carry out the task.

There are two methods of giving commands.

Verbal: As soon as our pup begins learning to balance the stock off of us, to circle in direct relation to our movement around the stock and to leave our side and make a short outrun to the far side of the stock, we gradually introduce the commands that tell our pup to do these things. As we increase the use of commands, we phase out the physical cues.

By the time you are ready for penning stock on the farm you should have gotten rid of the staff and be able to literally keep your hands in your pockets. Your dog will never actually listen to you as long as you give commands with hand and body. He will develop the habit of looking back at you, causing him lose contact with the stock. Even though he knows where the stock are at all times, his concentration on the stock is broken and he actually gives up control when he looks away and will need to regain control over them after each such break.

The whistle: just a nice refinement of the verbal. It comes through a clearer and cuts out a lot of verbal monologue. The dog reads it a lot easier and he should have no reason to turn and look at you even at a considerable distance. For best results, teach the verbal commands first then transfer to whistle by giving the verbal command (or the physical) followed by the whistle. When starting to teach the whistle command, go back to where you started teaching the verbal and teach the whistle at a level where it is easy to learn.

If you suspect that those early physical corrections you used continue to have a place when giving your dog commands, then try this test: Stand in one spot. Do not move around. Keep your verbal commands to a big zero and see if the use of your hands aren't really just a habit, and a bad one at that. The most common reason why a dog continues to turn and look at the handler is because the handler is still giving lots of body cues, just like he did the very first day the two went to stock.

Blocking the dog with one's body and the staff and not allowing him to think on his own requires the dog to turn and look at the handler. In looking at the handler, no matter from what distance, he is simply signalling that he was taught to look for a physical indication of what he should do. Looking back may also indicate that he has either lost confidence in his own understanding of the task, or he has lost confidence in you. A dog processes one command at a time, so don't give him two hand signals (one with each hand), or a staff signal, a body cue, and a verbal all at the same time. All it will do is confuse him.

Probably the most exaggerated example of this, and one sees it in every trial, is a handler tapping the ground with his staff, which is in his right hand, while he is waving or pointing with his left hand, and at the same time he is moving his body in tune with his arms while from his lips flows a monologue that would stump a linguist.

COMMANDS WITH MULTIPLE MEANINGS
My first suggestion is to list all of your commands on paper and below each write in every meaning that command might have between you and your dog. If there are several meanings for any one command then you have to eliminate all but one meaning. Find a unique word for each message you want to be able to use with your dog. Some of the most abused commands with more than one meaning which one often hears are: "there", "steady", and "get back". This last one is probably the worst.

DIFFERENT COMMANDS WITH THE SAME MEANING
Each command should have a specific meaning and you should never use two commands for a single behavior. One quite often hears handlers ordering their dog to "get around", or "get through there", or "get ahead". We all know that"go by" or "come bye" means for the dog to go to the left around the stock, and "away to me" means for the dog to go to the right around the stock. Now, if you were to give your dog either of these commands, he should not even stop on the far side, but should keep going clear around on a ful circle.

If you teach your dog on these principals then one must ask the question, why the other commands ("get through there", "get around", etc.)? Or, how do these other commands differ in intent from the normal side commands? And, why not stick to the normal side commands instead of forcing your pup into learning this complex, and to me, meaningless extra jargon? In every situation where I have observed a handler using these extra commands the dog obeys none very well. When the handler is questioned as to what their exact meaning is, his answer is a weak excuse. In addition to commands such as these there are many instances when handlers use a variety of short sentence instructions that are obviously not a part of their standard commands and can do nothing but confuse the pup.

MULTIPLE COMMANDS
How many times have you heard someone say, "Way to me walk on get back" all in one breath? Have you given conflicting signals to your dog by giving a verbal command while blocking the dog with one hand and pointing with the other? The dog takes in only one command at a time. Multiple commands can do nothing but confuse him and get the handler's adrenaline flowing because the dog didn't do whatever it was the handler wanted it to do.

CORRECTIONS THAT BECOME COMMANDS
"Get Back" is the most abused. When we put our pup on sheep for the first several lessons, our main concern is that we stay on opposite sides of the sheep from each other. When our pup has turned the sheep and they are being fetched toward the handler, the pup will, at first, want to flank around to their heads to stop them, which turns out to be where the handler is. We, at this point in training, hold out our outside arm to break his concentration and use a tonal correction to let him know that his correct position is behind the sheep and we simply force him back.

Too often we use the words "GET BACK" as our verbal correction because this makes sense to the handler. As the handler trains himself to the fact that this command means for the dog to get in the rear of the stock, he starts using it as a command instead of a correction and too often keeps on using it as the dog progresses beyond those early stages. Here are some of the meanings attached to this command that the handler thinks the dog should, through ESP, understand:
"GET BACK...to the rear end of the herd or flock."
"...to where you were just before you moved to where you are now and where I don't want you to be."
"...to where you were just before I gave you the last command which was the wrong command for the situation."
"...to the other side of the herd or flock from me regardless of which way the stock are facing."
"...because everything is going wrong, so it must be that you are in the wrong place."

And, finally, "Get back out of there!" I often wonder what that statement might mean to a dog.

TELLING YOUR DOG HE IS DOING SOMETHING WRONG RATHER THAN WHAT IT IS YOU WANT HIM TO DO
Another bad habit that cheats the dog. Example: a young dog is driving the sheep down the fence line and he starts flanking to his right to head the sheep which he thinks are going too fast. The handler, instead of a "stop" or a "Go by", yells, "BLACKIE! NO! NO! BLACKIE!"

By this time the dog is at the head and is turning the stock back when he realizes that he is doing something wrong, even though he is turning the stock as he has done hundreds of times before. After some confusion you will hear the handler give a belated "Go by". Actually the "no" is being used as a correction. A correction in training is fine, but these words, given too late, are an awful example of a correction.

If you hear such correction/commands while you are watching a handler work his dog you will seldom see any reaction from the dog unless it is one of confusion, even if the choice he makes, to get back to driving, is the proper one. The correction (and it could be a "no") should have been given when the dog was thinking about flanking. This is easy to see in a young dog, so watch him carefully in order to time your corrections properly. If you are too slow in giving the correction, go with the flow and give him a side command to reposition him. This, at least, gives him an opportunity to obey you.