Lie Down doesn't mean Lie Down - or does it?

In Schutzhund and obedience, when we told our dogs to lie down, they hit the dirt.

The first sheepdog trial I watched I saw handlers telling their dogs to lie down. Often the dogs complied but sometimes they didn’t. I was aghast. How can the dogs not lie down? That would never be me; my dogs were going to lie down. Fast-forward five years. A recent lesson with Data was a lie down lesson. After all of my initial pontification about how my dogs would always lie down, Data was barely stopping.

Back to the beginning. As I embarked on my sheepherding journey, one of the first questions I asked was about the dogs not lying down when they were told. The answer was, lie down doesn’t necessarily mean lie down. Alright then, if lie down doesn’t mean lie down, what does it mean? It means stop. Ok, so lie down means stop. Got it. Fast-forward again to my most recent lesson. I told Data to lie down and he stopped. Can you imagine my pride? My teacher, asked me why this was acceptable to me. After much humming and hawing searching my repertoire of excuses, I had no reasonable excuse. At least not one that I felt he would find even remotely believable. My answer was more like ‘uhhhhh’. He then said ‘A stop on the feet invites a cheat’.

Over the years, I have worked with several people all of whom have said that the dog needs to stop. Quotes like “Without a stop you don’t have a dog” or “Janet, he’s not stopping, make him lie down!” or “he’s not happy stopping, you have to make him happy about stopping”. One after another they all told me to stop the dog. Notice how stop and lie down are used interchangeably? To me, this reinforced the lesson of lie down means stop. A few of these trainers went so far as to actually show me HOW to get him to lie down and for a while at least I had a dog that did lie down – on his belly. So what happened? My brain happened. Once I got my dog to lie down, I had to tell him to do something else, anything else. Come bye, away to me, walk up, and do it quickly. My brain needed time to think about which direction come bye or away to me was. I had to be sure that if I gave a direction, he went the correct way. So I let him lie there while I thought. While he lay there, the sheep would wander off. Letting him lose his sheep, his Shangri-la, his reward for doing the right thing, convincing Data that I was a bone fide idiot. Ultimately, Data’s utter belief in my idiocy convinced him that he knew better than I did, and lying down was no longer an option, unless I ran up the field at him yelling and screaming like a fool. Now, perhaps I really am an idiot, but I prefer to think that I am not that daft. It is my firm belief that this is a common mistake we novices make. We need to act quickly and we need to think. Some of us more than others I’m sure, but we all need to think about the directions. We want to do it right, and in our zeal to learn and compete and train our dogs, we inadvertently do it wrong.

Five years later, I am working on lying my dog down, on his belly, 100% of the time. Rather than having to wait for my brain, I just shush him immediately after he lies down and it really doesn’t matter which direction he goes because I didn’t ask for one. If he makes a mistake, I just take the sheep away from him as opposed to letting the sheep get away. I’m just putting an appropriate amount of pressure on him for making a mistake. The behavior I want from the correction is not for him to lie down, but to acknowledge that he made a mistake. As soon as he concedes the point, I shush him around the sheep – his reward. I’m not running or yelling. Data is happy about lying down, and I’m not frustrated.

We still have a lot of work to do and, provided my mentors keep me in check, Data and I should enjoy the remainder of our career together. What I feel was most important for me to learn was that lie down really DOES mean lie down – at least as a novice. Sometimes in competition, all you need is a stop on the feet and then a quick flank, but that is a different level than I am at right now. Most importantly, I have learned a couple different ways of HOW to make him lie down.