I hope everyone is having a good 2022 so far? Personally, I think we should just still keep calling it 2020. What we’re all experiencing here is just long 2020. Let’s not waste anymore year-numbers. Deal? Okay, I think we’re all on board. That’s definitely how time works, and everyone is comfortable with this.
Tangent: I went to get my flu shot yesterday, and when I was writing the date on the paperwork, I accidentally wrote 201— and then I realised. It was a bit of a reality slap, thinking we’re two years into the 20’s! But anyway. That’s not what we’re talking about today. We’re talking about Delia’s first experience with cows!
(By the way, who else grew up with Hank the Cowdog? My brothers and I loved the audiobooks especially.)
This post is not a how-to. I’m not telling you how to introduce your dog to livestock. If you look up specific resources for this, I’m sure you can find some excellent ones. Off the top of my head, The Pandemic Puppy Podcast (I know, I plug this one a lot!) had a listener question at the end of Episode 3, “Where to Get a Puppy.” It starts at the 58 minute mark, and it’s specific to teaching a very young puppy to ignore livestock. So you can go look that up, and I’m sure there are a wealth of other resources out there. This just isn’t one.
My Number One Concern
My first and foremost concern was that I did not want to stress out the cows. I wanted to introduce Delia to cows and practise calmness, but it’s not really fair to use other living animals as props and not focus on being Least Invasive and Minimally Aversive with them as well. Especially since we were coming to their home.
I don’t know a ton about cows. When I first drove up (with Delia crated in the back) I took a second to observe them. They were standing as close as they could to the driveway, their body language was relaxed, and they were watching at my car without any particular curiosity, their large eyes neither interested nor completely disinterested. They were very cute in their fuzzy winter coats.
I parked as far as I could from the pasture. When I first got Delia out of the car, my Gramzi was there, and Delia was more interested in her than anything. She was getting quite excited, so I had to tell my Gramzi that it might be better if she went inside, which I felt bad about, even though she totally understood and was even the one who offered it. I needed Delia to be calm, and she hadn’t even noticed the cows yet. Once she went inside, Delia was able to calm down and give me complete focus.
Cow Time
I then pointedly looked toward the cows, and that’s when Delia turned and noticed them for the first time. She let out a quiet bark (I believe just a startle response), but stopped herself. I said her name, and she immediately turned to look at me. I gave her a treat. We did a couple repetitions of this, sort of similar to Leslie McDevitt’s LAT (“Look At That”) protocol, although that’s for working with a dog that is already reactive to the stimulus, and it’s a little bit different and more structured. Because we were so far away, she had no hesitation or difficulty attending to me. So we moved a little closer, and continued that way, stopping to assess for attentiveness and comfort the entire time.
I had to assess not only Delia’s body language to make sure she was relaxed and under threshold, but also the cows. Again, it would be very unfair to stress them out, and if they had looked stressed to me at any time, I would have called it. Now, I don’t know the ins-and-outs of cow body language (If I had it to do again, I would have studied up on it beforehand). But I have since done some reading on it, and my gut was correct. The signs of stress I was instinctively looking for happened to be true. But it’s not a good idea to rely on our gut feelings, because so often they’re wrong, and we especiallly fail to pick up on subtle signs when our eye is untrained. For example, in dogs, many people will ignore a tongue-flick because they don’t know it’s a subtle sign of stress. So by failing to read up on it ahead of time, I goofed. The reason I felt comfortable was that they had a good amount of pasture to put some distance between themselves and Delia if at any point they felt stressed. So they weren’t just reliant on my uninformed reading of their comfort level. (They chose to stay close to us the whole time though, and when we eventually started to walk along the fence, they followed.)
We eventually worked our way right up to the gate. I couldn’t believe how good Delia did. At no point did I have any trouble getting or holding her attention. She did bark at one of the cows one time, when the cow stepped closer to the fence. Just a single bark, and immediately disengaged when I said her name. That little bark didn’t cause the cow even to flinch. Now I have an even better understanding of why corgis herd so intensely!
The brown cow eventually lowered her head so Delia could sniff her nose through the gate. I was watching like a hawk, so I didn’t get a picture.
After that, Delia wanted to go under the gate, and seemed disappointed I wouldn’t let her. So we started walking along the fence on at the side of the pasture, and Delia found lots of interesting things to sniff on the fence and the ground. The cows followed us. The white one seemed especially interested.
We moved back to the gate for one last picture. The cows stayed behind at the spot they had followed us to.
And that was Delia’s cow introduction! I’m very pleased that she did so well and was able to stay calm and focus on me. She was really itching to get in the pasture though. And I’m sure if she had, she would have tried to chase them.
Other Random Updates
I finished my Introduction to Learning Theory course. It was really valuable and helped put a lot of pieces together and tighten up my understanding of some things. I’m now starting another course that I’m super excited about.
Other than that, just enjoying that there’s snow outside and dealing with the fact that my sinuses hate it when the heaters are running.
I will leave you with this little section of wall that I quite like. Both of the vintage corgi artworks are prints which were unfortunately removed from old books. I hate to see books sold piece-by-piece, but it does make these lovely artworks easier to enjoy I suppose. I want to keep the original pages from fading, so they’re stored away safely, and what are in the frames are just copies. I shrunk the topmost one to a smaller size to give some variety.
And that’s all for today! If you’re new here, you may not have found this post very interesting (or maybe even if you’re not new). Please do check out my other posts. If you’d like to suggest/request a post topic, click here. And if you don’t want to miss out on further corgi content, you can subscribe via email (bottom of the page) or go like/follow on Facebook for links to each new post and other short content.
And have a lovely day!
