THE MANY FLANKS OF DRIVING

By Dorothy DeLisle

I often hear that one problem commonly encountered when teaching a dog to drive is a degeneration of the outrun. (As discussed on another page, I believe this is caused by not cleanly separating driving and gathering.) However, another problem I commonly see with dogs learning to drive, that I almost never hear mention of, is loss of flanks.

I don’t think that many people appreciate the differences in flanking style that we expect out of a dog between fetching and driving. When you take a dog that has been trained only to fetch and start teaching it to drive, you are now asking it to do different things in response to old commands. Dogs in driving training get genuinely confused about what is expected out of them and often stand there dumbfounded when given a flank command.

When we initially train flanks, we train for a square flank. That is, we want the dog to first turn 180 degrees away from the sheep, move out away from the stock until it is totally off contact, then turn 90 degrees and move parallel to the flock. We want the dog to have no influence on the stock while it flanks. If the dog is not off far enough while it flanks, the stock will move when we do not want them to move. In some cases, the dog will never be able to reach balance point because the stock keep moving just ahead the dog in the arc.

In driving, we seldom want the dog to move out away from the stock first. We want the dog to maintain contact to keep the stock flowing in the proper direction. Essentially, we want the dog to wear on command. In fetching, a dog naturally readjusts his position to balance point. In driving (with a non-natural driving dog), the handler must frequently readjust the dog back to balance. Most handlers do this with the same commands they used for fetching.

Add to this the confusion we cause our dogs, by our all too frequent mix-up of the commands. We say AWAY, when what we wanted the dog to do was GO BY. Now instead of AWAY usually meaning one thing while occasionally meaning the opposite thing (and with some handlers, this occasionally can be pretty frequently), it now has FOUR possible conflicting meanings. (By the way, handlers that mix up their commands a lot will have dogs that look at them a lot trying to derive body language cues to figure out what the handler really means. In driving, we need to get the dog’s attention off of our bodies and totally onto the livestock.)

Therefore, I recommend using distinct commands for square flanks than for driving flanks. It can be something like OUT AWAY and IN AWAY. And never mix up the commands. (Ha ha!)

Oh and while teaching driving, don’t forget the all-important INSIDE FLANK. That is, teach your dog to flank between you and the stock. Too many runs stall out at the Open/Intermediate handler’s line/cone because the dogs have not been taught to push the sheep off the handler with an inside flank then drive off. With stock on your knees, one should be able to call the dog to your knees to displace the stock. Not all inside flanks are that tight in, but that’s one situation where they are real important.

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