Dog Life on the Lifestyle Block

There are certainly a few challenges to overcome when it comes to living on a lifestyle block with dogs, but also some really good things too. I’m not really sure where to start with the story!

My very first dog came to me when I had a house full of animals as well as the farm ones.
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I had: 3 cats, 2 canaries, a ringneck parrot, chickens and sheep. I then went and added a Border Collie puppy into the mix (and 6 months after that, a German Shepherd pup).

My sheep were already trained to come to my calls of ‘come on’ as well as the very loud shaking of a container full of pellets for them.

I knew I didn’t want my collie pup, or the shepherd for that matter, to ‘work’ the sheep or my chickens so we did lots of on lead training around them. That was my safety net if he got over excited or too interested in them. He was dragging a long line around whenever we did work outside so I only needed to step on the line, say “ah ah” to interrupt, and ‘come’, to show that I didn’t want him to do something and then I handsomely rewarded him for doing what was asked.  

I used the same approach with the cats. They were adult cats that had never been around dogs before so they were always given the option to ‘get away’ without a dog chasing them off.  My pup was allowed to calmly follow or watch but not nip or chase.  Once my cats were confident enough, they soon learned to take swipes if they needed to but it was extremely rare. I’d basically made my cats seem boring to him so he wasn’t really interested in them but he knew to avoid the sharp pointy claws!
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I worked with my collie in other ways - lots of toy play or redirection on to toys to make up for the lack of a ‘working’ job but he was involved in every aspect of our life on our lifestyle block.  He was around the ride-on mower, tractor (and tractor mower), trailers, weed eaters, chainsaws, leaf blowers and electric fences and how to avoid them.

He learnt the names of toys (I had to get creative as he had so many similar ones!) and I could send him off to locate one by asking him to “find tug” or similar.  He had quite a few tugs but he knew the difference between, ‘tug’, ‘big tug’ and ‘giant’ and would always bring the correct one and the same with the fake stick toys.  He had ‘Woody’ which was slender with twig arms and ‘Chuck’ which was a bit thicker and had arms with biceps and he knew the difference.

Being out and about on the property, not a lot of his time was spent on lead or working on his loose leash walking or walking at a heel. He was allowed to be a dog that came with us if he wanted or if he chose to stay back at the house or just watch us from a far, that was okay too (this was established over time, not something he did as a young puppy.)

I also gave him praise for his choices and never made him stay somewhere he felt uncomfortable - he generally didn’t stay with us if we were putting up electric fences for the sheep as he’d been shocked before so didn’t even like the sight of the standards let alone the reel of tape or wire.

However, we spent a lot of time in his first year getting out to the beach, a 30 minute drive away for us, as well as bush walks and river swims.  He traveled extremely well, even being flown from Tauranga to Christchurch as a 5 month old, to stay with relatives before enduring a car trip back, with not one problem.

He experienced lots of ‘sniffaries’ - when he was young we went on adventures to lots of different places and I kept him on a long line to keep him safe as well as making sure I set him up to succeed.  The beach, although fun, can have a few hazards that I wanted to avoid until I knew he had learnt a good ‘leave’ or ‘drop’ as well as a good recall.

By having him on a long line I found that he learnt a very good distance away from me and then a subsequent ‘check in’. Before he got to the end of the long line length of 10 meters I would say “stop” just before it went tight.  Later on, this meant that when he would venture away from me off lead, he would then naturally check in (turned around to find me) to which I’d say “good boy, you're okay” and that was his cue to keep going. Other times I could yell out “stop” and he’d turn and then I could give him another command like ‘wait’ or ‘come’.

This was super beneficial at home in the orchard when he didn’t have a lead on. However, mastering a nice loose leash walk wasn’t high on the priority list at home so it was definitely one of the challenges when I wanted to do street walking or an on lead walk and have him beside me. He wasn’t a bad puller but he definitely pulled me over to sniff things, which was annoying but I could put up with it.

As collie’s go, I found myself with a fairly chilled boy.  He didn’t have an intense prey or chase drive and to be honest, he was a little scared of the sheep and preferred not to be too close to them.  And now we have cows… he’s not going anywhere near those things!  If he chose to sit back and watch, that was fine by me and I praised him for it.  He learnt to ‘down stay’ really well as although he didn’t want to be near the sheep, if we were working near them, he wanted to be near us, so would hang back and wait.

However, that did lead to a lot of ‘passive supervision’ - we were there but otherwise occupied so occasionally, he entertained himself - generally this was finding the wonderfully ripe avocados, half eaten by birds, that were all over the ground. 
 
He could hunt those out anywhere and developed a bit of a taste for them.  Some advice says avocado’s are not good for dogs (mainly the skin and the pit) however over the years (he's now nine) he perfected the art of scraping the pulp out with his teeth, leaving a pile of purple skin and a pit for me to pick up!

Having a lot of space for dogs to exercise, play and explore is fantastic but the downside to that is that you get a bit complacent. You start thinking, ‘yay, they can just run around all day and tire themselves out but it just doesn’t end up being the case. Dogs do need to get out and explore the world outside of their property but that doesn’t mean they should do that by themselves.

One of the big downfalls to having a lifestyle property is fencing.  It’s all wire farm fencing and not solid anywhere - which means potential for escape at any time. I kept our pups attached to long lines while they were very young and still learning what was good to do and what wasn’t.  I actually never had any escapes… but we’ve certainly had roaming dogs come onto our property through the fencing and some visiting dogs have just walked through it like it wasn’t there.

I guess it shows that once a dog is conditioned to do the right thing in a positive way, it doesn't really become an issue.  Because they were conditioned to only go out the front gate when I was with them, we could leave it open and they wouldn’t pass the threshold - except I would never 100% trust that this would always be the case so I never tempted fate and never left our gate open if we weren't working right there.  The temptation of seeing a rabbit or a car (especially the Postie!) coming down the drive would have been way too exciting and hard for them to not want to chase or go and say hello, so I just didn’t do it.

I love living on a lifestyle property and now that we have children, it is equally as fun for them with all the space. However, any trip we make is roughly an hour out of the day with traveling and on weekends we have a lot to do around the orchard.  So, getting out and having time away from it is actually quite hard to do.

But, we make the most of what we have and I think that’s what's important.  We play, we relax, we involve the dogs in as much of the farm/orchard life as we can and that they are comfortable with and when I do get to take them for an adventure off property, it’s all about them.  I don’t go for a walk to exercise myself, I get enough of that trudging around a farm - so they get their ‘sniffaries’, they can drag me here and there, they can stop at every tree, post or car tyre they find and have a good sniff, walk through muddy puddles and roll in something smelly!
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They are dogs after all.

Authored by Letisha Anstis
General Assistant, Support Trainer and Overall Superwoman
Edited by Sarah Endres