One of the things that SR needs to learn is that restraint is just a fact of life and nothing to panic about. I frequently need to tie a dog out to make sure the dog stays out of trouble while I'm doing something else. Stock dogs get tied out rather frequently actually and it's just part of life. Case in point. I was out with the sheep with SR and needed to do something where both hands were necessary and I didn't want to let SR just run around.
So I tied her line to part of the car. Well SR was not happy and was lying at the end of the line with pressure on it (second picture--sorry they're in the wrong order and I can't figure out how to switch them!). She was not panicked, just unhappy. What I wanted was for her to figure out that (1) she had some control of the pressure; by moving forward and relaxing, the pull would go away and (2) that she could not simply make the "line/restraint' go away.
So, in the spirit of making the "wrong difficult" and the "right easy", I took the hunk of sheep wool SR had picked up earlier (a treasure!) and moved it in front of her, luring her to move up a bit. I just put it there and drew her attention to it; I didn't rev her up with tug of war or a lot of "prey movement with the wool." Then I moved back and let her figure things out.
In typical SR fashion, she thought for a minute, moved forward to get to the wool and discovered that life tied to the car wasn't so bad (first photo...elapsed time about 5 seconds!)
A side note. I don't tie my dogs out and leave them; it's always simply because I need freedom of movement and need to keep the dog safe at the same time.
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