17. Around and Around again

A friend of mine was telling me that he has a dog that keeps circling around the stock and he has a hard time stopping it. This dog came from a friend of his who trained it for him.

It was interesting when he showed me the problem. He brought some sheep into a yard and the sheep immediately went to the high point. The dog began to circle as he was having trouble moving them. I asked him how he had trained the dog. He said that a friend had trained the dog and that it had been trained in a round pen.

My opinion on round pens is, it is a good place to train out the natural instinct of a dog. It makes training a dog to specific commands relatively quick and easy. Also, when training in a round pen so many people think that is a good place to train balance. What is balance to a herding dog, or should I say working dog? To a working dog it is not a 12 and 6 placing, it is balancing on the head of the sheep in relation to you. It could be a 9 and 12 position.

Again, it is my opinion, if you are going to train a working dog do it where you are going to use it.  GET RID OF ROUND PENS. This should be come a mantra.

16. Trialling

A couple of years ago I  attended a sheep dog trial, unfortunately I was not competing at that time. I provided a demonstration before the trial to explain to the audience how sheep dogs are trained. Most of the audience were either towns folks who new very little about stock dogs, or those farm folks that did not use dogs in there daily farm work.

I have found over the years when participating in trials that there was very seldom an explanation as to what was actually happening. Some times, very rarely, a diagram of the course was put up where folks could see it but for all intents and purposes it was for the competitors. An other problem was that the competitors kept to themselves and away from the limited viewing area. It was almost as if the competitors did not want to talk to non-competitors something like a private club and spectators are only tolerated.

At this fall fair, held at Burns Lake British Columbia, the announcer gave a running commentary of what was going on, explaining the whys and wherefores of each run as well a little about each competitor. Not only that, the announcer sat in stands so what he was explaining was what everyone was seeing. With really tough sheep it was amazing to see how long spectators stayed, yes even the open competitors were not doing well. This is a topic for my next post. There was a lot of good feed back and with the competitors making themselves available to anyone who had questions the overall interest was high and made for an enjoyable experience for all.

I believe that this approach to this “sport” promotes it, as well as interest in stock dogs in general. Who knows, this may even bring more people into the world of trialling.

Be who you are and say what you feel….
Because those that matter…
don’t mind…
And those that mind… don’t
matter.”