Bonnie passed her first birthday, and one day, my agility instructor mentioned to me that the local Aussie club was sponsoring a two day herding seminar. What the heck. I signed up. But then I thought, maybe I should get a herding lesson before I went. I wasn’t going to beg Sam again. After quite a bit of emailing I found someone up the coast an hour from me. She said she would not do a lesson the first day, only what she called a ‘herding instinct evaluation’. I thought, ‘but my dog has herding instinct. That’s the reason I’m doing this.’ But what did I know? Well, nothing.

It was a beautiful spot, one of those old coastal dairy farms with a California-style, sweepingly graceful redwood barn aged to the color of chocolate. No cows any more, just sheep and an eclectic variety of poultry, from ducks to peacocks. No one seemed to be about. I snooped around, my curious dog in tow, and finally found an elegantly outdoorsy-looking older woman sitting in a lawn chair, wearing lace-up calf-length boots, looking world-weary. She reminded me of an aristocratic expat in Africa in the nineteen twenties, the kind that hunted big game with native gun bearers. She gazed at Bonnie without a great deal of interest. Despite my long descriptive emails, she asked what kind of dog Bonnie was, just like everyone else. She seemed in no hurry to do anything, but eventually she gathered herself up and took Bonnie out to a small pen with a few sheep in it. “She’s very quiet,” she commented. “Most dogs bark a lot when they see the sheep.” I looked down at Bonnie. She was transfixed.

The herding instinct evaluation consisted of letting Bonnie loose with the sheep in the little pen. Bonnie stood there goggle-eyed for a few seconds, and then took off after the sheep like a maniac. She ran around the outside of them, while the instructor stood in the middle and the sheep wheeled around her knees. When the instructor blocked Bonnie in one direction, she spun around and ran the other way. She yipped as she ran, as dogs do when they can’t quite run fast enough. After a few minutes the instructor stopped her bodily and took her out. She was totally blown.

Then we sat around. A friendly overweight lady drove up with a large black and white shorthaired dog with houndy ears; a pound puppy, she told me, when I asked. I could see why someone would ask what Bonnie was; in this milieu, anything might show up. Clearly familiar with the whole routine, she went out to a paddock with some other sheep in it. Her dog loped slowly and cheerfully around and around her and the sheep, like a horse on a longe line. I couldn’t help but wonder at the practicality of this herding technique, since the only thing moving anywhere was the dog.

I made a few stabs at asking what Bonnie’s herding instinct test had told the instructor, but she seemed to feel she had finished her job. Another woman came by with a Smooth Collie, which is the AKC Collie but with a Labrador-length coat. I watched as her dog split up the sheep and chased one until it crashed into the fence. I gathered that people without livestock came out here to “rent sheep time” for their dogs. This was a concept of which I had never heard before.

Bonnie got another session before we left, which was exactly like the first one. I didn’t know what to make of any of it. And in a week we headed out to the herding seminar, a hefty three hour drive away, none the wiser.

This was a fancier ranch. More like a Herding Facility. It was in the Central Valley, so it was dead flat. Sheep grazed on irrigated pasture behind straight taut wire fences. I was a bit late, and everyone else was settling in for the introductory lecture under an awning. I put Bonnie into her exercise pen in the barn where the other seminarians’ dogs were. There were some beautiful, immaculate show Aussies, a couple of Shetland Sheepdogs, a German Shepherd, and a Corgi. As usual, Bonnie looked like no particular kind of dog at all, next to them.

The lecturer passed out a packet of papers, which turned out to be copies of the judging rules of the various herding-trial associations. I looked around at my fellow seminarians; they were all middle-aged, slightly overweight women with sensible haircuts and very clean athletic shoes. I fit right in except for the shoes. They chatted about the agility trial they had been to last weekend, and, that perennial favorite of the dog fancy, expensive veterinary problems. It was apparent that no one in that group knew the slightest thing about herding.

Our leader introduced herself. When she herself attended a seminar, she said, she liked to know something about the person giving it. She must have assumed that we all shared this proclivity, because she then proceeded to tell us a great deal about herself. The morning wore away as we learned about her very first dog, her first herding instructor, the careers of every one of her marvelous dogs (she favored a breed never used for commercial stock management in the US, which shall here remain nameless), and many other things, including herding, although always peripheral to what I had imagined to be the central topic, how to do it. Everyone appeared to be fascinated.

She gave a little history how different herding breeds developed; some of what she stated to be true about the Aussie was contradicted by what I had been reading, which was not exactly reassuring. I wondered when we were going to get to work our dogs.

Eventually lunch came. I looked at what was provided and was grateful, as so often, that I brought my own. Once I had the courage of a full stomach, I asked the lecturer privately what could be expected for the rest of the weekend. It turned out that the big physical event of the day was going to be walking a trial course—without dogs. We would also “meet” the sheep, petting zoo style; as she noted with probable accuracy, “most of you have never really seen a sheep up close.” Tomorrow, more lectures, a herding demonstration with a Border Collie, and, at the very end . . . herding instinct tests! Which she would administer herself, for an extra twenty dollars. She smiled with genuine warm amusement and told me it was out of the question that she would let any green handler work her precious sheep with a green dog.

I sat down by myself and gave it some thought. It was true that I had worked on farms and had already met, indeed helped butcher and then grind into tasty muttonburgers, my share of sheep. It was true that mastering the rules of herding trials before you had ever put a single dog to stock seemed ridiculous. But, I was kissing goodbye a hundred and fifty bucks. I decided it was worth it. I sneaked off to the barn where the dogs were penned, apologized to Bonnie for bringing her there under false pretenses, packed up, and drove to my friend’s house in Berkeley, a hour away. It was good it was so far, because it took me that long to stop fuming. She and I took Bonnie out to a wild abandoned-landfill park and she ran happily around the edge of the bay. It was a lovely afternoon.

In retrospect, my problem with my first herding seminar was simply with the word. Everyone else there seemed to know that "seminar" meant listening to someone talk, and watching someone demonstrate; there was no expectation of actual experience. Except from me. Greenhorn that I was, I thought that was the only way I could learn anything significant about stock work.

However, such was my introduction to the world of hobby herding, wherein suburbanite dog lovers with breeds which once were useful farm hands, have fun trying to move sheep around with a dog. Some of these people just want to see what “herding instinct” their show-bred dog might still posses. Some hope to add working trial titles to their dog’s resumé of obedience, agility, or conformation titles. Very few know anything about livestock, fewer still have farms, even hobby farms. They are a growing market, however, and, as I now had seen, facilities and trainers were sprouting up to cater to them.

Unlike when I trained and competed in agility, I felt estranged from these people, even though, objectively, it was hard to see so much difference between us. Perhaps the gap was between our dogs, not us. There was an obvious divide between Bonnie, who could just as easily have ended up on a Texas ranch working range cattle for her keep, and a fifteen-pound button-eyed Sheltie. But there was something else, which was harder to define. I didn’t know what it was yet, except that it was big.