I cannot think of another initial dog training experience which much resembles putting a green dog to stock when you yourself are perfectly ignorant. A typical Other training scenario is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. The new trainer learns how to correctly visualize and reward the foundational desired responses—holding a ball without dropping it for a count of five, say, or going down three stairs and nose-touching the floor. These pieces all eventually get extended, elaborated, and linked together into the whole pattern desired by the trainer, such as running a whole agility course at top speed, or finding a lost person in the woods and leading the handler to him. Seeing the finished result, one marvels at the amazing things dogs can do—but it all consists of slow, small, carefully assembled pieces.

Stockdog training, at least in the amount of initial drama involved, is more like lighting a fire in a field, and then trying to influence the way it burns, without ever trying to put it out. Sherry has called first putting a dog to stock, “waking up the monster”. Bonnie was transformed by the realization that sheep could be herded. Long trained to walk quietly on leash, for the first months she would habitually drag me to the working area. If she had to wait for her lesson, she shook and moaned in a fever of anticipation I had never before seen in her. It was, frankly, a little scary how intense she was.

And, once out there with the actual sheep, in the fifty-foot round pen, she was a blizzard of demonic energy. At least, so it seemed to me. Before I could ever remember what I was supposed to be doing with my feet, my training pole, and my voice, the crisis had shifted, and Sherry was yelling at me about something else entirely. She tried to educate me about what the sheep were doing and what my dog was doing and what I should be doing, and I couldn’t understand one sentence in ten. For some reason I never told her this, but I was a lot like that classic Gary Larson cartoon dog listening to her master’s reprimanding harangue: “blah blah blah, Ginger, blah blah blah.”

As Sherry nicely pointed out, unlike Bonnie, I had not been bred for generations to control livestock, so it was a lot harder for me to learn than it was for the dog. I wasn’t that bad at moving stock without a dog; I have fairly good instincts and reflexes that way. But moving stock with a dog was like a westerner trying to eat with chopsticks; frustrating for the diner, embarrassing to watch, and not much getting accomplished despite all the effort.

An experienced trainer uses the behavior of the sheep to tell her how well the dog is doing. But I couldn’t even see the sheep around my legs, I was so focused on my dog. And, not to be whiny, but all the commands I had used for twenty-five years meant something else. ‘Stay’, which in obedience work means, freeze until released, in herdingese meant “hold your stock in that position whether you need to move to do so or not.” Sherry used ‘get back’ to mean “reverse direction” and “get out” to mean, “kick out away from the stock and give them more room”, and ‘get around’ to mean “get to the heads of your stock and turn them toward the handler”. I got them confused all the time. Luckily, most of the time Bonnie didn’t listen to me at all, so no real harm was done.

And in that last sentence lies the core of the difficulty. Much of the reason Bonnie wasn’t listening to me was that she was listening to the sheep instead—and when what, in her opinion, was needed to control her sheep differed from what I told her to do, she would opt for the former, every time. I was constantly proving to her how dumb I was about sheep. If I had the ability to read my sheep, decide where my dog should be to get the sheep to move where I wanted them, and issue the correct command to my dog to put her there—all, of course, simultaneously—then Bonnie would trust and listen to me. Theoretically. This idea didn’t have much chance of being put to the test.

Unlike Other training, the trainer cannot really cling to an image of what the dog should be doing. The important issue is what the stock is doing. Your job as trainer is to communicate to your dog what you want her to make the stock do. What the dog does to get the stock to behave is really her business, not yours. At this early stage, it was very simple: just keep the sheep to me. That’s it. Bonnie picked this up, well, like she’d been born to do it. But I was always fouling her up. Why, then, did I persist, and persist, and persist? I cannot really tell you.