Reading these essays, one could get the impression that I don’t do anything except drive my dog around looking for sheep. This would be basically correct. Sometimes I fit in saying hello to my spouse, cooking dinner, picking my daughter up after high school. But sometimes I don’t. This is about a week that I didn’t.
On Monday I drove out to practice at a ranch with a pristinely-kept set of facilities for AKC herding trials and also Border Collie trials. It’s about an hour inland from me. Even their doggiest sheep were lighter than Bonnie normally worked, and we struggled, as usual, with her Aussie idea of pushing the sheep past me and then circling to pick them up again, as opposed to my idea of her staying out far enough that the sheep would walk quietly behind me. She always controlled them, but only when I really got mad at her and literally chased her away would she stay far enough out that I would call it actually rating. We could put the sheep through all the funny AKC obstacles, but she was still too pushy.
The ranch manager came by to collect her small fee and yak. She said Bonnie sure looked ready for ASCA Started. “After all, in ASCA they like circles and they like barking.”
I wondered what she meant by that. Border Collies are bred to be silent, but Aussies will bark on occasion, especially on cattle, although I am sure ASCA judges take a rather dim view of barking at sheep. But Bonnie hadn’t been barking at the sheep, that I recalled. The only time she barked was at me, when I gave her a flank she thought would lose her the sheep, or that she had been mistakenly corrected for taking before. That horrible high-pitched frustration/anxiety bark. But that was probably more than was ever heard at a Border Collie trial.
As for the circles, I took this to mean that Bonnie, wearing in her pushy way behind her sheep, had a different style than the Border Collies, whose handlers’ tweetling whistles I could hear coming from the big field, through the walnut orchard. Certainly Border Collies circle—huge ones, endlessly, if you let them. But I have never seen an Aussie slinking along the ground at a great distance from their stock, which I supposed was what she was used to. However, I got another view of “circling” the following day.
On Tuesday I got up predawn to meet my friend Janet and carpool to a new sheep place. We drove over two mountain ranges into the Central Valley tule fog, the impenetrable icy fog that piles up cars on the interstate every winter. This was a little hobby farm owned by a herding trainer who had agreed to handle Janet’s Bearded Collie, Blossom, who had become unwilling to work with her first handler. Janet is herself rather afraid of sheep, but she is so devoted to Blossom she is willing to drive hours twice a week just to watch her have fun herding.
We stopped on the interstate for a bathroom break at a Taco Bell, near where a nice rancher lady I had met at Sherry’s lived, with her good ranch dog Casey, who handles three hundred head of cattle by himself. Casey was called a Border Collie, and looked more or less like one, but it would be more accurate to simply call him a "ranch dog"—a mix of a bit of this and that, tough as saddle leather, managing his every day all day job in the hot dry hill country with little more direction than "bring 'em", "put 'em in" and "quit". Another world.
The herding trainer was a pleasant person—friendly but firm, chirping enthusiastically to Blossom and getting the shy, sensitive dog to wag her tail and greet her before she took her in with the sheep. She was an aficionado of a breed included in the “continental” herding group. These breeds, which include the various Belgian Shepherds, German Shepherds, Rottweilers, Bouviers des Flandres, and Beaucerons, among others, once escorted the sheep and cattle of Europe to market, and tended large flocks in unfenced common land, keeping them out of roads and gardens. They have in common modern usage as protection and search dogs, and invisibly small numbers used as commercial stockdogs in the U.S. All of them are about as big as a smallish sheep and tend to have dominant personalities, so I was surprised when she told me that her impressive-looking dogs sometimes couldn’t get her sheep to move. Blossom, too, had been unable to lift this person’s sheep before, so I was prepared for some very heavy, stubborn sheep.
It was so foggy I could hardly the sheep out there a small distance away.
Blossom had never been able to successfully do an arena-length outrun, so Janet had, at home, clicker-trained her to run away from her along a fence. Now the trainer told Blossom “Way t’me,” and Blossom obediently galloped along the fence, her long hair flying. Meanwhile the sheep, naturallly enough, ran toward the other end. I expected Blossom to do what Bonnie would have done, go hell for leather after them and head them before they could get away. But the trainer called to Blossom to stand, and Blossom stood at the far end of the arena, calmly watching the sheep dash away and hide under a tree. “Good girl! Come get a cookie!” And Blossom trotted over for petting and dog treats. Then they started all over again. This went on for a good while, since they had to do both sides.
Where the sheep ended up seemed somewhat incidental to this kind of herding training. Indeed, had it been an open field, they would have vanished in the first five minutes. It was a lot more like obedience and agility training, wherein one breaks down each exercise into blocks and masters each one separately before putting them all together. I could see how some people could refer to this style as “obedience with sheep”. Janet commented to me as we watched, “Blossom’s so happy. She’s really working well! She’s getting her confidence back. I love watching her do this.”
At the end of the session, Blossom was encouraged to run barking through the sheep and split them up, as a reward for all her obedience. This was a new one on me too. After Bonnie had worked hard on something new, Sherry would have me reward her by taking the sheep for a quiet walk, something Bonnie loved to do and for which she needed no commands at all. I could just imagine what Sherry would say if I deliberately let my dog break up the sheep. Ouch! But on the other hand, Blossom was a low-powered, gentle dog who was obviously not going to decide to go sheep-bowling for larks. In fact, getting her excited enough to work was more of the issue. It was a different kind of training for a very different dog.
In the whole training session, Blossom had never, that I had seen, been given responsibility to control her sheep, she’d only been required to follow orders that, to a sheep dog, really made no particular sense. This training technique didn’t seem to be frustrating to Blossom, as I knew it would be for Bonnie. On the contrary, she appeared, as Janet had observed, to be quite enjoying herself.
Next it was my turn. Bonnie had been observing Blossom’s long training session on a downstay, quivering with tension. When I sent her, she exploded into action, gathering the sheep and sending them toward me at a gallop. I stepped aside to avoid being mown down by an avalanche of sheep, rebuked my dog as she instantly headed them going the other way, and we settled down to an even more pushy than usual performance.
It became immediately obvious that this group did not think of themselves as a flock. One big wooly wether kept trying to split off, and Bonnie nailed him a couple of times for it before he gave up. However those sheep behaved for other dogs, they were plenty respectful of Bonnie. Sheep are not as dumb as they’re made out to be.
I wasn’t getting much of a rate out of Bonnie today. The combination of new spooky sheep and freezing weather was too much for me to combat. She never let them get away, but they never settled much either. After we’d done two works, the trainer asked me if I could pen them. Sure. No problem there. And would I mind moving this other bunch? Yep, Bonnie was more than happy to gather another group and pen them for us. The trainer told me Bonnie was “so flashy! It’s so great to see a dog really cover!”
Maybe she was just trying to say something nice about our, to me, less-than-stellar performance. I didn’t argue, even though I thought Bonnie was being pushy, not flashy. I had never thought of Bonnie as flashy. What was flashy, anyway? Isn’t that what Border Collies were? The way they dashed around and froze? I didn’t think of covering as flashy, I thought of it as, well, just working. I relied implicitly on Bonnie making sure all the stock were together. I thought how frustrating doing chores would be with a dog who had little sense of group. But then, these dogs had no chores to do, it was all just for fun.
On the way back, past the Taco Bell, I thought of Casey again. He was a happy dog