Sheep Herding
Towards the end of 2008, we started training our dogs to work sheep. Midge, Mollo and Manouk had always demonstrated their willingness to herd either each other, or in Midge's case, any thing that moves. One of the drivers for this was to find something that would keep Midge's brain active as Agnes started to slowly wind down Midge's agility career.
One of our friends suggested that she knew a local farmer, Sandy, who might be interested to help us train. After a couple of phone calls and some polite arm twisting a date was agreed to give Midge, Mollo & Manouk their first outing with sheep.
All three dogs took to the sheep with great enthusiasm (a little too much enthusiasm in Midge's case). It very quickly became apparent that we were going to need quite a bit of help to get to grip with this new way or working with our dogs. Although Sandy has trained his own dogs all his life, he had never attempted to teach other people how to train, so it was a steep learning curve for us all.
It was clear that we would need to get some experienced help to show us how to get hold of the basic concepts. As such, Agnes managed to book us on a training session with Derek Scrimgeour at his Farmhouse B&B near Carlisle. Derek is widely respected thoughout the world for his method of training dogs on sheep and runs regular training camps when he is not sucessfully trialing with his own dogs.
After only a couple of sessions with Derek, we were able to see a big improvement with our dogs, mostly due to our better understanding of what we were trying to acomplish and how we were communicating this to our dogs. We are still at a very elementary level with all of our dogs, but try to be a regular visitor to as many of Derek's sessions as we can.
The photographs that can be accessed from the links to the left were taken during some of the sessions with Derek and include many other dogs that were attending and some of Derek's dogs. During the training sessions Derek uses his own dogs to either demonstrate techniques or, more often than not, rescue the sheep the corners of the field when the beginner dogs and their handlers get out of their depth.