Sheepdog training is a rewarding journey that requires patience, understanding, and the right guidance. This comprehensive guide delves into the world of sheepdog training through a vast library of video tutorials, designed for aspiring handlers and seasoned professionals alike. Whether you’re looking to train your first sheepdog or refine the skills of an experienced working dog, this resource provides a structured approach to mastering the art of herding livestock.
The Foundation of Effective Sheepdog Training
Successful sheepdog training begins with understanding the fundamental principles that govern a dog’s behavior and its interaction with livestock. The initial videos in this series focus on establishing a strong foundation, emphasizing key concepts that make the training process smoother and more effective.
Top Tips for Easier Sheepdog Training
This highly popular tutorial is essential for anyone starting their sheepdog training journey. It outlines nine crucial tips designed to simplify the process of teaching your dog to herd sheep or other livestock. While training a working dog is never effortless, understanding the underlying principles and paying attention to critical details can significantly ease the learning curve for both dog and handler. It is recommended that new members watch this video first to set the stage for successful training.
The Golden Rule of Sheepdog Training
Every training endeavor benefits from clear guidelines. This video explores the essential rules that every handler should keep in mind when training a dog to work cattle, sheep, or other farm animals. It aims to help establish and maintain order, offering recommendations for progressively broadening the farm dog’s skill set and ensuring a well-behaved and effective working partner.
Sheepdog Selection and Preparation
Choosing the right dog is a critical first step. This comprehensive tutorial provides essential information for understanding and caring for your farm dog throughout its working life. It covers vital aspects such as housing, selecting the appropriate breed, making the right choice between a dog or puppy, and identifying dogs to avoid. Furthermore, it offers valuable insights into preparing your pup or young dog for the specific demands of herding sheep, cattle, and other livestock.
Understanding Your Livestock: Sheep – Essential Facts for Trainers
While sheep might seem unpredictable, understanding their behavior is key to effective training. This video highlights the importance of learning about sheep and their patterns of behavior. The more you comprehend their ways, the easier it will be to guide them with your dog. This knowledge is crucial for any handler aiming to train their dog to work sheep or other stock effectively.
Early Stages of Training: Puppies and Young Dogs
Introducing a young dog to the world of livestock handling requires a delicate and informed approach. The following tutorials focus on the initial steps of training, ensuring a positive and confidence-building experience for young pups and dogs.
Starting a Young Puppy
The typical age to begin training a young dog on sheep or other farm stock is between six and twelve months. However, with the right approach and suitable livestock, training can commence at a much younger age. This video showcases how training can begin as early as 11 weeks, emphasizing the importance of care and ensuring the sheep do not frighten or injure the pup. Early lessons can make training easier, but it must be conducted with caution and sensitivity.
Puppy Training Essentials
It’s tempting to introduce a puppy to stock early, but caution is advised. If you cannot guarantee the youngster’s safety from attack or even the threat of it, there’s a significant risk that the sheep or cattle could frighten the young dog and permanently damage its confidence. While walking your dog around sheep can be beneficial, it must be done with careful consideration for the puppy’s well-being and developing confidence.
Developing Essential Skills and Commands
As your dog progresses, developing specific skills and mastering commands becomes paramount. This section covers crucial techniques and commands that enhance control and effectiveness in the field.
The Training Stick: Enhancing Control and Ease of Training
This video highlights the indispensable role of a simple, lightweight plastic pipe known as the ‘Training Stick’ in sheepdog training. It demonstrates how this tool is used to guide and direct the sheepdog, particularly in the early stages of training, for controlling direction, pace, and distance from the stock. Its proper use significantly simplifies sheepdog training.
The Dog’s Confidence: A Vital Factor for Success
Understanding the factors that influence a dog’s performance is crucial for any trainer. Confidence is a significantly underestimated element that impacts a sheepdog’s effectiveness. Whether working in confined spaces or with stubborn animals, a confident dog is essential for efficient and reliable work. This tutorial explores the importance of confidence for successful sheepdog training.
Learn Your Commands
Mastering basic commands is fundamental for training a farm dog. Attempting to train a sheep or cattle dog without fluency in commands can lead to confusion and errors, often resulting in the handler unfairly blaming the dog. This video emphasizes the importance of learning and properly executing commands to avoid unnecessary complications during training.
Stopping the Dog
The ability to stop your dog promptly around livestock is critical for control. This three-part series teaches how to train your dog to stop on command without compromising its confidence. It also recommends containing the training within a designated ring to help the dog understand and respond effectively to the ‘stop’ command.
How Can I Slow the Dog Down?
An overly excited dog working sheep or cattle can cause stress and erratic behavior in the animals, further escalating the dog’s excitement. This tutorial provides methods to train your dog to work steadily around stock, leading to quicker and more productive training sessions. Achieving a calm and steady working pace is key to effective livestock handling.
Look Back!
This tutorial teaches how to train your dog to ‘look back’ for sheep that have fallen behind or are in another location. This command is particularly useful for dogs that tend to lose sight of some sheep. Once mastered, the ‘look back’ command helps the dog keep the flock together efficiently.
Balance, What’s the Point?
The concept of ‘the point of balance’ is frequently mentioned in sheepdog training. This video clarifies what this term means and how understanding it can significantly aid in teaching your dog to work sheep or cattle. Discovering the point of balance can offer new insights into sheepdog training dynamics.
Get (the Sheep) Off the Fence!
Sheep often bunch up against fences to avoid a dog. This video demonstrates how to help your dog overcome any apprehension about working between sheep and a fence, enabling them to be moved effectively. It also shows how to utilize the dog’s natural circling instinct to move sheep into open areas.
The Outrun
A proficient outrun is the cornerstone of a capable sheepdog. Dogs naturally enjoy outruns, making them an effective training tool that also improves flanking, working distance, and stopping abilities. This tutorial, presented in three parts, guides you through training your dog to perform excellent outruns and gather sheep effectively.
Give the Sheep Some Space!
A common issue in herding is the dog working too closely to the sheep, causing distress. While assertiveness is sometimes necessary, generally, the less pressure the dog exerts, the better. This video emphasizes instructing your dog to give livestock ample space during early training, a practice that yields significant long-term benefits.
Starting a Non-Starter
Discovering your dog lacks interest in working livestock can be disheartening, but there are ways to re-ignite their natural instincts. This two-part video series explores methods to spark your dog’s working drive and confidence, even if they initially seem reluctant.
Advanced Techniques and Problem Solving
For handlers looking to tackle more complex scenarios or refine their dog’s abilities, this section introduces advanced techniques and solutions for common training challenges.
Backwards is the Way Forward
Once your dog has basic control of the sheep, this exercise becomes crucial. By walking backward with the dog bringing the sheep towards you at your pace, this technique significantly enhances the dog’s speed, working distance, stopping ability, and overall sheep control. It’s a highly recommended exercise for improving a working dog’s performance.
Back to Forwards
Building upon the “Backwards is the Way Forward” technique, this video introduces the next logical step. As the dog brings sheep towards you while you walk backward, turning and walking forward encourages the dog to follow suit, bringing the sheep along smoothly. Mastering this progression makes training significantly easier and accelerates progress.
Training Max – The Gripper
This challenging video series addresses the difficult aspect of training a strong-willed dog that tends to attack sheep. Part one shows Max at his worst, but with careful application of techniques and the use of a rope-chain, progress is made, and the dog begins to learn better control. This series is for experienced handlers dealing with aggressive tendencies.
Close Work
Beyond open-field herding, farm dogs must be adept at handling sheep in close quarters, such as yards, pens, and sorting races. This two-part tutorial demonstrates efficient techniques for moving sheep in these confined spaces, as well as guiding them to fresh pastures and through gateways.
Sending the Dog the Wrong Way
This technique, termed ‘sending the dog the wrong way,’ intentionally widens the dog’s flanks around the stock. While challenging to describe in text, it’s easily understood visually. This method is excellent for teaching the dog to give sheep adequate space and is a key step towards developing a proficient sheepdog.
Flock Work
Transitioning a young dog from training to actual farm work can be a significant leap. This tutorial offers valuable strategies to make the introduction to flock work smoother. It applies techniques learned in earlier stages to help the dog adapt to the demands of herding a larger group of sheep in a farm environment.
The Sheepdog Whistle
Mastering the shepherd’s whistle can be a challenge, but this video provides clear instruction on how to blow it effectively. Part two focuses on training your dog to respond to whistle commands. While not essential for beginners, it becomes a valuable communication tool as the dog progresses.
Sometimes Nice is Not Enough
While training a dog to be gentle with stock is important, there are times when a firmer approach is necessary, especially when dealing with difficult animals or situations. This video explores how to give your dog more confidence and assertiveness when required, ensuring they can manage challenging livestock effectively.
Specialized Skills and Trial Preparation
For those aiming for higher levels of performance or competing in sheepdog trials, this section covers specialized skills and preparation strategies.
Tess in the Open Field
This highly recommended tutorial offers a complete training session packed with valuable examples. It demonstrates Tess learning to widen her flanks, avoid crossing over during outruns, and prevent sheep from splitting up. The video also covers encouraging calmer work around sheep, improving reliability in coming away, and introducing the concept of driving.
Why Your Dog Should Flank Both Ways
Just as humans have a dominant hand, most herding dogs favor working in one direction. This video emphasizes the importance of training your dog to flank in both directions around stock, overcoming any directional bias to ensure well-rounded herding capabilities.
Driving
Teaching a dog to drive sheep away from the handler can seem counterintuitive to basic training, which focuses on capturing sheep. However, with the right understanding, this process becomes enjoyable and effective. This three-part series guides you through teaching your dog to drive sheep, making it a simpler and more rewarding experience.
Inside Flanks – Circle on Command
This advanced technique involves teaching your dog to flank 360 degrees around sheep on command. Essential for training a competitive sheepdog, mastering inside flanks requires patience but significantly improves the dog’s confidence and control over livestock.
Woolly Jumpers
Sheep jumping out of the training area can disrupt lessons, cause injury, and damage equipment. This video addresses how to minimize the likelihood of sheep learning to jump out of the training area, ensuring smoother and safer training sessions.
Use a Reward to Get Training on Board
This tutorial focuses on using rewards to encourage a dog to enter vehicles, addressing a common issue for many owners. It demonstrates how easily a dog can be persuaded to get into cars, trucks, or tractors with the right approach, making travel and transport much simpler.
Eliminate the Toilet Break
A farm dog stopping to relieve itself can lose focus on the livestock, which is detrimental in trials or farm work. This video teaches how to train your dog to eliminate on command before working, ensuring they maintain concentration on the task at hand.
No Excuses Please
It’s easy to overlook a dog’s subpar work, especially for novice trainers eager to progress. This video emphasizes the importance of accurately assessing your dog’s skill level and avoiding the trap of making excuses. Learn how to train a farm dog to work better by objectively evaluating its performance.
Eve at the Pen
This comprehensive tutorial showcases Eve learning essential pen manners, including getting sheep into tight spots and back out. It also focuses on boosting her confidence and control, addressing typical weaknesses for a sheepdog learning to herd, such as an unreliable stop and one-sided flanks.
Shedding
Shedding, or separating sheep, contradicts the basic training principle of keeping the flock together. This video explains how to introduce shedding to your dog, making the task as easy as possible during the initial stages to avoid confusion or worry.
Educating Gloria
This video documents Gloria’s fourth training session, showcasing her work in the open field with mixed results. It illustrates training techniques such as reinforcing the stop and flank commands, widening flanks, moving sheep out of the ring, and handling gripping. Gloria’s journey provides practical lessons for handlers.
Sheepdog Trials – Getting Started
This two-part series provides a comprehensive guide to competitive sheepdog herding trials. It explains how trials are run, how to prepare your dog and yourself for your first event, and details the layout of a typical trial course, offering crucial advice on what to do and what to avoid.
Sheepdogs Time-Out!
Following “An Insight Into Pack Behaviour,” this video offers engaging content with practical training lessons from “Super Sheepdog” Kay. It provides 17 minutes of Border Collie content, offering further insights into their behavior and training.
This extensive collection of video tutorials offers a complete resource for anyone dedicated to mastering the art of sheepdog training, providing clear, actionable guidance from foundational principles to advanced techniques.
