Exuberant with a touch of wild. I do wish I were brave enough to let it all hang out and live like this dog does, consequences be damned. But I am a quiet, contemplative soul, a look before you leap type. I balance well with Kelpies who are enthusiastic keeners for any type of work or play.
On the northern prairie the snow lasts for five months. I spend the first few weeks of winter adjusting to it, the middle part of winter relishing the quiet of it, and the latter part of winter wishing it away. I’m still relishing the quiet of it, active Kelpies notwithstanding. The Kelpies, actually, are the reason I stay so active.
I’ve spent a lot of walking time with the dogs, mulling over training difficulties and shaping my mountains back down to mole hills. My approach to stock dogs has certainly shifted with age and experience. I let a lot of little things slip by now; things that felt critical to me in the early days with dogs are no longer so. For example, I used to be much more stringent about the dogs following with me or behind me on a walk and then letting them run free only when I said so. When you don’t know your own way of being you follow the way of others who are doing it and that’s what I did with dogs.
But now I’ve carved out my own way to be with dogs. I’m not aiming for the Kelpies to be sheep trialing dogs and I’ve been highly influenced by the philosophical smarts of guardian dogs. So now we all just head out the door and go and so long as everyone is minding their manners, it’s all good. When they don’t I’ll act according to the infraction. I’m sure I’ve lost a bit of my trainer edge when it comes to the Kelpies and they might not take me as a leader in all manner of things important to dogs, but it doesn’t seem so life and death critical to me as it did in the past. I think there is unseen pressure on farmers who want to use to stock dogs, pressure to be proficient and expert at it or don’t bother getting a dog. Me and my current Kelpies would never make it around a trial course, and have no desire to anymore, but there are a lot of trial dogs who’d never handle 500+ head of livestock with as much comfort and control as we can either.
Maybe it’s just a life stage thing and I’ll revert back to training, training, training but nowadays I talk to the dogs as much or more as I command them to do one thing or another. The Kelpies are here to help me get the work with the sheep done, and we’ve managed that for enough years now that I’ve figured out I don’t have be such a hard case about how the work happens or what we do or don’t do when we’re not doing sheep work. I like a dog who minds me but equally as important is our enjoyment of each other’s company regardless of who is leading in any moment.
