Despite having ZERO time to read for pleasure lately, I’m making my way through a sheepdog book that our herding trainer recommended. It’s called Talking Sheepdogs: Training Your Working Border Collie (by Derek Scrimgeour).
Yesterday, I reported on What Went Well in Lilly’s second herding lesson. Here is a recap of what didn’t go so well.
Last Thursday, Lilly and I hauled ourselves out to Valdemar Farm for our second official herding lesson. This I know … I’m probably the worst goatherd on the planet. Lilly loves bossing goats around.
Let’s resume our discussion of Lilly’s herding lesson with some reflections on the overall experience. As promised, I’ll also clue you into to a couple of details that may shed light on how things went.
The third and final time Lilly worked the goats during her one-hour herding lesson, we tried something different. Oh, I still played the role of newbie goatherd, but we asked Lilly to FETCH the sheep and bring them to me.
After taking a break, during which Lilly smiled and panted wildly but refused to drink any water, we took her back into the training pen. EXCEPT, this time I got the chance to be the shepherd. Goodness help us and the goats.
In today’s goat herding lesson video, Lilly works the goats in the larger training pen. Again, I don’t want to influence your impressions of what you’ll see, so I’ll let the video footage speak for itself.
Our herding story continues this week with a video showing Lilly chasing and/or letting the goats go hither and yon. Yes, they ended up spread across three pens, so we asked Ben, an experienced herding dog for help.
Between bouts of silly cold and small-ish snowstorms every 1-3 days, we finally squeezed in Lilly’s second herding lesson on Friday. The weather was clear, with temps in the 60s, which was great. So, all this week, we’ll be talking about herding.
