Farm Fresh Blog

Everyone should have the kind of job where work is play. No, I'm not talking about CSI stuff, I'm talking about the gig Border Collie has . . .

This is for all the readers who write me about training their dogs to herd. GO TO A PROFESSIONAL!!! I have been blessed with a dog with good genes, but I still manage to screw up things on a fairly regular basis. Because Border Collie MUST help me on the farm, we tend to work with an eye toward the job and not look too far down the road. We just muddle along, the work gets done, and everyone is happy . . . until . . . we go to our semi-regularly scheduled training time with Professional Herding Dog Trainer aka Sheep Goddess. At this point, Sheep Goddess screams and points out that Border Collie doesn't like to go in a counter-clockwise direction, and not only have I unwittingly ALLOWED this, I have actually been quite accommodating and adjust my own body position for the dog. Hmmmmm . . . . never noticed that. (That, by the way, is what you pay these people for . . . )

After pointing it out, Border Collie is quite happy to go counterclockwise.

Then things went a lot smoother. Sheep Goddess was happy. Border Collie was happy. I was happy. Sheep were . . . sheep.

Things were going well . . . until the sheep began to lose interest. Now Border Collie is pretty smart. She can count fairly high and tends to notice when she is missing someone. But then again, this was a larger group.

Someone got bored with the game.

Apparently Border Collie failed to notice this and marched the rest of the group along. Sheep Goddess was not amused.

                                                            "Huh? Where? OOPS! My bad!"

                                              The morning was filled with tough mental and physical work for her. But at the end of it . . .

Don't you wish we ALL had this much fun at our jobs?

(I want to thank Other Half for taking these pictures. The day was cold and windy and he did NOT want to get out of the truck!)

I also want to take a moment to invite everyone to view "The Countdown" section of the website. Police Dog and I are counting down the days to her retirement. She has given most of her life in service of Man, and I'm of the opinion that she needs a hum dinger of a retirement to make up for the fact that soon ANOTHER dog will be leaving for work each night with Other Half. (Sniffle . . . sniffle. . . sniffle)

OH! and something else! I have FINALLY figured out how to enable the comments sections for the blogs. Most of you have been e-mailing your comments (and you are quite welcome to continue to do so!) but I finally figured out how to let you post the comments publicly. I'm still having to go back on the old blogs and enable the comments sections (give me a little time) but the new ones should be up and running!