But on a working sheep or cattle farm, the border collie breed is more than a just fun-loving pet, it’s a full-time worker, always on-call and always eager to please.
With border collies, one of the most intelligent breeds of dog, the herding instinct is so strong, training the dogs to move the herd is fairly simple, said Chesterville-area sheep farmer Werner Reitboeck, who trains the dogs and sells them to farmers across Canada and the United States. The closest sheep dog trainer to him is in Kingston.
"The dog instinctively wants to herd the sheep and bring them to you," he said. "I work with that to get the dog to do what I want him to."
Reitboeck currently has about nine dogs and 300 sheep on his farm, and is in the process of training the border collies for farm work and for sheep dog trials, which he hosts a couple of times a year.
"Most of the dogs can do good farm work, meaning they can learn to drive the herd into another pasture, bring it in for the night, send it out in the morning and help segregate the animals for vaccinations or shearing," he said. "Trial work takes longer to teach, about two years or so, because it’s a lot tougher."
For sheep dog trials, the dog has to be able to follow commands by a whistle or a hand signal and perform tasks with precision and obedience, such as driving the herd in a straight line down the middle of the field.
A working farm dog will often have about 300 animals in a flock, but in trials, each dog is assigned only three to five sheep, which Reitboeck said is a real challenge.
"When you have about 300 sheep together, they feel safer. But when there’s only three or four of them, they think it’s like a death sentence because they don’t have the protection of a big group, so they tend to want to do their own thing. The dog has to keep them together and drive them through gates and into pens."
Every August long weekend, dog breeders and farmers from across Canada and the U.S. come to Reitboeck’s farm for the annual Sheep Dog Trials. On July 8, he hosted a province-wide trial.
So how does a dog learn all these skills?
There are five basic commands, standard among the sheep dog populations: Way (run counter-clockwise around the flock), Come by (run clockwise around the animals), Walk-up (slowly walk closer to the flock), lie down, and that’ll do (stop herding and come back to me).
Before a young border collie is even introduced to the sheep, it learns lie down, "that’ll do" and walk up.
"They have to be able to run faster than the sheep before they can start working, and that takes about eight months. But if you start them too early, they don’t learn to think for themselves," he said.
Once it turns a year old, the dog is fast enough, big enough and strong enough to handle the work on the field is taken out on a leash and walked carefully toward the flock.
The leash is taken off and the dog instantly runs around the herd. Reitboeck calls out the command for the direction the dog chooses to run, and it doesn’t take long for the dog to understand which command means which direction.
"The hardest part about training the dogs is getting them to listen to you, because sometimes they get so focused on what they’re doing, they tune you out," he said. "They instinctively want to control the flock. I have to teach them to ignore the sheep."
Usually, it takes anywhere from a day to a week for a dog to learn to obey those basic commands while herding a flock, Reitboeck said.
Teaching a dog to drive, meaning it follows the herd and steers it toward its destination, takes about a year because it goes against the border collie’s instincts of bringing the animals to its owner. However, the skill is a must for any good farm dog.
Teaching whistle commands and hand signals is also no easy task for the trainer, but such skills allow the dog to obey commands from across fields.
While farm dogs aren’t as popular on farms in eastern Canada, a lot of western Canada farmers use them, as do farmers across the U.S. In such countries as England and Scotland, farm dogs are a must.
"The idea of having a farm dog is that you can stand in one spot and the dog does all the work for you."
Reitboeck can usually tell early on if a dog will become a good farm worker and trials competitor. And while most can handle the workload, there are a few dogs that simply won’t cut it as farm workers, he said.
"They become goose dogs, chasing the geese off golf courses and parks."
From the Archives:
News, July 2000
