Sunday, March 16, 2014

Herding Lessons

Kirk in the round pen

Spice working on her driving
So we managed to get great herding lessons in before the rain yesterday.  Both MASs also played with Ms Linda's 8 week old border collie.  To confuse the issue Linda named her bc pup Mike.  The other Mike was off his ambulance yesterday and shot video and still photos while we worked.

We used 2 sets of sheep yesterday - first 3 wool ewes with lambs penned elsewhere and then 1 Barbados ewe with lamb penned plus 2 wool wethers.  The second set was light - the Barbados' lamb sounded pitiful from the back pasture and all 3 adult sheep in the 2nd set were a bit flighty.  The other noises on the videos are Linda's pup, the MAS not working, and tom turkeys.

Spice's first session was a bit of circling to take the edge off and then we worked on walking diagonally from one corner of the pen to the other.  I need to be a bit more aggressive with my flagging on her "away" circles.  She is turning back and coming around to the other direction on her "come by" circles without any correction.  Her second time in the pen we worked on driving.  She is quieter and calmer if Linda has her leash but we switched handling locations.  Video shows Linda with her leash.


Kirk worked in the "round" pen on lead and off lead which went fairly well.  So well in fact that Linda wanted to work him in the big pen on his second session.  We have the near disaster on video.  He spent time on his leash with a handler after the video episode but did really well.