Cass is a very talented herding dog, but she’s a bit handicapped by the fact that the guy teaching her how the farm works is making it up as he goes along.  Bless her, though, she’s getting it.   Recently I’ve been working in the barn with her, asking her to hold the sheep in a corner so I can put corn in the feeder without getting knocked off my feet.  At first she was having trouble holding her ground as the sheep rushed in toward me, but over a few days of this work, she realized that if she snapped her teeth a bit, the sheep listened to her.  Working close together in the barn, I could encourage her controlled demonstrations of strength, and I could also step in if a sheep got aggressive toward her.  We’re now at the point where she and the sheep are figuring out the routine, and they respect her authority to tell them to stand in the corner for a moment — small victories.

When I’m working in one of the pastures with the other group of sheep, the distances are too great for me to provide this kind of immediate feedback and support to Cass, and some of our work wasn’t going so well.  She was having a particularly hard time keeping the sheep from mobbing me when I put out new round bales of hay. This is a much harder job that the one in the barn, since there are no corners to push the sheep into, and a single little dog cannot make herself into a physical barrier to 30-some sheep.  The job has to be done by strength of personality — the sheep have to believe that the collie can enforce the “stay back there!” directive she’s giving them.

This morning, with a big storm gathering force, I needed to get a round bale out before the snow was too deep for the tractor.  It was windy and cold and I was hoping that the job went quickly enough that my hands weren’t too frozen to split firewood afterwards.  I brought Cass in with me, the first time on this task since she’d mastered the work in the barn.  Previously the sheep largely ignored her efforts to keep them away from me, but this time Cass marshaled the presence to convince the sheep to listen to her.

Even when Bravo started bouncing around, trying to sow mischief and chaos, she held her sheep.  Good girlie!