I just got back from spending the weekend in Oregon. Visited some friends that have a small ranch, and finally got to something with Cali I've toyed with for a long time. She's worked sheep a number of times, not tons, maybe 10, but enough to know some basic commands and show a good head around livestock (ie work them, vs just trying to eat them). My friend raises/trains working BC's and after I watched him work a number of his young dogs (and watched his cattle closely :-) ) he agreed to let Cali give the cattle a shot. Although I insisted he be the handler LOL One reason I've never worked cattle before is so far all Cali knows how to do is fetch, and I don't mind a bunch of sheep crowding around me, but I'm not wild about having 6 or so cattle all crowding around me LOL Especially his, 1/2 of them were Texas Longhorns. I can only image what a bump from one of those horns would feel like. So I played photographer instead :-)? ?She got rolled one time by a cow, Bill was telling her to stop and down and she was ignoring him, so I yelled at her to do it.? She stopped, but turned to look at me, and happened to stop about 3 feet in front of one of the cows.? The one with the biggest horns of course LOL.? Who saw the opportunity to slam into her.? But Cali just jumped up/away, gave it a look like "how rude" and went right back to working those cattle.
I LOVE his Longhorns, talk about some gorgeous cattle. I have some photos of his bull I'll be uploading soon.? Cali didn't play with Hannibal. I don't want Cali anywhere near Hannibal any time soon :-)
Unfortunately his sheep and goats just went to the big packing plant in the sky a few weeks ago, so the younger dogs didn't get to try their paws at herding.
We Dutch people have to bow deep for you and Cali !!! Excellent pictures where you see the job is done awesome... --fun of course to see remote ready to be used :-)--
LOL He wanted to put the collar on Cali, although I told him she's only worn an e-collar once before, and really didn't respond well to it. But he just wanted to be sure if things got dangerous for the cattle, he could stop her, so I agreed. With the understanding he wouldn't use it otherwise. I didn't even notice until looking at the photos later that he had his hand on the trigger the entire time. But he didn't use it, she was to well behaved for that. I could understand his concern though, since he's started quite a few young dogs who were basically out of control biting machines at first, until they started to realize that wasn't the point of the training :-)
This was partly a vacation, partly a "working trip" I am originally from this area, and the trainer I train with was going there to do a seminar. So I went along to help out with the seminar, but also to take a day and visit friends.
As an aside, I have nothing against the e-collar and use it on occasion with some of my other dogs. I just don't use it with Cali because she seems to be overly sensitive to the stimulus. For herding work though it really makes sense as a tool for when you really ned to "talk" to your dog long distance.
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