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Hi Bev. Over the years, you seem to have done your homework. You have traveled to the west, and to Texas to get experience on those types of sheep for your dogs, and it seems to have paid off. Do you think there is a difference in sheep, and dogs need to experience this in order to become competitive at the western trials, or do you think you can simulate the same things back here in the midwest and east? For example, the Bluegrass is one of the eastern trials that imports Texas lambs for its trial. Do you think they are representative of Texas sheep, or of Lambs? I have heard people say they are just silly lambs, and work like all lambs.

 

With the finals being in Sturgis again, are those sheep really different? and if you don't mind, how so?

Marilyn Terpstra

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Hello Marilyn,

 

Bev is obviously an expert in this area, but thought I'd share with you my experiences from last year regarding western trials.

 

We arrived in SW Oregon from SC in Sept in time for the Nationals. Over the ensuing year I went to more than 15 trials with Boone (6 yo now) and Boone's Lad (3 yr old now). They had been raised on hair sheep trials in the SE USA. On our trip from OR to ND to WY we had a ball on these great venues and the western sheep. On almost every trial we improved on our second day's run - many time placing in competion with some of the best of the west. Several other easterners were there and did equally well or better. These were both trial sites and sheep that my dogs and I had never seen before.

 

The question is was the dog or the handler adapting? I suggest both and I think the dog did it better, faster, and more consistently than the handler (me). A dog with good instincts versus a man with little - sorry to have held Boone and Lad back.

 

Penning was particularly challenging. Watching Bev, Tommy Wilson, Susan Carpenter was illuminating. Hint: Be proactive not reactive.

 

Also redirecting is often important as a lot of the large fields here have no fences and you've got to do a little directing at significant distances.

 

Also they more typically run four or five sheep. The sheep are larger.

 

My Lad dog is more of an unpredictable actor based on the sheep as some of the easy moving sheep help his sticky eye by moving on and I'm just the rudder. On the other hand some of these Rambos that stop to face the dog or graze in the alfalfa require whip-like flanks to continually lift with him. And close work is far from satisfactory. Boone, however, seems to adapt really well if I can stay confident.

 

One of the biggest pleasures I had was after a storm break almost at the end of a Wyoming trial with a 850 yard outrun (those tiny specks are the sheep and the horseman), overhearing the judge say "zero, zero" after the outrun and lift. Pretty nifty for a little SC/GA dog raised on hair sheep set at 275 yards.

 

Merry Christmas (gotta go watch the Elk cross the pasture)

Bill

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A really tough question Marilyn and one that many of us have spent a lot of time under the tent talking about the trying to translate from a "feeling" to words.

 

Yeah there is for sure a difference. Some dogs can handle the difference with relative ease and get it pretty much right away. Some dogs learn to handle the sheep and get better with exposure. Some dogs can't go west and indeed some western dogs get sold east as not being up to the work out west and do great in the east.

 

The biggest difference is that western sheep and trials are more a show case of the ability of the dog and less a test of who is the best handler. The nicest difference is that while time of day can make a difference in your run and weather can be an enormous factor mostly any draw of sheep will be like any other and a draw will not prevent you from winning. Coming from the east, where the draw can be determine your placing this is a huge difference.

 

There is much more that the dog needs to just handle on western sheep. The dog actually needs to lift the sheep and often to get them grouped and keep them in a group coming into the fetch (sometimes from a great distance) and as the sheep have never or rarely been worked in a small group or by a dog its really just up to the dog to know what needs doing and to get it done. This is sort of a graduation exercise for the dogs. Proof that all of the training and trialing has prepared them to understand the job and to get it done.

 

The penning requires a dog with very good flanks that neither gives ground nor cuts a flank. Either one will mean no pen. Often the sheep will face and even come toward the dog at the pen so it can be a pretty good test of the dog's courage, training and obedience. Some dogs can stand the sheep looking and even walking toward them but the pressure this puts on them is such that they then blow up on the next flank.

 

The western courses tend to be bigger then the eastern courses, the sheep are tougher and require a lot more work from the dog. This whole thing requires a fitter dog then the east. As a result you see many fewer old dogs running in the west and the dogs need to be generally fitter (altitude is also often a factor as few of the trials are lower then 3,000 feet and most are higher).

 

Finally, it is very rare to single out west. You will almost always work five sheep and rarely four. You will almost always be asked to shed. The shedding is usually not to hard (easier then the east) and is all in the set up and not requiring the extraordinary execution we are accustomed to.

 

I love trialing out west. I'm afraid it has rather ruined me for hair sheep and farm flocks. So don't go if you can't stand to drive a lot and go again. Trialing in the west is the high point of my season. The sheep are great. The venues are outstanding. The hospitality is wonderful (as I have found it to be everywhere in this country and Canada).

 

As Bill Orr said the pleasure of watching your dog bring 5 unbroke, argumentative sheep the 850 yards at Woodbury's Ranch can't be beat any where in the country although there are plenty of trials out there that can give as great a thrill.

 

The Texas sheep are different then the north plains sheep. They are lighter and crazier, no doubt as a result of experience of spending all their formative years in Texas. They run like deer and willingly desert any companion they think they can outrun. They are an absolute blast to work but I think put less pressure on the dogs then sheep at Meeker, Soldier Hollow and the Wyoming, Dakota trials. They for sure are the fastest sheep in the world. The only other ones that come close are LeBar's sheep running across the field at the lift and the Soldier Hollow sheep headed across the field breaking back to the setout.

 

The sheep at Sturgis tend to be a bit heavy and face the dogs quite a bit. They need good pen work and a dog with determination, courage and patience.

 

Hope this helps. Don't miss the Sturgis finals. I actually think that if you do well at the Blue Grass you should feel encouraged for Sturgis. The Blue Grass sheep don't do as much facing up to the dogs but they do for sure put some pressure on them and can be a good indicator if you have a dog you should head west with.

 

Beverly

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Great answer, Bev; really right on. As a western handler, with western dogs, who has trialed a little recently in the east, I can agree that there is a marked difference. As you said, the shedding on western sheep is easier, but it is also true, I think, that the dog can do it more readily without too much handler assistance, while it seems to me that in the east, the handler must do most of the work with the dog assisting only at the very end. The Bluegrass sheep this last year were I thought typical of western sheep, that is, were on the heavier side, but they were also leaderless lambs (which you're not apt to get at Sturgis nor at most western trials), and only three were used, no doubt for cost reasons, but the effect was to make them a tad lighter. Even so, I thought many of the dogs pushed very hard around the course; if this were done on Sturgis sheep who are more adult, there would be lots of fighting, or passive-aggressive lying down from the sheep. The dog needs to have more push on western sheep generally, but it can't overdo it. The best sheep that one can find in the east that can replicate the heaviness of the western variety, I think are dorpers. The MacRaes, I believed, used white dorpers or dorper crosses in their thanksgiving trial, and they heavied up nicely while remaining very workable over three days. Easterner

s should try to get to this trial in future if they have an interest in trialing in the west. The course was comparably large (550 yard OR), and imaginatively and correctly set up with regard to pressure (e.g. the cross drive was set in the opposite direction of the draw from the exhaust, which meant the dogs had to work harder), and at least four sheep were used. The sheep there are also not penned much and so penning can offer a bit of a challenge; and finally, there were enough sheep for everyone to have fresh sheep on the first run, unlike most eastern trials where sheep, because of their scarcity, must be re-run sometimes three times within the first day of the trial. Melinda Hanley in Carlisle, KY, near Lexington, raises dorpers and has affordable grades of them for sale. The Woodburys in Wyoming also raise dorpers, as does Ken Willard in Oregon. The Texas sheep, I've been told, incidentally, tend to be a bit crazy because they graze in the wild without benefit of guard dogs, and so have learned how to flee from predators.

 

Yours,

 

Albion

 

 

 

 

 

 

A really tough question Marilyn and one that many of us have spent a lot of time under the tent talking about the trying to translate from a "feeling" to words.

 

Yeah there is for sure a difference. Some dogs can handle the difference with relative ease and get it pretty much right away. Some dogs learn to handle the sheep and get better with exposure. Some dogs can't go west and indeed some western dogs get sold east as not being up to the work out west and do great in the east.

 

The biggest difference is that western sheep and trials are more a show case of the ability of the dog and less a test of who is the best handler. The nicest difference is that while time of day can make a difference in your run and weather can be an enormous factor mostly any draw of sheep will be like any other and a draw will not prevent you from winning. Coming from the east, where the draw can be determine your placing this is a huge difference.

 

There is much more that the dog needs to just handle on western sheep. The dog actually needs to lift the sheep and often to get them grouped and keep them in a group coming into the fetch (sometimes from a great distance) and as the sheep have never or rarely been worked in a small group or by a dog its really just up to the dog to know what needs doing and to get it done. This is sort of a graduation exercise for the dogs. Proof that all of the training and trialing has prepared them to understand the job and to get it done.

 

The penning requires a dog with very good flanks that neither gives ground nor cuts a flank. Either one will mean no pen. Often the sheep will face and even come toward the dog at the pen so it can be a pretty good test of the dog's courage, training and obedience. Some dogs can stand the sheep looking and even walking toward them but the pressure this puts on them is such that they then blow up on the next flank.

 

The western courses tend to be bigger then the eastern courses, the sheep are tougher and require a lot more work from the dog. This whole thing requires a fitter dog then the east. As a result you see many fewer old dogs running in the west and the dogs need to be generally fitter (altitude is also often a factor as few of the trials are lower then 3,000 feet and most are higher).

 

Finally, it is very rare to single out west. You will almost always work five sheep and rarely four. You will almost always be asked to shed. The shedding is usually not to hard (easier then the east) and is all in the set up and not requiring the extraordinary execution we are accustomed to.

 

I love trialing out west. I'm afraid it has rather ruined me for hair sheep and farm flocks. So don't go if you can't stand to drive a lot and go again. Trialing in the west is the high point of my season. The sheep are great. The venues are outstanding. The hospitality is wonderful (as I have found it to be everywhere in this country and Canada).

 

As Bill Orr said the pleasure of watching your dog bring 5 unbroke, argumentative sheep the 850 yards at Woodbury's Ranch can't be beat any where in the country although there are plenty of trials out there that can give as great a thrill.

 

The Texas sheep are different then the north plains sheep. They are lighter and crazier, no doubt as a result of experience of spending all their formative years in Texas. They run like deer and willingly desert any companion they think they can outrun. They are an absolute blast to work but I think put less pressure on the dogs then sheep at Meeker, Soldier Hollow and the Wyoming, Dakota trials. They for sure are the fastest sheep in the world. The only other ones that come close are LeBar's sheep running across the field at the lift and the Soldier Hollow sheep headed across the field breaking back to the setout.

 

The sheep at Sturgis tend to be a bit heavy and face the dogs quite a bit. They need good pen work and a dog with determination, courage and patience.

 

Hope this helps. Don't miss the Sturgis finals. I actually think that if you do well at the Blue Grass you should feel encouraged for Sturgis. The Blue Grass sheep don't do as much facing up to the dogs but they do for sure put some pressure on them and can be a good indicator if you have a dog you should head west with.

 

Beverly

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I don't know that I can add much to this discussion, but as a former easterner who was running my first trial dog in Ranch when I left, then Pro-Novice when I moved to California, and who recently (and probably wrongly, but it's too late now to cry about it) moved up to Open, I can say that moving out here with my dog was an awful lot like slamming into a brick wall.

 

I have a very classy, stylish dog with lots of eye, impeccable training, and not a whole lot of power and basically, she cannot move the sheep out here. We did quite well at home in the east, had our share of novice success, placements, or wins, then moved out here and found she could not even lift the sheep much of the time, and that even if she could, we would time out on the drive. The distances are no joke either, with Pro-Novice outruns often being the length of Open outruns back home and the size of the fields meaning the sky's basically the limit when it comes to Open outrun lengths. On top of that there's the terrain which is so much more varied than it was back home, with big, undulating hills often the order of the day. Combined with the fact that Fly just turned nine, I think that our move out here has basically ended her trialing career unless we only go to small field trials or arena trials with hair sheep or goats. I know that there are a number of things I can try in practice or training to improve the situation but I also know what I have and that I can't change Fly into a fundamentally different dog than she is. I'm not saying this to diminish all her excellent qualities -- she's smart, and kind, and absolutely positively wonderful on flighty sheep that many other dogs can't handle. But she lacks the element of "No, I REALLY mean it" that the dogs really need to have to be able to move sheep out here. They don't need to be brutes (I think Bev's Pippa proves that) but, well, they need to really mean it -- not to fold and reply, when the sheep say "no," with "Please?"

 

I will say, on the plus side, that being out here has taught me an awful lot about what I want a dog to bring to the table. It's also provided me with a number of intellectual and training challenges I would not have discovered if I'd stayed on the east coast. I'm not saying that it's easy back home and hard out here because that's simply not true; but it IS different and I don't think there's any way to simulate it without actually coming out here. For what it's worth, which given my inexperience, may not be a whole lot.

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