Under the Circus Tent

[blackacre]

Lori,

Tell the one about the UPS guy who came while you were trying to flip a sheep in the barn. That one had me howling.

Andrea

[tucknjill]

Oh man, Lori wins hands down..I was rolling!!!

 

heheeh Wobin,

Grit is doing an outrun of my whole little field....hehehe the secret weapon, randy is himself about to peeee his pants. He is planning a trip to see Tommy shortly!

[Belleview]

Sweet photo, Christine. Thanks!

 

And, thank you Andrea, for bringing up that unpleasant memory. Since it didn't happen at a trial, it really doesn't count, right? Oh well.

 

Many many years ago (way past any applicable statute of limitations for reporting any type of animal *abuse* :eek: ), I had to medicate a particular ewe. It was a blazing hot summer day. I had all the sheep penned and, with Blu-Coat & syringe of antibiotics in hand, went in to catch & flip this sheep.

 

Owing to the size of the ewe (very big), size of the pen (too big), and my lack of sheep flipping skills, things *uh* did not go smoothly. I caught the sheep, but absolutely could not get the bugger to go down. She was bucking around, I was flopping around the pen like a rag doll in tow. Very bad words were flowing freely from my mouth. At one point, the ewe reared back as I was bent over her and gave me a wallop of a head butt. Owing to the heat, exertion and pain, I believe I went temporarily insane. I had the ewe in a head lock and was NOT going to let go. Period. What started out as a simple farm chore had now become an epic battle of wills and probably looked something like a weird inter-species Greco-Roman wrestling match. Suddenly, the ewe's eyes rolled back in her head and she slumped to the ground. There was not a doubt in my mind that I had killed her. Sweating, heaving and still swearing, I pulled and dragged the lifeless carcass across the pen and gave her the injection anyway.

 

Then, I noticed there was a UPS guy standing in my driveway, clipboard dangling from his hand, staring at me wide eyed. He got in his truck and drove away. Not a word.

 

Oh, and the ewe was fine. "Came to" soon afterwards.

 

Lori

[cgt]

Oh, man. That's good.

 

charlie

[Shoofly]

Lori wins, Lori wins!!!! Damn girl that's hilarious!

[Valhalla]

Lori, not only was that another hilarious story, but the way you write is great. I can really visualize what was happening in every sentence.

 

I'd say Lori gets first and second for her two encounters.

[cgt]

All right. I have refrained from contributing to this thread. Frankly, I'm not much of a handler so an embarassing moment or two is not *that* impressive. Moreover, my incompetence is really hard to beat and I didn't want to nuke everyone. Hell, I don't have to dig very deep to find something truly painful and I didn't want to brag about it. But Lori's hilarious story prompted me to dig up a couple of stories I told here a long time ago. I ended up putting them in an article in our local club's newsletter. Here it is.

 

*******************************************

Excerpts from: The Wrecks Files

by Charles Torre

 

Those that know me are well-aware that I get very nervous before my dogs and I run at a trial. There?s a good reason for this: I know how bad it can get. The other day I started thinking about all the misfortunes I?ve managed to create during training and work activities. I thought I would share some of them with you. Maybe this is my role in the Utah Stockdog Association: to make everybody else feel better by comparison. Here are two excerpts from my bulging Wrecks Files.

 

(1) I like to train on a large (maybe, 40 acres or more) abandoned pasture near the mountains. A few of you have been kind enough to come up and train with me there. As you know, there?s not much in the way of fences. You and your sheep trailer get to the place via a little dirt road that climbs up out of a ritzy neighborhood and onto the field. If you?re working alone, you set six or seven sheep on one end of the field and then race back to the other end to set up a huge, somewhat blind outrun. So, imagine a beautiful summer morning. It?ll be hot later, but it?s nice and cool so far. Both the dog's and my mouth are watering in anticipation of the upcoming outrun, which should be so beautiful, so poetic. The sheep are peacefully grazing 400 yards away. I send my dog Wink on the right side and enjoy how long it takes for the dog to get out there, how peaceful are the surroundings, how nice Wink is looking against the mountains. About half-way through the outrun the sheep decide to wander off the pasture to the left, down a little dirt road and into the neighborhood below. I start running. Wink eventually sees that this is going to have to be one BIG outrun. I lose sight of her and the sheep as I run down into the neighborhood. By the time I get there the dog is gone and so are the sheep. I still don't know what happened down there while I was making my way down. Eventually, I found 3 sheep at the edge of the neighborhood. I found one sheep in somebody's garage. I found one sheep on the deck of the local sheriff's house (yikes!). I found one sheep in the foundation of a house under construction. I found Wink with a sheep cornered in somebody's back yard. The people who live there are out watching. ($&*$#^!!) ?Hi! Don?t worry, everything?s ok.? (Gulp.) Wink and I start the arduous process of rounding these sheep up. (My other dog (Jen) is tied up to my truck back at the pasture.) We finally get them rounded up and we begin marching them back up the big hill to the pasture when Wink gets heat stroke. The people that were watching (*&%$&%^!) tell me I can use their hose, etc. and shaded porch to cool Wink off. Thank goodness. Now I have to leave the dog and herd the sheep back up the road into the pasture by myself. Across darn near 50 acres to get to my other dog so I can put them back in the trailer. I am starting to feel a stroke of my own coming on. But that part went well, fortunately. The sheep seemed quite happy to have Jen escort them into the trailer. Wink is fine. My ego is damaged.

 

(2) (A different kind of wreck...) That same %&*#%)%@# field. This time in winter. That dirt road I mentioned in (1) is steep, one lane, against a hill on one side, a steep drop off on the other. The road is now covered in snow. I barrel up the hill in 4-wheel-drive with my trailer. I lose traction and have to stop. Stopping turns into backward sliding. I realize I will have to try to roll back down since the brakes just make me slide out of control. I make it most of the way; I'm in sight of the neighborhood. Just when I am complementing myself on my stellar trailer-backing skills, I make the wrong move and send the trailer over the drop off. The trailer drags my truck so that the rear wheels are dangling over the edge, the trailer is hanging down. We stop when the transmission hangs up on the ground at the drop-off edge. Naturally, somebody is out watching this spectacle (^$&$(>!) and offers me a phone. I call for a tow truck. In the meantime I let the sheep out of the almost vertical trailer, get the dogs out and herd the sheep up to the pasture. Tow truck arrives. A seasoned veteran this guy is. What a huge wrecker he has. He just stares and exclaims, "I've never seen anything like THIS before." Neither have all the neighbors who just have to come out and see. Two and a half hours later the truck and trailer are rescued without any damage. The tow driver thanks me profusely for the most interesting tow of his career. Great. The dogs and I go back up to the pasture to get the sheep. They?re gone. But that's another story...

[laurie etc]

i agree - Lori, that's one the most amusing sheep-tales I've heard! It reminds me of some of the close encounters I'VE had with horses(and lived to tell about...) Why is there always someone inadvertantly watching when these "insane" moments happen? I think it's to keep us humble...

[Shoofly]

Charlie, those are great! Now we know why you wear the bucket.

[Denise Wall]

Although not in the same league as Lori and Charlie's stories, here is a repost of an adventure with Kate:

 

When Kate was a pup, she would climb over five foot fences to get in with the sheep. Once, when she was about five months old, I was all dressed up getting ready to go out to eat and made the mistake of thinking I could get her the short distance from the barn to the house without a lead. She took off for the pasture fence, went over it, and ran out 200 yards to the 50 odd sheep and brought them straight to me (or I should say, they ran straight to me for help) until they reached a dividing fence where she held them against it and began fighting with the ram. I ran out there as fast as I could in my cute little going-out-to-eat shoes. I'm sure anyone who has tried to catch a pup this age that stays on the other side of the sheep can understand the frustration of it. I got run into, run over, and feet crunched many times. I tried everything. I put them in a corner but she still went behind them and I couldn't block her. I tried letting them all through a gate into a paddock and shutting the gate in her face, a trick that had worked before, but not this night. I tried taking them to a pen and on the way is where they bombed into me the worst; I rode on the backs of a pack of them for what seemed like a long while, flat on my back, facing the sky, before they split, I dropped to the ground, and then the rest stampeded over me. When she brought them back again, I just lay there on the ground crying and begging her to come. This was about thirty minutes into this whole ordeal. It was dark by this time. I was very late for my dinner plans. You can imagine what I looked like by this point. But still she had no mercy. I finally did catch her by letting her pack them as tight as she could in a corner and leaping on her as she tried to squeeze behind them against the fence again. I was way past worrying about such things as flinging myself, in dress clothes, to the ground between a bunch of sheep.

 

I'd love to end this story with what a wonderful, talented, easy young dog she's been to train but unfortunately, I can't. I do love her dearly but she is a weasel.

[Valhalla]

I can just see Denise out there in her Mary Jane's and dress pants flailing around the try to catch the Katie critter.

 

I have a similar story, but not as amusing as Denise's. When I first got sheep of my own to work, the only dog I had to work them with was Noah. Now Noah was nothin' special, one of those "bought as a pet and then decided to try herding with" kinda dogs. He was an acceptable starter BC but with me behind the controls it was not a good thing.

 

It was Easter Sunday and my husband and I were all dressed up to go to his parents house to meet for Mass and then to the big family Easter feast. I told him that I wanted stop by the pasture on the way to let the sheep out of the barn before we left. I took Noah to help me, trying to be all cool and show my husband just how good Noah and I were doing.

 

Well, I opened the barn gate and Noah shot in there like a cannon and out came 10 panicked sheep with Noah hot on their tails. I was screaming "lie down, lie down, lie down", but I am certian that all Noah heard was something similar to what the Charlie Brown gang hears when their teacher speaks. Anyway, he singled one off and ran it in straight into a barbed wire fence. I finally did get things under control enough to tie Noah up and close the other sheep in a different pasture. By this time, my husband was standing there tapping his foot and looking at his watch. I, unfortunately, was taking up too much of his time and forcing him to miss some major sporting event on TV. I got to that sheep that had run into the barbed wire noticed profuse amounts of blood. Being the Novice that I was, I started to fret... what to do with a cut up sheep on Easter Sunday? I finally did get in touch with an emergency clinic (dog and cat) and they agreed to see the sheep. So, we shoved it into a dog crate and hauled it to the emergency clinic. Luckily the vet on call was having a slow day and was amused at attempting to sew up a sheep. We took it in the exam room and my husband had his knee on the sheep's neck while the vet put about 40 odd stitches in her legs and chest. We took her back home and she lived on to tell the rest of the flock all about it.

 

Needless to say, we missed going to church, the big Easter feast and his sporting events...

 

P.S. Noah now lives with my ex-husband and enjoys lounging on the couch watching sporting events.

[Joan]

Originally posted by Valhalla:

[QB]P.S. Noah now lives with my ex-husband and enjoys lounging on the couch watching sporting events.

Christine,

 

To me, the P.S. is the funniest thing in this thread.

[J.E.S]

I'm not nearly in league with you guys, but I do have one little bitty story.

I was taking care of my friend's sheep, big Rambouillets and when I went to feed them in the pen they were kept in at the bottom of the field, I realized they were not there and the gate was open which meant they were in the field. Well it was pitch black dark but I figured well what do I have this dog for if not to go fetch me the sheep. So instead of driving back up and penning them up top for the night, I decided to send the dog in the dark to go fetch them. I sent him and I heard him running then I could hear him curving around and he ended up back to me. I sent him again assuring him there was sheep there, somewhere. Well after the 3rd time of sending him he didn't come back so I figured he must be up there finding them. I could not hear them up there that far and it was so dark I couldn't even see my hand in front of my face. My car headlights did nothing as they were facing the wrong way. After a bit I heard the sheep coming down the hill. I thought great my dog did a 300+ yrd outrun in the dark and actually brought me the sheep! Then I realized I was standing there hearing the hooves thundering down the hill and I could not see a thing! I knew a couple of those sheep had wool over their eyes and probably could not see too well in the dark either. Anyway, after a brief moment of panic, the sheep missed running me over and I got them penned, but I will never ever send my dog to retrieve sheep in the dark again!

Joan

[debp]

We have topped our personal best (worst?). Previous "Most Embarrassing Moment" was having my dog chase the sheep across the land bridge at Breezy Hill last year. This past Saturday, same field, Heather tired of keeping the lambs from running past her to the exhaust and actually got one IN the pond. You can't see the pond from the handler's post, but I heard the splash, and horrified, I ran over in time to see my sweet little girl swimming back to shore and the sheep swimming to the middle with a suicidal look on it's face. Roy (who was judging) had to help get the bugger out, and it jumped in again! Someone mentioned a Titanic Award.....

Humiliation, Thy Name is Sheep!

[tucknjill]

Again one from my personal archives...My OPEN DOG, (as in Open for pete's sakes,Ok well maybe we had JUST moved to open but still) Tucker and I were working at Henry Kuykendals one January (yeah January) Thank god the man bred this moron dog! We were working on a really long drive, probably over 300-400 yards away (my story and sticking to it!) with 6 wool sheep that hadnt been sheared in years...He drives em right into the pond (not small pond, think BIG pond...I am running my tail off down the field to stop my dog who is still swimming after them (in a straight nice line I might add, what a dog he is!) Henry is grabbing the boat, (think I might have mentioned something about the breeding of the dog at this point???) and the sheep are starting their death paddle motions when they finally made it to the other side...I COULD HAVE DIED. I mean, like what part of come by dont you understand you damn cur dog, open wanna be, sob?