I noticed early on in my work with border collies that there are many critics and experts out there, but very few people who share the process of training honestly.  You will never see Cesar on TV failing to train a dog, you will not ever see videos of a border collie wiindbag failing to herd the sheep.

For me, sharing the training of a dog means showing mistakes as well as triumphs. I have a lot of both. People are afraid to be authentic on social media or You Tube because a lot Internet warriors – the bands of the righteous – will pounce on them for it. That is unfortunate.  I love to share my mistakes, that is the only way we all can learn and show the truth. I value being pounced on, it means I am alive and learning.

I don’t generally give advice, but I will share one bit of training lore: do not trust anyone who will not share their mistakes with you out in the open, they are lying to you. You cannot train any dog, let alone a turbo-charged border collie puppy without making mistakes.  People who never share their mistakes, who love to judge others, know nothing. The real learning comes from the mistakes, not the victories. I will always share mine and take what comes. That is what it means to be authentic.

Can working with dogs and sheep be fun? I believe it ought to be, and the first day it isn’t, I’ll quit. Fate has a joy for life and work and I don’t want to extinguish that. I got five ribbons in my year or two of going to herding trials, I never had fun at a single one of them, perhaps because I was nervous, and because I wasn’t that good at it, and also because I started putting a lot of pressure on my dogs to get that blue ribbon (they still hang on my wall, though, hypocrisy lives everywhere.)

I also noticed that there were always lines of people waiting to tell me what my dog was doing wrong, even when we won.

There were a lot of people around, they were constantly critiquing one another, their dogs, the judges. I don’t want to generalize, I met some great people, some were having fun. But not too many. Fate and I are having a blast – we always have fun – as Dr. Karen Thompson wrote me, we appear happy and relaxed in our videos. That was music to my ears, just what I want to do. If I am grumpy or in a bad mood, I just stop. The dog deserves better.

I am working with Fate to clarify some of the confusion and fuzziness in our earlier work. Because we worked so much with Red, Fate tends to look for him and cue off of him. “Come bye” often meant racing around the pasture with him, now it means she should run clockwise around the sheep. She is getting it, we are working alone, Red is put away in the house when he isn’t working.

Fate still can’t move the sheep by herself, we are getting close to that I think. In my training, there are always steps forward, steps back. All of the mistakes are mine, not hers. I have my own style of working, it works very well on the farm, the dogs are efficient and invaluable to me here, we have no need of ribbons anymore.

This morning, Fate and I worked on clarity. When Maria and Red and I are in the pasture, she isn’t always sure where to look. So we are working alone, quietly and calmly – and happily – to clarify that, a new phase. She is getting it, as she always does. Fate is very quick and we are communicating almost telepathically now, come along and see in this video.