SIX MONTHS AFTER I bought Bundy I acquired another sheepdog, this time a traditional border collie. I have now had a succession of border collies, but that doesn’t mean I have turned my back on kelpies. One day, when I am doing less television work and have more time on the farm, I’d like to have another of those wonderful dogs. Our livestock manager has a kelpie–collie cross, which is another great option, with some shepherds classing them as the best of both breeds.
I bought Fenn from a great friend of mine, Dick Roper, who manages a farm not far from mine. He’s an acclaimed sheepdog trialler, winning the Countryfile One Man and His Dog competition for England in 2016. The competition involves teams of a senior handler and a junior handler from Scotland, Wales, Ireland and England, and for many years has been a huge TV hit, now having its own slot on Countryfile.
I’m going to describe Dick as the doyen of sheepdog trainers, because he’ll enjoy the joke. When he first heard the word ‘doyen’ he went home and looked it up in the dictionary, to find it means ‘outstanding in his field’. So he reckons it is a description that fits him (and all shepherds) because he spends his days out, standing in a field.
‘Outstanding’ is a good description of him, especially as he won the championship despite having lost the sight in one of his eyes, which is a real handicap in trialling. But he’s a cheerful person whose attitude to life is, ‘Yes, I’m sad to have lost the sight of an eye, but on the other hand, at least it’s not a red wine allergy …’
I first met Dick when I joined Dad and Uncle John on the farm and I went on a sheepdog training course organised by the Agricultural Training Board. I took Bundy, and that was the occasion when Dick made his unforgettable judgment on kelpies, something along the lines of: ‘Sell her and get yourself a border collie …’ He stands by that opinion.
‘Collies are accurate in the way they work. They stare at anything that is moving, which is why puppies who live on a farm will chase vans and bikes before they get near to sheep. They don’t run around like headless chickens, they run with purpose and balance, and that’s what makes them so good at their job. The amount of “eye” they have governs how close they can work the sheep, how they can make the sheep go in the direction they want.’ (As I’ve explained, eye is the ability of a dog to fix its stare on a moving object, essential when working sheep at a high level.)
I’m afraid Bundy had no eye; she was scatty. She wanted to work, but she never had an accurate point of balance. She was just as happy chasing the sheep away as rounding them up and bringing them to you, but with no style or accuracy.
‘And that’s the difference between collies and nearly all other types of working dogs. They have eye, and they’ll work anything moving – they’ll work the water coming out of a hose pipe,’ said Dick.
Clearly, I defer to Dick in all things to do with collies. But I think he was a bit harsh on poor Bundy: she wasn’t great by his standards out in the paddock, but she was a wonderful yard dog. Dick particularly loves border collies, but, despite his criticisms of kelpies, he recognises the abilities of other strains of collies. Bearded collies have less eye, but are still very good with sheep. One of our assistant stockmen bred beardies and he handled sheep well with them, but they would never reach trialling standard. They are lovely strong dogs, though, which is sometimes a great advantage.
Welsh collies have no eye, but they can still work sheep and are more versatile because they are also good at moving cattle. Dick admits he was very impressed when he was judging trialling in Brazil and he found the same dogs being used in the sheep classes and the cattle classes.
‘It was very exciting watching them moving half-broken Aberdeen Angus steers around, and then seeing them working a flock of sheep. But you cannot use a good border, with real “sticky eye”, with cattle because they are too stationary and will get kicked or trodden on, so you need a free-flowing dog like a Welsh collie.’
Dick has trained all sorts of dogs: Labradors, spaniels, German shepherd dogs among others. He believes that collies have brains that are wired differently, almost completely controlled by their eyes.
‘The whole thought process of a collie is different. Other breeds are great at other tasks, but for working a flock of sheep, give me a collie every time. There’s something about the German shepherds that makes me think they have a bit of collie in their breeding, but not enough …’
Dick is often asked to help out with dogs that are not behaving well, and he says the first thing to consider is their circumstances. I know, because I’ve seen it myself several times, that the very best of dogs can be ruined by owners who don’t understand the animal and it becomes unruly and even nips people. Dick cites the example of a serviceman based at a nearby RAF station who was worried about the behaviour of his collie.
‘It never takes its eyes off the budgie,’ Dick was told. The owner and his wife had a new baby, and they were worried that the collie now seemed to be watching the baby with the same fervent attention as it focussed on the budgie.
‘I told them that the dog was 99 per cent guaranteed to be the best protector their baby could ever have, but there was a 1 per cent chance it would nip, especially if it was bottled up all day without enough exercise or mental stimulation. They gave the dog to me and I rehomed him with a shepherd who found him to be a really great worker.’
One reason for the problem of collies going to the wrong homes, which I’ve talked about, is that people see Dick and all the other great sheepdog trainers on television, they read that collies are so intelligent, and they think they would like to own one, without any consideration of what they can offer the dog. Some collies thrive as pets, particularly if they are taken to agility classes, especially flyball competitions. Flyball is a sport where competing teams of dogs race across hurdles, then release a tennis ball which they have to carry back before the next dog in the relay team can set off. It’s fun to watch – they have competitions at Crufts – but it is also stimulating enough to keep a collie’s brain and limbs busy. But so many get nothing more than a half-hour walk in the park and spend the rest of their day confined inside.
So it is from Dick that I have learned most of my sheepdog training – and unlearned the bad habits I developed growing up!
When he expressed his disdain for Bundy, I was, at first, determined to defy him, and prove that I could train Bundy to round up sheep the way I wanted her to do it. I still had the image of Bob, the kelpie in Australia, in my mind. But after a while I realised that my best plan was for Bundy to work the sheep in the pens and to get another dog for out in the fields, because rounding up sheep was not her greatest talent. Dick, I was forced to admit, was right.
I rang him up and he told me of a litter of puppies, bred from one of his own trialling dogs and a mother who was kept as a pet. The sire was Dick’s dog Cap, who was a national champion sheepdog four times, so I was keen to see the puppies. We looked at the litter together and Dick helped me choose the right one for me. His rule of thumb for choosing a good pup is to look for a brave and curious one, with good ‘eye’. Dick likes to get a broom and see which ones in the litter chase it as he moves it around, showing that they have a natural inbred herding instinct and a fascination with anything in motion. He also drops an empty metal feeding dish, making a loud clatter. Any dog that doesn’t run away may well be deaf or stupid, so he ignores that one. Then he looks for the pups who come back to the source of the noise quite quickly, with curiosity, not too frightened but naturally wary.
I knelt down on the floor with the puppies. There were two bitches I liked, but one of them came up to me, taking more interest in me than the others, jumping to try and get on my knees. As Dick says:
‘A puppy chooses you, not the other way round. It’s an old adage, but it’s true: a puppy will choose the right owner if it has the chance. You can’t hide your character from a dog, they can judge you in a few seconds. It’s part of their history, from when they lived in packs and had to understand the hierarchy very rapidly. They learn, as puppies, which ones to get on with, which to back off from, which to scrap with. You rarely see a major fight in a pack, because they each understand their position. And that’s how they quickly judge humans, knowing instinctively who they will get on with.
‘It’s because they make instant judgments that they are also good guard dogs, sensing which human beings are friends and which are foes.’
Predictably, like everything people like Dick and me know instinctively, there has now been a university study to confirm it: scientists in Japan have demonstrated that dogs are good at working out who their masters’ friends are, and similarly they remember anyone who has not shown kindness to their owner. The scientists’ conclusion is the same as Dick’s, that dogs are very quick to sort out who is who in a pack, and will be ready to protect the animals (or people) who look after them. It demonstrates, they concluded, that dogs show sophisticated intelligence and make use of their observations ‘to reach a decision about which individuals to interact with or to avoid’.
As Dick says: ‘Puppies will go to a person they like, automatically, and a confident dog will go to a confident person. A subservient puppy can still flourish, but will be much happier with a gentler owner.’
If Dick is interested in a litter, he tries wherever possible to make his choice when the pups are seven weeks old, which he believes is the right time to assess their characters.
‘There are lots of odd myths around choosing a sheepdog, but one that is true is that at seven weeks a dog’s eventual character is established. They may go through a mad teenage period between seven months and up to 12 or 14 months, but then they will revert to the personality they had at seven weeks.
‘Many police forces also make their selection from litters at seven weeks, choosing the dogs best suited to police work and rehoming the ones whose personalities don’t measure up to the criteria they need. At one time, far more puppies went forward for training only to fail at a later date, which was expensive. By choosing well at seven weeks the failure rate is cut back, and the other puppies go on to work that suits them better, perhaps security work, or simply to be pets.’
Dick also judges pups by the position of their tails. He doesn’t like dogs who keep their tails up – another strike against Bundy, who always worked with her tail up.
‘In a collie if the tail is up it is a sign that they are tense, under pressure, or even that they are simply thick. I like a tidy tail. If it is rammed under their body that is just as bad, as it means they are wound up or scared. What I look for in a border collie is a nice relaxed tail, because that signals a relaxed dog. Other signs of tension are when they eat sheep droppings, or when they yawn.’
The little pup I chose was beautifully marked, even at ten weeks old, which was when I saw her for the first time. She was adorable and seemed to like me too, and I was very happy to take her home with me. Of course the first thing you need to do when you have a new puppy is choose a name. With a dog I am a strong believer that it needs to be something short and snappy, ideally with one syllable. That’s why many sheepdogs are called names like Fly, Pat, Meg or Ben, so that they can be said quickly and clearly with no chance of misunderstanding. For my little puppy I wanted something a little bit different to the ordinary and went for the name Fenn.
It didn’t take Bundy long to accept her, which was probably easier because Fenn was kept outside in a kennel, as working sheepdogs are, and Bundy slept in the loo. At first Fenn had a lamp in there to keep her warm. Our kennels are large, with a comfortable bed for the dogs. Working sheepdogs housetrain themselves very quickly: a young pup will mess in its kennel but it soon learns to keep its own home clean.
Fenn was a beautiful black and white bitch. If you asked a child to draw a sheepdog, the result would be Fenn. She looked exactly the way everyone thinks a sheepdog should look, and her behaviour didn’t let the side down, either.
The first thing any dog of any breed needs to learn is its own name, and to come to its owner. It needs to come not in answer to a polite request, but on command, obeying an order. If it doesn’t come at once, don’t shout at it or punish it. You can do this with a disobedient older dog, but a puppy has to feel that being by your feet is the safest and best place. Teaching a dog to come to you is the most essential, but also one of the hardest, lessons. When the dog obeys, even if not straightaway, it should be rewarded with a stroke and some words of approval. The dog will know from the tone of your voice that you are pleased with him. Dick’s advice is to ration stroking and fussing over a dog, so that when you do it really knows that it has earned your praise. Much harder said than done! I’m nowhere near as strict, and I’m happy to stroke and fondle the ears of my sheepdogs on greeting them every morning. I treat them a bit like when you see a pack of wolves on a natural history programme, when they wake in the morning and they all fuss around one another, whimpering, wagging their tails and saying hello. This is all over in a matter of minutes and then it is off for the hunt. I do the same with my dogs, a lot of fuss to say good morning and then it is off to work.
The importance of having control of your dog and being able to get it to come or stop on a sharp command is obviously fundamental. Every parent knows that a child who doesn’t obey first time can end up in danger, touching something hot or walking into a road. So it’s something that every dog owner, even if the dog is a pet who will never work, needs to be able to do.
Fenn was easy to train. At six months old she met the sheep for the first time, and she instantly took to them and the job. I knew she would: I’d seen her trying to round up the chickens in the yard. It always amazes me how the instinct is there in sheepdogs, thanks to selective breeding down the centuries. The herding instinct is part of natural hunting behaviour, but these dogs have learnt not to follow through and kill their prey, but to try and please their owners by bringing the prey, in this case sheep, to them.
If a dog is really difficult to teach to come (or any other behaviour problem) Dick told me his method of bringing it into line: ‘Dogs are pack animals, and even if you only have one dog it feels part of a pack with you. So the worst thing that can happen is to be excluded from the pack. You do this by ignoring them, making it clear you don’t want anything to do with them. If you are in a field, simply walk away and shut the gate. When the dog attempts to follow you, ignore it, leave it there. If you speak to them at all, tell it to clear off. It sounds harsh, but you’ll find that it quickly picks up on the fact that it has to come when it is called.’
Of course, Dick is training sheepdogs, and it is much easier to enforce rules when the dog lives outside, which explains why most working sheepdogs are kennelled (plus the fact that they are often covered in mud and muck). The same rules apply to family pets, although it is much harder to enforce them within a family. I may be trying to ignore the puppy, but that doesn’t mean that Charlie, Ella and Alfie will ignore her … puppies get mixed messages, especially if they are living inside with several family members.
I am a strong believer that the family should decide what the rules are for the dog in the house and everybody should make their best efforts at sticking to them. At home we don’t allow the dog to have titbits from the table as this leads to begging when you are trying to eat, which drives me mad. Our dogs are never allowed upstairs, so even one paw on the bottom step is out of bounds. Many people let their dogs upstairs, even sleeping on their beds, but when you live in a muddy farmyard it really doesn’t work. I also think that a dog should have its own bed and as it views you as the alpha male/female, it does not have the right to sleep on yours. A bit of dog psychology, which I am sure is right. For a similar reason, our dogs aren’t allowed on the furniture. It is always important to scold a dog at the moment it breaks the rules so that it can identify with what it has done wrong. We all use the same commands so there is no confusion, and simply say the word ‘No’.
Trialling dogs like Dick’s, of course, have to learn so much more even than a working dog on a farm, like Fenn, and the amount of time given over to training them has to be so much greater. I never took up trialling when I was younger. Partly because trials take place at weekends, and, back then, weekends were for playing rugby …!
Also, if I am honest, I don’t think I would ever have been good enough. But I love watching sheepdog trials, and I’m full of admiration for the experts like Dick, just as I’m full of admiration for hill shepherds who control a dog in a howling gale from one and a half miles away. It’s awe inspiring to watch them.
I started training Fenn with the sheep by walking her along the edge of the field and then taking her into the corner with a small group of sheep (I used Bundy to round them up). Then, because her instinct was to be on the other side of the sheep, I made her sit before giving her the command to go to the right of the sheep – ‘Away’. When she mastered it we went to another corner to learn the ‘left’ command – ‘come by’.
We practised for 15 to 20 minutes every morning and every evening. I learnt from Dick that if she got it wrong the worst thing I could do was to show anger. I had to walk away, put the dog back in the kennel, let my steam out, have a cup of tea then go back later. Different dogs take different amounts of time: sometimes weeks, sometimes months. Fenn was very good, and she learnt the voice commands and whistles within days.
After mastering right and left, I moved the training to the middle of the field, where I erected a circular pen out of hurdles and stakes. (It’s interesting that dogs, like humans, have a natural preference for left or right. They’ll obey the commands, but if simply sent out to round up some sheep they’ll tend to choose their own favoured way.) I used Bundy to round up some sheep and pen them, and then I walked around the pen with Fenn. I didn’t let Fenn run with Bundy all the time, although that is a method used by some farmers and shepherds. There’s always the risk that the puppy will learn bad habits from the older dog and will end up watching the other dog instead of listening to you and watching the sheep. And besides, Bundy wasn’t the best model for the kind of work I wanted Fenn to do.
I took Fenn back to Dick after I had been training her for a few months to refine some of my techniques and sort out a particular problem I had. I probably started working her with sheep too soon, before I had perfected a strong ‘stop’ command with her. Dick stresses that you need to be able to stop your dog before it works with sheep ‘otherwise you end up chasing behind it, ranting and raving, in a bad temper, and the dog recognises your temper but it doesn’t understand what you want it to do.’
Dick sometimes introduces a puppy to sheep before he teaches ‘stop’, but he does it in an enclosed space with a few sheep, so that they cannot scatter and run away. He taught me that when you have a particular problem with a dog, as I did, you go right back to basics, and start teaching ‘stop’ in the yard, until she has it.
‘Do it at five yards away, fifty yards, a hundred yards, and bring it back if it doesn’t obey. You are going to have to control your dog from a long distance away, so you need to be sure and confident in what you are doing. A dog quickly senses when you are not confident.’
If you ask Dick how he knows he can stop his dog at a thousand yards distance he simply says: ‘Because I know it’s going to stop and therefore it will stop.’ Confidence is the key.
A general tip that Dick gave me about training dogs, and which I always remember, is never to overdo it.
‘Sometimes a dog seems to have mastered a command, then it loses the plot and goes backwards. My advice is to stop training for a few days,’ he says. ‘Dogs, especially those being trained at a high level, sometimes need a bit of thinking time to absorb what they’ve learnt. If you are trying to teach too much at once, it can all go to pieces.’ It helps having their own kennel, their own space, in which to reflect and not be distracted by everything going on in a busy house full of people.
Dick says the warning sign that a dog is worried and overstretched by training is that it will begin to act out of character, perhaps chasing its tail, carrying things in its mouth, eating sheep poo. Obviously, lots of dogs carry sticks all the time; it is only a sign of stress if it is outside their normal behaviour.
Fenn developed into a really useful working dog and was happy to work for our stockman, John King, as well as for me. John had his own border collie, and they worked well together. This was really important for me, because although the idea of ‘one man and his dog’ is very appealing, on a working farm a dog should respond to other masters. This doesn’t mean she wasn’t first and foremost my dog, but I could happily go away and leave John to it, knowing she would do everything he wanted her to do.
When I have a good dog like Fenn, it is natural for me to want to breed from her, to keep her genes going. I arranged for her to be served by one of Dick’s dogs, and she had a litter of six puppies.
It’s easy to know when a bitch is ready to conceive: it happens three or four days after they finish menstruating. They start to get overexcited. Generally, the bitch is taken to the dog, and usually they have a bit of fun running around together. When he eventually mounts her they get ‘dog tied’, because he swells inside her and for up to about 20 minutes they are tied together, until he deflates and it’s all over. Often it’s wise to follow up with a second visit to the dog a couple of days later, just to be sure.
The owner of the bitch pays for the service, either in money or by giving the owner of the dog the pick of the litter. Our sheepdogs have their litters in the stables and it is really fantastic fun: there’s nothing better than seeing those adorable little bundles of fur finding their way about, playing roly-poly with each other. It’s especially nice if a litter is born in spring, because they will be with their mother for ten to twelve weeks and if the weather is good they can have more freedom running around in the garden and exploring.
We kept one of Fenn’s pups, another little black and white bitch called Maud. Charlie and I chose the name for no particular reason except that we both liked it. Maud worked out very well, but I didn’t put as much time into her training as I did with her mother, so she never quite lived up to Fenn’s standards.
Fenn lived a long and active life, but eventually, when she was really old and in semi-retirement from work, her back legs gave out. I took her to the vet who told me her spine had prolapsed, and there was nothing we could do. I made the decision there and then, and he put her down. I took her body back for the usual burial at Buttington Clump, driving with tears filling my eyes. I was very sad to say goodbye to her, but I knew her time had come and she had lived a great life, doing what she loved best. If I can, I always bring the vet to the farm to put down an animal so that they feel at home, away from the alien smells of the surgery and in familiar surroundings with a familiar, loving hand to hold them. It’s hard to suppress tears, but I never let them flow until the dog is dead: I never want to unnerve them in those last few minutes by showing my own sadness.
With Fenn gone, Maud became my top dog and she was proving really useful. I had started working for Countryfile but was still very busy with the livestock on the farm, and my loyal, hardworking sheepdog was invaluable. During foot and mouth when we couldn’t have any cloven-footed animals on Cotswold Farm Park – i.e. sheep, cows, pigs or goats – I started to give sheepdog demonstrations using ducks and taking them around a course to entertain the public. Maud was brilliant at this and the skill came into its own for Countryfile, as you will read in Chapter Seven, Other Kinds of Sheepdog.
With Maud doing so well I was keen to breed from her, too. I took her to a friend of Dick Roper’s and she successfully conceived and gave birth to a lovely litter of six puppies: three bitches and three dogs. We chose one bitch that we called Pearl, John our stockman had another and the rest were sold to local farms.
When Pearl was still quite young, about a year old, I made a stupid mistake that I will never make again. I allowed Pearl to ride on the back of the quad bike with her mother, Maud. She was too young, and I should have been more sensible and only had one dog on the bike. As I went round a corner, Maud slipped and Pearl fell off the side going straight under the wheel of the mobile handling system I was towing. Thankfully she wasn’t killed but her leg was badly damaged. It is not uncommon to hear about dogs getting run over on farms, usually due to the farmers rushing around in their very busy lives. Our daughter Ella was particularly close to Pearl and I knew she would be devastated if she couldn’t be saved, so we invested quite a lot of money having the vet pin her leg back together with a Meccano-like structure. I was under strict instructions for her to be rested in her kennel, with only gentle exercise on a lead. The accident occurred just at the peak of her training, and the long layoff, coupled with what turned out to be a permanent limp, meant she was only ever half trained – a useful dog to have as an extra but I rarely used her on her own, or for anything difficult. She has lived to a ripe old age, over 13, quite deaf and a little bit stiff, but still game for pottering around the farmyard. She sleeps in the stable and is always there, ready for a walk, when Charlie takes our family dogs out.
Maud also lived a long life, reaching 13, which is above the 12-year average lifespan of a border collie. She spent all those years as my constant companion in the field, and it is hard to think of a better life for a dog bred to love working.