Fate is about nine months old and I am realizing that she may not be a herding dog like Red. I’ve trained four border collies to work with sheep, red came pretty much trained. Every morning, for months, Fate and I have worked together with sheep, but I am seeing something that I want to accept and respect.
Fate does not intimidate the sheep. They just do not accept her as a herding animal or as a kind of predator. She gives the strong eye every morning, and they blow her off, butt her or try to back her up.
She is game and fearless, she holds her ground, gives good eye, comes back again and again. But all of my border collies – Orson, Rose, Izzy, Red – have been able to easily intimidate the sheep, backing them up, nipping them when necessary. I have a good friend who is a sheepdog trainer, he has been working with border collies his whole life, he came by to visit and went out to watch Fate.
“This is a great dog,” he said, “smart, tough energetic and loving.” But she doesn’t have authority with the sheep, they just aren’t impressed with her. I know what he means. I bring Red up to the sheep and they back up instantly. He can control them with his eye from 100 yards away. They never challenge or defy him. This was also true of Rose, and of Orson and Izzy as well.
Fate, I told my friend, is a Joy Dog. She loves to work, she has tons of instinct, but perhaps because of her blue eye, the sheep simply don’t react to her stares the way they do to the other herding dogs I have had. I think it’s not going to be. The sheep are just not intimidated by her as they are by Red or the other working dogs I have had.
Fate loves to be around the sheep, to circle them, to sit with them. She is a working girl through and through. But I’m starting to understand the limits of her herding. I think I’ve done right by her as a trainer, experienced trainers have seconded my approach and techniques. But every dog is different, has a different spirit.
When Red goes near the sheep, he is almost obsessively focused, there is nothing else in the world. Fate is a different story. She wants to have fun to run freely, to bob and weave, to run until her tongue is on the ground. She is interested in everything going on in the pasture.
But so far, she does not intimidate the sheep in any way.
She cannot really get them to back up or move. So I’ll keep watching and studying and working gently, but I am back off my original notions. We love Fate just the way she is, between Red and grain, we can always get the sheep where we want them and need them to go.
I will give Fate the chance to be whatever she is in her nature, but I won’t push and badger her into being something she isn’t. That would be selfish, for me, not her. She is pretty great just the way she is.