Into the Field

 I was recently asked to help prepare a group of Heifers for an annual Fall Fair Cow Dog trial. My job is to dog break the cattle which should calm them down for when they go to the arena. The trial is indoors and when you take a bunch of cattle that have never been exposed to that type of surrounding it can take a great deal of fun away from the trial.

This is a perfect time and place to evaluate the training my pups have received to date. I had my new pup, Wage, with me as well as this mother, Kate, and of course my main dog, the old guy. Each morning we would round up the Heifers out in the field and bring them into a paddock. We would then separate a few and move them into another paddock and work them for about 1/2 hour. We then join the separated ones up with the rest of the herd and move them back out into the field. We did this up to 4 times a day.

Wage working the flank

Here he keeping everyone on the straight and narrow

While moving the cattle I used as few commands as possible. Mostly “there” and occasionally a directions command “go bye” or “away to me”. This gives me an excellent opportunity to find out where we are in the reaction to the commands. So now that we are back home it back to the side commands.

Even in the paddock he is keeping order

It was very interesting to watch Wage, he is 8 months old, work the flanks with very little direction. He would swing out and run along to near the head of the herd and then turn into them and run back to where we were driving from. This appears to be natural to him. He exhibited the same technique in the paddocks. He certainly did not pull any punches when one of the Heifers stepped to far of the line.

After 3 days of this, training in the training paddock is not going to be as exciting. Back to working on sides

The results

All that training and what can you do with it?

Well when you are on a working farm or ranch, there's probably a need for a dog every day.

In the following picture you will see some dogs in a down position in front of a herd of cows. So whats the story: When I feed the cattle each day I'm greeted by a bunch of hungry so and so's. So not to run over cows or knock them over, I send the dogs in in advance and they move them out of the way and hold them until I release them.

When you are holding a 1500 lb hay bale on the front of the tractor, the last thing you want is cattle around you. You have to take the netting off of the bale and if you have been around hungry cattle then you will know it's no fun getting knocked around or stepped on by a big old fat cow.

Life is so much more comfortable when you have a trained dog working with you.

Until the next post