Specialised Workshops
Coming up:
Border Collies: Work is Fun
with Kay Laurence
Work is fun and fun is work.
Training Border Collies in a collie way, working with their innate skills not against them. For whatever lifestyle your collie lives, we often need to adapt the training to suit their way of seeing the world - from walking amongst traffic to being around sports.
Games with collies to relieve everyday stresses: sheep balls and tug masters are thrilling and exacting games for your collie.
Learning About Border Collies:
with Kay Laurence
Many sports enthusiasts are choosing the multi-talented collie, or sheepdog, to partner them in a variety of activities. From Agility to Freestyle, from Obedience to Tracking, the collies will do their best to enjoy and fully participate in the training and competition.
We employ their inherited talents; such as supreme concentration, athleticism, mental and physical stamina and enthusiasm to learn and tailor these skills to our sport's requirements. In the same package other talents can interfere with the very skills we are trying to develop, such as over arousal, response to uncontrolled activity, using prey behaviours.
This workshop focusses on teaching you about the "whole package" and learning to use ALL their talents to create a balanced partner. A critical part of developing a healthy collie is to teach relaxation and find the "off" switch.
On the day there is an opportunity to work with some of the dogs to explore their particular talents and look at some rehabilitation strategies. Whatever breed we select we can never dismiss or ignore the selective breeding that has captured the characteristics we desire. The inherited behaviours have been fixed, multiplied in strengthened over many hundreds of generations in Border Collies and cannot be tossed away as “inconvenient” just because you do not personally need them.
Breeds that have roots going back of hundreds of years are specialists and you can no more stop a Setter or Spaniel enjoying the air, than stop a collie wanting to control movement.
Suppression of these inherited behaviours can lead to a distortion of their personalities, immeasurable frustration and a lifetime of conflict between you and the dog.
Learning about Border Collies, and the associated working sheepdogs or heading dogs, can help you understand how they are designed, why you have specific behaviours that seem contrary to popular understanding, and why many of the regular training solutions seem ineffective. Using their inherited skills is probably the most reinforcing opportunity they can have. This passion, that often needs no external reinforcer, needs to be channelled towards your chosen activities, not pushed aside. You can use their skills to enhance existing behaviours, remove frustration, and as the perfect reinforcer. No sheep are needed, balls make wonderful substitutes.
Once you let your Border Collie BE a Border Collie, they enjoy life much more, seem more balanced and content within themselves.
Kay is a Border Collie specialist, with over 35 years of sharing her life with collies, nine generations of the Genabacab affix and a career developed through Obedience, Trials, Scent work, Hill Shepherding and sheep farm to Heelwork to Music. This wonderful breed needs understanding and respect for their heritage to achieve a balanced and fulfilling relationship.
|
