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work and great


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The shingle post started me thinking....

 

 

 

What is work to everyone? Is it moving 60 head from pasture to pasture?

 

Is it shedding out a ewe with young lambs?

My variety of work I think gives me and my dogs strenght and understanding.... I can look up and see the top of a tall mountain.but then this question comes up.....

 

What is great?

 

 

I agree a great handler and dog could probably do anything set before them or learn it pretty darn quick. Many judges I have met are working farmers (These guys and gals from the UK) Many run cattle as well as sheep. I find I can talk with them.

 

So back to great....I am far from even being good. I am attempting to do a delicate water color with a pallete knife somedays.

 

 

 

However- I can see great- with Taw's feel and Sweeps gather and shed. And so I follow a dream looking out for the time I am lucky enough and can recognise greatness.

 

I should live that long.

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To me, work is whatever the job that needs to get done that either requires a dog or is greatly helped by a dog or is even made more enjoyable with the presence and willing assistance of a dog. It can be moving a new, first-time mother and baby or it can be moving thirty pair and a bull, from one field to the next, or several fields along and across the road, or out of the hayfield. It can be convincing the herd that they all will go into the working pens, or getting one heifer with calving difficulties from the field to the pen and chute, where we can help her.

 

Work is work, large or small, complicated or simple, hard or easy. It all needs to be done.

 

As for great, I've seen things that take my breath away, small or large, but I'm certainly no judge of greatness. But I do see work that amazes me, and maybe that's the same thing.

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...And so I follow a dream looking out for the time I am lucky enough, and can recognise greatness.

 

I should live that long.

 

IMO you are doing the right things -- helping/observing at trials (perhaps competition?), talking to judges and handlers. You no doubt get instruction, and clinics are often available. Your blog indicates you have a nice farm operation, so you get experience there. Assisting ranchers sans dogs, who have gotten themselves in a pinch, and discussing war stories expands a person's scope.

 

Often greatness is the winning run(s), or parts thereof, but not always. Believe it can absolutely be found in highlights of farm/ranch work.

 

Can I recognize it? Sometimes. Am beginning to realize the significance of nuances in overall modes of handling, as well as to understand the one or two commands that may have saved the run/job...things that greatly impressed me. Finding ways to compensate for a dog's weaknesses and working to its strengths, or dog helping correct handler's errors and working with few cues...they're some of my wow factors.

 

Consensus provides certain dogs and handlers that deserved title, for their bodies of work.

 

Greatness in stock-dog handling -- its broadest definition -- like beauty, may not be an invariable objective fact, but something the source of which is within the individual observer. -- TEC

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Work in our case is most importantly the annual roundup of the free roaming hill sheep.

What would amount to "great"? Well, getting that job done I suppose.

It means driving sheep many kilometers through very rough terrain, while fetching small groups,and single ewe´s with their lambs.

These sheep are from different farms, and usually have their own idea´s about where they want to go and often resent to be put together with sheep they don´t know.

It will be Gláma´s first time this fall, and doing well there is more important to me than getting ready to trial (though we do harbor some ambition there ;) ).

 

NB. I am not expecting "greatness" in our work this year, I will be very happy with "usefulness".

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I have to add this....when I talk to the judges it always is primarily about livestock. How they run them, their breeding practices.

 

I suppose some of my dogs best work will never be seen. And you know I wish there were brace trials here!

 

However, what a joy to spend three days trialing.

 

And what a blessing to work with the stock and my dogs and horses for a living.

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Work is tough pysical and mental jobs that either could not have been done without the dog, or could not have been done without a LOT more work... without the dog.

 

The job has to get done, there is no dq/rt when 500 lambs get into the neighbors alfalfa. There is no quit cuz you or the dog get tired. You can't beg a dog to work, he has to love it in his soul.

 

Work is sometimes all day on bloody paws, and other days it is a 2 hour mad sprint.

 

It is dirty and ugly and beautiful.

 

Work feeds your family.

 

At the end of work you love and recepect that dog just a little bit more than you did the day before, and you always know he is tougher and braver and smarter than you.

 

Great is this same dog who can go to a trial field and make it all look so easy. Those days the team can lay down a run where you two are in that zone. Just sheep, dog and handler. When you walk off the field after a run like that you don't even care about the score, you have the high. That magical feeling that you will sacrifice time, money and sanity to feel again.

 

Great feeds your soul.

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Work? it varies. Moving 100 or more ewes/lambs, goats/kids , buchs/rams from pasture to pasture. Finding the goats which have wantered thru thick woods and bringing them home without direction (cause I can't see what's going on), holding stock off the feeder, acting like a living fence or gate when necessary. taking the ducks to the pond in the AM and gathering the poultry at night. Helping the neighbor bring in their cows or move them when it is needed. Shedding off that sickly ewe/goat and carefully bringing her across the 80 seeing to it that the stock is pushed hard enough to cross the swollen creek when necessary. Loading cows/sheep/goats/hogs or whatever is needed into the trailer when called for. Driving the neighbor's cows home when the fence has been washed out.

 

If time and money allows then trialing can be fun, but work rarely

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Work is processing 300 calves in the desert before lunch. Work is moving a couple cords of ugly oak into the wood shed after cutting and splitting it in the pasture. Work is cleaning out the barn before a truck and trailer of hay arrives, then stacking it by hand. Work is gathering wild cattle on the mountain in brush so thick you couldn't walk through. Work is leveling the roping boxes with shovels, or building a new gate after the steer you just doctored wound the old one around his neck.

 

Work is dipping 1200 ewes over 2 days, or loading sheep for home after the dog trial. It is stringing a mile of snow fence in 80 degree heat, rolling rusted barbed wire and filling badger holes to keep dogs safer. Work is pulling a windmill and cleaning the horse trailer...even under the mats. Sometimes it feels like work when I'm hooking up to that trailer so my friends can work dogs at 6am in the big field, but it's not. Work is my dog running out straight up the side of a mountain in 90 degree heat at 6,400' elevation.

 

Great is how I felt when we were finished.

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Great answers all!

 

(I am limiting myself to stock work or my list will be too long! :D)

 

And work to me is the quiet foraging in all weather from my horses back. Heat, rain, wind sun.....6 hours a day at least.

 

Catching sheep when I am paid to shear. Anything from angora goats to big suffocks

 

Shedding out mama's and tiny lambs and walking them to the truck to go home.

 

Moving my calves and everyone elses.

 

 

Moving the dairy goats to be milked

 

Moving dairy cows to be milked.

 

 

Working the unit, moving stock of all kinds.

 

Finding loose cattle for pay.

 

Catching a sick or lame sheep.

 

 

But wait...it is not work....it is life.

 

 

 

Then trialing, with my dear friends!

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