Yesterday while working some extremely light (barbados) sheep on a friends farm we stopped to chat for awhile. While we were talking the sheep drifted to the far corner of the pasture. This field is very challenging with lots of hills and dips between them that causes the dog to lose sight of the sheep multiple times during an outrun.

I sent the dog to the left to try to minimize this problem. He could not see the sheep from where we were standing. When I sent him he did a lovely outrun until about 2/3 of the way there, at which point he crested a hill and must have heard/seen sheep in the adjacent field. I couldn't see my dog at this point. Suddenly he popped up on the right side of the field by the fence. He realized his mistake, corrected himeslf and finished the outrun from the right side.

In a trial situation with a complicated blind outrun, do you choose to sacrifice points by giving flank commands in diffifult spots or just hold your breath and hope they don't cross over? In this situation I know he only crossed over because he thought I was sending him for the sheep in the adjacent field (I could hear them from all the way on the top of the hill), but at a trial this could happen with sheep waiting in the exhaust or settout pens.

In any situation, trial or not, if you anticipate that your dog is going to come in tight or cross over you should automatically redirect him/her with a flank. You are better to, in a trial situation, lose the points rather than cross over and either lose lots of points or possibly not even get to the sheep, or, in a work situation, allow your dog to cross by not giving the redirect and teaching your dog that it is ok to cross over. In other words, there'll be no holding of the breath and hoping and wishing that something will happen. Be proactive as much as possible, rather than reactive. Bob

Did the sheep drift to the far right corner or to the left one ? Just curious.