Mick Hudson

Mick Hudson has been around working dogs his whole life, one of seven children, born and raised on a 100,000 acre station between Cobar and Wilcannia, western NSW. Growing up, Mick spent a lot of time with his father mustering, marking lambs, draughting, crutching etc. and in this period he decided he would like to have his own dogs to be able to do the jobs his father was doing with his working dogs. Just prior to leaving school Mick’s father, Pip Hudson, bred a litter of pups out of a very good bitch called Windeyer Pippy, who he had joined to Morillo Nick Webb. Within this litter there was one red and white Border Collie female which Mick begged his father to give to him. Mick can remember at the time his father saying, “I will give her to you but I don’t know how we got a red and white pup,” as he had not bred that colouring of the Border Collie before. Long story short, Mick trained the bitch, that he named Hudsons Yhana, with the help of his father and went to a few trials with his Dad. By the time he was 18 he had placed second in the Supreme Australian Championships with her.

After going shearing, Mick realised that he couldn’t be doing dog trialling as the competitions did not fit in with his work commitments, so he set on his way to make enough money for a deposit on a farm. That was his dream, to work dogs and livestock on his own property one day.

Mick then bred pups out of Yhana, trained them and on weekends and weeks off would muster feral goats on a share basis for farmers that he was shearing for, as they did not have their dogs educated to the same standard as his. This goat income, along with his shearing income, allowed him to finally purchase his first property. Often the goats were very wild as they had been chased with poor dogs and stockmen, who had allowed them to get away, making them more cunning for next time. Mick had to teach himself to be smarter than the goats and realised that timing, balance and distance were the three most crucial elements of yarding the feral goats.

Another crucial element was the natural ability of the dogs he had and set about breeding dogs that were trainable, to him that meant they had to take commands easily and move and do exactly as they were told without being mechanical. Over the years he has tried to select dogs with good natures, trainable and clean strength. The clean strength was the most important also as dogs that hung on and wouldn’t let go would result in losing the whole mob. Mick also realised over the years that the animals, whether that would be cattle, sheep or goats could pick out a dog’s weakness, so he generally had different types of dogs in his pack to do a job. An example is a wider, weaker dog may put the animals together and a stronger dog would help the other dog to get them into the yards. Mick feels there is no substitute for working dogs with clean strength, calmness and trainability.

After years of shearing, mustering and the likes, Mick had purchased his farms and had not been to a dog trial competition for eighteen years, but in his heart had always wanted to compete with his dogs again one day, like his father and grandfather. Mick then went off to competitions and soon realised that the standard had improved greatly and he would have to work hard to train his dogs to a higher standard to be competitive. He worked hard at educating his dogs and developing new methods to educate them. He realised that the dogs had to think for themselves but be under control, as commanding dogs to cover and read livestock was too slow. Mick developed a method of how to educate dogs without command to be able to do 80% of the work without being told, only spoken to if in the wrong spot. He said he was very fortunate to be able to watch and learn from the greatest handlers in Australia.

After Mick’s huge success in competitions, handlers were wanting to know how he educated his dogs to such a high standard, so decided to run working dog training clinics, which worked well, but felt he could only teach people at the level they were at and they would have to come back regularly for more knowledge.

With the commitments of his three properties and competitions, he didn’t have the time to devote to working dog clinics so decided to put his knowledge into a training program which was released in January this year. Within this training program, he also included virtual training lessons, which allows handlers that are having trouble to have them and their dog filmed by phone and sent to him for a voice over to problem solve and improve their dog training skills. Mick also offers virtual working dog and handler assessments for handlers wanting to know where they or their dogs can improve. The virtual training lessons are working exceptionally well as shown by the recent success of Doug Taylor at the Commonwealth Championships at Port Fairy and Ken Jelbart at the Australian Championships at Koroit that have both been doing virtual lessons with Mick.

Mick also suggests that anyone with working dogs must look after their nutrition and health care to get the best out of them. He highly recommends the products he uses which are Hypro Premium Grain Free dog biscuits and Moxiclear for internal and external parasites.