12
Hi-Line
June 2018
FARM & RANCH
www.havredailynews.com
Competition: Boyce: Competing 'has really helped me as a handler' n Continued from page 11 Part of the retraining work involved getting a handful of Holstein calves to work with and “refocusing on balancing and not telling her anything,” she said. “I used a flag or a stick to kind of get her to go one way or the other, but I wouldn’t tell her anything.
“But what I learned was with stock dogs you have to give them that leeway. They can’t always be hammered down.” “The less I have to tell her the better she’s has gotten,” she added. But some things — like looking away from the cattle to Boyce which the cattle interpret as a weakness to be exploited — will remain. It’s good in some ways that Paisley will default to looking for guidance because that can keep her from doing something wrong such as being too aggressive, but she doesn’t work well too far out from her handler, Boyce said. “That’s where her being mechanical sucks, because if she’s out of range of me and hearing, and if she thinks that I called her back, she will come all the way back to me,” she said. “I can’t just send her to do things while I go and do something else.” Her husband has an 18-month-old dog that can work an entire field on its own, she said, and she’s working to avoid her first mistakes while training Millie. “I think it’s made me have better ranch dogs because I nitpick and fine tune things for competition. She’s still not perfect, she still causes wrecks, but I think we’ve come a long way and it has really helped me as a handler, too,” she said. “I didn’t understand how a stock dog worked ... but once I got her freed up and working I just had to keep reminding myself that I needed to let her go and I’ve been really working on my puppy to let her go — so she doesn’t know any commands.” B oyc e s a i d h e r l o n g t e r m p l a n s include getting Millie working cattle
Havre Daily News/Colin Thompson Border collie Paisley holds an attentive down position May 16 while the small herd of black Angus cattle she has been herding on the Boyce Ranch in the Bear Paw Mountains stand quietly in a bunch. Her handler, Linday Boyce, said she went to her first stock dog training clinic to help fix problems she had in Paisley's initial training. The pair now travel to Mountain States Stockdog Association herding trials that test their cattle herding skills.
and competing when she’s mentally ready for the challenge. And she wants to try to get people in the area interested in stock dog trials to make bringing in trainers or holding competitions in the area feasible. But for the summer, Boyce said, her plans had been to go to more competitions, including the Mountain States year-end finals. Paisley’s puppies will only be 4 weeks old at the time of the finals, she said, and while it would be physically possible for Paisley to compete, she might not want to. “This will be her first batch of puppies,” Boyce said, “so we won’t know how she handles it. We'll see.” “I have learned so much, and the one thing I’d have to say in the stock dog world, in the competitions, there is not a single person that I have met that wouldn’t help you out, looking at runs, explaining what went wrong or right.”
The dog days of competition