March 9th, 2025

Continued Training...

If you have trained with me or heard me talk about my dogs and my training journey, you probably know that I am crazy about training.

I love the journey of working toward a training goal, and I often find myself saying that I miss having a truly difficult dog to train nowadays. The Border Collies are too smart, and pick up on everything within seconds, which is amazing. I will spend the rest of my life trying to learn as much from them as possible. However, if I am honest, it can also be a little boring at times. Nothing seems to challenge them, especially when a training setup is done correctly. They grasp the concept in one or two repetitions, understand the mechanics within minutes, and then they just do it.

Emma working sheep on March 6th, 2025.

It is incredible but herding is nothing like that. Emma has been a little tight on her flanks, and I had to really communicate with her to give a little. She did, but then I had to remind her again the next time. Some of it is just baby dog things, some of it is handler error, and some of it is not having the right setting, season or weather conditions for sheep training at the moment. Our last sheep session was amazing, though. I corrected her once for flanking too tightly, and she immediately gave space, continued to flank squarely. I am beyond proud of her for reaching this goal - just shy of her first birthday!

Training is a journey, and in my opinion, you never truly finish training. I do not think it is possible to stop learning from and with the dogs we have. So I encourage driving ridiculous distances just for the chance to learn from a trainer you admire. I support spending hours reading, researching and figuring things out.

I take weekly lessons - because what if my trainers and mentors see something that I could do better?

Happy Training!

Addi and her dogs