You’ve already had lots of good tips about moving and penning sheep and sheep psychology, but I’ll add a few more observations of my own.
Native / primitive types, and some of the more extensively farmed hill types too, are different to more commercial and downland types. Whereas a Ryeland or a Texel is generally easily trained to a bucket, will probably eat too much good hay if it’s offered, mostly don’t challenge the opinion of many farmers that sheep are stupid, (but also rarely mount much of a challenge to their human’s instructions in terms of being chased into a pen), and can get overtame and pushy through greediness, all of which makes them relatively easy to manage in terms of moving and penning, the less domesticated types have different strengths ;p
Their ancestors learned to survive on the hill or moorland with little or no human assistance, so the prey mentality is strong, and the instincts which protect a prey animal have been honed over many many generations. They generally can be trained to like cake and be interested in a rattling bucket, but it’s never a given than they’ll follow it; as soon as their antennae for danger or threat are tickled, the flight or fight response depresses appetite and food ceases to be of interest.
In my experience, most of these types of sheep have plenty of brains, but their intellect is focussed on being a prey animal that stays alive, not on understanding what the human wants! Lol.
Prey animals have to be good at reading the body language of their predators - and that includes you. So if stand square on to them, they may take that as a threat and switch into prey mode.
General tips for moving this type of sheep include “less is more”. You don’t drive them the way you would drive a biddable type like a Ryeland, that will just switch them into prey mode. You want them to feel they are making their own choices about where they go and at what pace, so your job is to make all the directions that aren’t the one you want them to go in, less appealing. Not to chase them, but to block with non-threatening posture from a reasonable distance so they feel confident that they can turn away from you and move in a different direction. If you get too close or your stance is threatening, they will feel pressured, may turn and face you (same applies to a dog, many farm dogs simply can’t move this type as a flock because they put too much pressure on, and often get too close in). If you are close and they are facing you, they may not turn away at all unless you make your body language softer : turn slightly sideways on, don’t stare into their faces; keep your arms out to make yourself wider if you need to, but make like a fence, not like a snow plough
While you are learning these techniques, sometimes they will run past you. Don’t fret, just learn - that was too close and threatening, they switched into fight rather than flight, next time keep a bit further out, be a bit less dominating.
Sometimes I actually turn my back on them and pretend to be looking at the ground!
Think about it - you are a prey animal, a predator is close to you, possibly close enough to run and grab you. Your best bet is to face it. You won’t feel confident to turn around and see if there’s a safe exit, unless either you are sure the predator can’t reach you, and or you are reassured that the predator is not about to make a jump for you.
Same with driving - if they feel driven, they will suspect that you are up to no good and are trying to get them cornered so you can pick one off. So they will keep breaking away, hiding behind rushes, generally doing the opposite of what you want!
So take this desire of theirs to be where the predator is
not wanting them to be and use it to your advantage. I often walk towards them fairly square on
from the direction I want them to go, then move out a bit and soften my body language. Suddenly the place I came from looks to them like the very place I do
not want them, and they make a break for it! Then I make apparently incompetent efforts to stop them going exactly where I do in fact want them, so they are even more sure that’s where I don’t want them and are even more determined to go there! This technique is particularly useful for getting them out of a pen through a gateway - run at them
from the gateway and “let” them “beat” you and get past you - into the gateway! Lol
Other tips include always moving them the same way into, through and out of the pens, so they learn the route. Then when you are in the pens or penning them, there is a route which is familiar and if you make that place seem not scary, they will probably choose that.
In tandem with that, you need to be resolved to try very hard to never give them a bad experience once you do have them penned. They remember for several times, so if they got hurt or very frightened last time, or on a recent occasion, that they went into there, they will have a reticence to go in there again.
Keeping your cool and doing things over and over again if you have to if it isn’t working, but always calmly and without shouting, will pay dividends in the end, even if you and the folks helping you this time might be able to force the issue and do it a bit quicker this time because you are mobhanded. You might not have so much help next time, and they will get harder and harder to manage if they are given reason to believe you will hurt them.
Even with more domesticated types you can see this behaviour. I used to work the loading pens when we sheared on ex-BH’s farm. If I was left to do it myself, I would get more than 80% of the sheep onto the ramp up to the race from which the shearers took their next customer without touching any sheep at all, without shouting, all very calm, using small body movements and intelligently arranged gates and hurdles.
As soon as someone arrived to “help” and got in or leaned over and started behaving more domineeringly, getting hold of and pushing the sheep, shouting at them etc, the ramp and the route to it became scary places, and my gentle hands-off techniques for guiding the next few up there would not work. I’d be trying to make the ramp seem like a safe route out of the pen, but they would remember seeing a flock-mate getting manhandled in there or shouted at, and would refuse to go up.
And because of all that, your friendly local farmer (with or without his or her dog) can sometimes make things worse, unless s/he has the same type of sheep and knows how to manage them. If they are used to managing Texels, they and their dog will be far too “in your face” for a more primitive type, and, even if they manage it this time through sheer determination and perhaps quite a bit of close work by the dog, the sheep will be even harder to manage next time because they know you really are predators and they really are at risk of being caught, hurt or frightened. So choose whose help you seek wisely.
You need to act with calm, quiet confidence; if you are exuding fear, anger, uncertainty or frustration, that will make the sheep even more wary. When you see a good, experienced shearer handling a sheep, the sheep nearly always relax against his/her legs and require very little actual restraint, because they feel the calm confidence of the handler and are reassured by it. The first time you try to dag a sheep, you will probably find it extremely physically demanding, because your uncertainty will communicate to the sheep and make it even more nervous about being up close and personal with you, and restrained by you. As you and the sheep get to know each other better, your confidence in yourself, and theirs that you mean them no harm, will grow, and everything will get easier.
(Much of this stuff applies to suckler cattle too, actually. If the move gets stressful, you can forget the power of a bucket to draw them. If you stand square on to them, they may take that as a threat and switch into prey mode. Etc.)
And finally... things are as almost as hard with this batch of sheep right now as it gets. You are new and inexperienced, they are new to this farm and to you, and neither of you know how to predict what the other will do! It will get easier, it really will.
