Sorry to rub it in, but it was great. Julie and Bob are the real deal. They have 18 working border collies from 8 weeks to 11 years. They demonstrated from starting a young dog of 6/7 months to complex tasks at international trial standard. Both Julie and Bob have been International Champions and do clinics and workshops all over the world.
At the end they were working with five dogs, a big group of ewes and lambs over two field with a burn running down the boundary between them and were driving, shedding and penning sheep. And never a shout in nager was uttered. It was breathtaking; the dogs were fabulous and obvioulsy thrive on what they are doing.
The hardest bit for me was watching not what the dog was doing, but what Julie and Bob were doing - it looks like the dogs are doing it them selves but there is such a lot of skill and tiem and commitment goes into making it look like that.
Their methods are based on using a dog's natural behaviour to train it and it seems to work.
All of us there have dogs - and they're all perfect except...
Julie was able to give us some pointers on how to deal with less than perfect behaviour in our dogs, which is almost always our fault. So our Tess is in for a bit of a shock!