Q: When does exercising your sheepdog become sheep worrying?
A: When the sheep are worried.
The word 'worrying' does mean the same in this context as it would in any other context. A worried sheep can give rise to all sorts of medical complications, not just when she's pregnant, either.
A farmer
has to train his/her sheepdog, so using his/her own sheep for this purpose is of course necessary. And the farmer will choose sheep which are not at the time vulnerable, for instance fit young hoggs.
Here's something I wrote on Ravelry recently:
I’m sure a lot of it is education - before I farmed, although I leashed the dogs near lambs and had them close to heel and/or leashed near any sheep, I simply wasn’t aware of the effects of stress on sheep, nor that it wasn’t only lambing time that was a problem.
•I didn’t know that a lambing ewe might run off and abandon a lamb if she saw a dog nearby
•I didn’t know that a sheep still wearing her fleece in summer could collapse if physiologically stressed (which is why we walk ours very steadily, at 2 miles an hour, along the road when we have to move them before they are clipped - much to the very evident annoyance of any traffic we are holding up)
•I didn’t know that an in-lamb ewe could abort or reabsorb if physiologically or psychologically stressed
•nor did I know that an in-lamb ewe could be on a knife-edge physiologically, simply with the burden of winter and growing her lambs, so that only a very small upset could tip her over the edge into physiological collapse - and that if the farmer didn’t spot her within an hour or two, she would probably die
Hope that helps, shout if you want more. I have
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