Jennifer Glen - Lesson Learned

My first border collie, Bob, is now almost 14 years old. He came in and out of my life starting when he was 7 weeks old until I finally bought him at 6 months. This was a few years before I met my husband, and I was working at a sheep ranch in California.   I didn’t think I needed a border collie because I thought I had it covered with my border collie mix.  However, the ranch I lived at had tried to sell young Bob a few times and he kept coming back so I bought him for the worst reason: I felt sorry for him.   It turned out to be the best decision of my life.

Bob was a great starter dog.  Maybe, no I’m certain, that definitely, for my ego, he was too good of a starter dog. Actually he was a mediocre dog and I am a mediocre handler but together we got it done well.   We learned together but he always seemed to know more than I did, so I let him show me the way.  You can’t do this with all dogs, but he would never grip unless attacked, or run sheep into a fence or lose them off a field and he always stopped (a little too well sometimes) when he was told. We only walked to the post twice in novice, when he was  14 months old, and took a second place and three firsts. 

There is a phenomenon with novices, when we get a few wins, that we figure we know exactly how to do it now.  I mean, how hard can it be to do open when we clearly aced the novice classes?  We quit taking lessons from our teachers (because we know more than they do), do most of our training by ourselves and sit in the back of open trials sometimes quietly, and sometimes a little too loudly, pointing out what the open handlers are doing wrong.  I hear this also happens in the agility world and I saw it play out again this past summer at a sheepdog trial.  I heard a novice complaining to another novice that if we open handlers would just stop our dogs, we would be doing better.  When it came time for said novice to run her dog, IF she could have stopped it, she would have noticed the sheep kept on running, and you were better off with good flanks on a listening dog.  But there is so much in the details that we don’t know at the beginning and we are so full of our own success that we don’t think we have anything else to learn.

This is how it started to play out with me and Bob.  After my blazing (so I thought) success in the novice trials, I took on the nurseries.  In two trials I had my finals qualification and a few months before our first Nursery National Finals, Bob and I entered our first open trial…

 AND WON IT.

So!  Clearly, I did know what I was doing.  I wasn’t like other novices.  I was as good as I knew I was and watch out National Finals!  That year, 2001, they were in Klamath Falls, Oregon and I was going.  There were a lot of nursery dogs that year but how many of them had already won an open trial, huh?  It was really just a formality, this running of the course.  They should have just put my name on the trophy ahead of time and save themselves the effort of running the trial because I obviously was going to win it.

In my defence, I was nervous.  Like, going to vomit my breakfast if I could have eaten it, nervous, so I must have had some inkling in my swelled head that something might not go well.  Maybe it was because I knew that all but one of my wins had come on my home field, or maybe I remembered that my open win was actually a tie and instead of a run off, they gave it to me based on my outrun, lift, and fetch scores. Or maybe, just maybe, I might have been a little nervous because I realized my dog had never been any further than 200 yards in his life.  Nah!  These things couldn’t have been bothering me because at that time, I didn’t know enough, to know what I didn’t know.

This was the year of the infamous nursery outrun.  I swear it was 500 yards, but Geri Byrne would probably tell you it was closer to 400.  It didn’t matter.  It was far.  Farther than Bob or I had ever been.  It was cold, rainy and windy as I walked, hunched with fear and chills, to the post and sent my dog.  Bob ran out like he knew where he was going and I started to relax.  Until, he got to about 150yrds and started to turn in.  LIE DOWN! (this was going to make getting that trophy a little harder)  Of course, Bob did, but when I flanked him again, he continued on his merry way, crossing over his course.  LIE DOWN!  Now Bob was beginning to realize there was a problem and so was I.  I tried every trick I had, which were very limited back then, but Bob was not going to go back any further than his 150 yards.  Dejectedly, I called him off and left the field.

Oh, did reality hurt!  I had been walking 10 ft off the ground but now I slammed into it full force and it hurt.  My pride was severely wounded and to make matters worse, all the nursery dogs got to run a second run so I got to repeat the good times all over again, but this time, when Bob didn’t find them and I called him off, he ran under the judges table and hid.  Even he was embarrassed.

Haley Howard went on to show me that year how easy she could make it look, taking home my trophy, and I swore Bob would never run too short at a trial again.  And he never did.  In fact, my novice mistakes unknowingly continued when I taught him to run too big.  However, he was a good boy and by the time I retired him he had won 4 open trials and that made the losses a little easier.  But I never look back on that year in 2001 at Klamath Falls, without cringing.