Messing around with dogs

The last couple of weeks have been a bit all over the place, and so is this blog entry.
It's just some random bits and pieces cobbled together until I can find something more coherent to write.

Here's Muddy from the other day, helping me move some sheep after shearing:


It's really hard to film, walk and try not to let the sheep knock over the slightly ricketty fences simultaneously.

As soon as we'd finished the first lot of shearing, an agent turned up to look at lambs and culls for sale.




Fortunately Mike, a trialling friend from Albany, had come to help out with sheepwork, and he and his dogs Tig and Badger (FredxTig) racked up the kilometres taking sheep to and from the yards.

Badger only took an interest in sheep 2 weeks ago, but she's already very handy in the paddock, and took to yard work easily too. And she's much better behaved than our ferals!

Badger:



Badger outside, bringing the training sheep up the house paddock to the training yard:



Spectating in the yards:






Badger, Bella and Charlie:



Bottoms up!







BabyJ isn't really into yardwork.



He had words with Bella about her annoying bark:




He sat in the dirt (well, it's probably more accurately decomposing sheep poo, but I prefer to call it "dirt"):



And then he retired to the car to peruse his tractor catalogue:



I have a bad feeling BabyJ is going to be more of a cropping man.


Hangin' in the house paddock, after Mike and Tig kindly gave Bill and I a lesson in shedding:



I did okay, Bill not so much, but we will keep working on it. We'll have to find some more farm work to entice Mike up here again- we had a great time picking his brains on trialling, farming and sheepdogs in the UK, enjoying stories about various high profile handlers and trials ranging from small local events to the Nationals.


BabyJ was more impressed by the tasty rubber hose on the bike: