Stock dog championships are competitions in which dogs, guided by their bosses, move sheep through a challenging course within four minutes
Kier Scott had been having relationship problems. He couldn’t get his stock dog, Blue, to follow instructions before a championship.
“I think he’s been working bad, and he thinks I’m an idiot,” said Scott, who is 28.
Blue is a black three-and-a-half-year-old border collie, who wagged his tail and paced around his boss with an unbridled energy.
Scott and Blue were half an hour away from a competition at Stampede, in which Blue would be expected to force a herd of sheep to follow a certain path. Scott, however, seemed unsure about Blue’s performance.
“I don’t know, we’ll see . . . Winning this is $10,000, so there’s quite a bit of motivation,” he said, as Blue stared at him blankly with his eyes wide open.
Scott said his relationship with border collies began from the day he was born.
“My dad was literally at a dog trial with the only family vehicle, so the neighbour had to call him on a back phone for him to come to the hospital. He then came to the hospital for my birth and then went back to the dog trial,” Scott said.
“I’ve literally been born into this.”
Scott grew up on farms east of Airdrie with several dogs tending to livestock. For Scott, raising animals on the field was both embracing his family’s legacy and a sweet escape. “It was my happy place,” he said.
“People picture going to the mountains or going on a beach — I have no interest in anything like that,” he said. “All I want to be is outside in the Alberta prairies, where the sky is big, and the grass is tall.”
‘It’s kind of your first love’
Stock dog championships are competitions in which dogs, guided by their bosses, move sheep through a challenging course within four minutes.
Scott began competing reluctantly at 19 — he was rebellious then — at a competition hosted by his father, Milton Scott, who’s a renowned figure in the sport.
“The worst possible thing that ever happened to me when I started competing was that in my very first competition, I won,” Scott said jokingly. “Then, you’re hooked.”
For several years, he competed with dogs trained by his father. Then, he met Blue. He knew he had met someone special.
Blue was fast, loose and filled with energy, but also trustworthy. When he was 18 months old, he helped Scott tame 800 sheep in 30 C. “He worked eight hours straight,” Scott said.
Blue was the first dog Scott trained.
“It’s kind of your first love,” he said. “I don’t think I’m going to forget.”
Teaching dogs — who are already motivated to work on the field — how to herd livestock involves showing them where they’re going wrong.
“If they try running directly at the sheep and biting one, you step between them and the sheep, which then tells them that’s not OK,” Scott said. Slowly, as the dog learns acceptable behaviour, the owner adds verbal commands to their repertoire.
“As they get more and more obedient to your verbal commands, you go from working where you’re standing with the sheep, literally at your knees, to adding more and more distance, until ideally you can work with your dog as far away as they can hear you.”
‘When I get nervous, he tends to not listen to me’
The quality of training a dog receives also depends on the owner. “It’s just like the ability to make friends — not everyone is good at that,” Scott said.
Blue readily became friends with Scott, and since then, their relationship has blossomed.
However, for the past two weeks, Blue hadn’t been complying with Scott’s orders during game practices.
Scott’s fears came true during the event when Blue galloped as Scott told him to stop and lie down. In the end, Blue was disqualified after he overpowered the sheep, one of the many rules that govern the sport.
“I have a terrible tendency to get nervous at these kind of big shows,” said Scott. “And when I get nervous, he tends to not listen to me.”
Scott believes Blue doesn’t understand that they lost. After the event, Blue sipped some water and went back to his kennel.
“We were still coming down off our adrenalin,” he added. “We were both in a daze for the next couple of hours, but then we went home, and we practiced and worked some sheep at the farm.”