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We love coloured dogs and we’ve had a few over the years!
Yesterday’s post about so-called mis-marked puppies sparked a lot of response, mostly on Facebook and Twitter.
One of the questions we were asked was whether we train Merle or Red and White dogs. Yes, we’ve trained quite a number over the years, but (and this may not go down too well in some quarters) we honestly feel that some (but not all) of them seem to be significantly harder to train than an average black and white or tri-colour collie.
For that reason, and remember, this is just our personal experience, we don’t breed red and white or merle dogs. Also, these days we don’t have as much time for training dogs as we did in the past, so we don’t buy-in dogs any more. Because of this, we have not had a coloured or merle collie for several years.
The tricolour merle at the head of the page is Molly. Believe it or not, Molly was dumped on us after the owner dubbed her (at one year old) “the dog from hell”. The man persuaded me to “have her for a few days” and we never saw or heard from him again! It was our gain. Molly was spayed before she came here and was very easy to train. I have no idea whether the spaying had any effect on her training but she had plenty of confidence and went to a farm as their number one sheepdog. We were very fond of Molly.
Buff, the big fella above, was very hard on his sheep, but we got the better of him eventually and he went to a farm not far from here to work cattle and sheep. We were very fond of Buff, but I didn’t look forward to training him until he started to respect the sheep more.
Audrey (left) was another difficult dog. In fact, she’s the main subject of our sheepdog training tutorial video – Calm But Firm. Audrey was horrible to the sheep, but the moment you corrected her, she’d run back to the yard. How do you train a dog like that? Well, you’ll need to watch the tutorial to see how I did it, but the title’s a clue. Perhaps it should have been called Calm but Firm and VERY Patient. As with Buff, we were very fond of Audrey, but not when she was around sheep.
Our opinion hasn’t simply been formed by the dogs mentioned on this page, our experience goes much wider than that. There are a good number of other coloured dogs we’ve trained, as well as quite a lot which came here over the years when we ran sheepdog training courses.
Lastly, I should mention that some black and white or tricolour collies can be pretty horrible with stock too. A great example is Scylla. If you watch the Bronwen and Scylla training videos, you’ll see a comparison between Scylla (who is really aggressive with the sheep, and her litter sister Bronwen who was one of the easiest dog’s I’ve ever trained.
As I said earlier, this is just my personal experience. “Yer pays your money – and yer takes yer choice!”
BORDER COLLIE SHEEPDOGS & FRIENDS – STILL OFF DUTY! (DVD)
WATCH THIS TRAILER!
Watch Pearl Glen, Mel and lots of the dogs you saw in our first DVD Border Collie Sheepdogs – Off Duty! PLUS MANY MORE! The DVD is available from our DVD Store – and we automatically ship the correct format for your country. More info.
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