Featured tutorial – Educating Gloria

This complete training session shows the importance of good timing when you’re training a sheepdog.

Encourage the best and, with good timing, make the best of the rest.

Handlers who are new to sheepdog training can find it difficult to recognise what their dog’s doing, and take the appropriate action at the right time – timing is everything! Your timing will improve with practice, and watching a complete training session can help.

The importance of good timing, and much more

This was nine-month old Gloria’s fourth training session; she’s headstrong and excited, but not uncontrollable. This tutorial shows the complete lesson twice, first at half-speed and then at its actual speed – demonstrating why new handlers often feel everything’s happening too fast and their timing’s far too slow.

Don’t worry. You can’t hope to get it right first time, every time, but with patience, and calm persistence, you and your dog will progress.

This complete training session shows the importance of timing; setting the dog up for a good start; use of the stick and body position to impose and maintain control; discipline (and when to back off); how the handler’s attitude influences the dog; establishing a good working distance from the sheep, despite the dog’s best efforts; typical ways the dog may evade the stop command; and why you should guard against forming patterns in your commands.

For the highs and lows of a typical early lesson, with a typical trainee dog, watch Educating Gloria. And for an explanation of the words and phrases we use in sheepdog training, see our Terminology page.

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SHEEPDOG TRAINING VIDEOS ON DVD

With nearly FOURTEEN HOURS of our SHEEPDOG TRAINING TUTORIALS now available as FOUR double DVD sets, you can SAVE up to 20% if you buy all four, together with our original “First Steps in Border Collie Sheepdog Training” DVD set. More details. OR BETTER-STILL – watch ONLINE!