Within a few years, I realized that with the interest in this video I should buy a professional camera and start the whole project again. A professional camera and a professional format would allow me to edit the source footage and thus make a tighter and better video. In 1989 I finished Training and Working a Border Collie. This remained a great video for us and was watched by thousands of Border Collie trainers and handlers all around the world.

I was happy with Training and Working a Border Collie until one morning at about 6 o’clock. in 1994. The phone rang and at the other end of the line was a very disgruntled cattle rancher from Nevada. ” This video is all about training a Border Collie on sheep”, he said. ” I don’t have any sheep, I’ll never have any sheep. I don’t like sheep”. I tried to explain to this fellow that the whole process of using the Border Collies natural instinct of balance, as demonstrated in the video, would work the same whether on sheep or cattle. “Just try to imagine the sheep are steers”, I said. By about the 4th time he said, “look young fellow, you don’t know what you’re talking about. Border Collies won’t work on cattle the same way you’re showing them working on sheep in your video”, I decided then that it was time for a change. After I put the phone down, I said to my wife, “today I am starting on planning out a new video on training Border Collies and this time I’m going to include everyone. I don’t want to have anyone like that on the end of the phone again”.

But to be honest, similar phone calls over the years had led me to think that showing training on sheep alone was not fully explaining the whole deal. There had been people who had a few acres and no stock at all. Then there were the cattle farmers with feeders, the cow calf operators, big and small, the turkey farmers who wanted to know if a Border Collie would help them out. And so the list went on! It was just this one fellow from Nevada who lit the fuse.

Border Collie Training Information