In the beginning, almost everything that goes wrong is your fault. You were standing in the gate you wanted the stock to come through, you told your dog to come bye when you should have said way t'me, you thought your dog was ready to tackle something that she wasn't, you never dreamed the stock was going to react like that. How can you evaluate your dog when you can't even get out of her way? Eventually, though, what your dog is actually made of begins to show through the beginning handler errors. There are no perfect dogs.
Bonnie was a lucky draw for a novice handler. She is biddable and forgiving. She is not a high-octane genius who instantly becomes frustrated with handler incompetence. Nor is she a canine alligator who loves to make chaos. She calms stock down with her steadiness, and her native desire for order and respect from her stock. But those gifts also contain her flaws. She has very little grip, and hence, difficult cattle and goats will always be hard for her, and sometimes impossible. Her natural ease in close work translates into a big training challenge getting her wide enough to be effective when only distance will do.
There are times I think what I have is just a dog who will never be as good as a trial-type Border Collie on sheep and can't deal with tough cattle. Other times, watching her finesse panicky lambs out of a corner, or walk the chickens firmly to their coop, I can't imagine another dog doing a much better job. I can sit on a log and watch my goats graze the weeds, with Bonnie sniffing aimlessly around in the background, but if they decide to stray beyond the perimeter I've set, suddenly Bonnie is there, enforcing the rules.
Although the truism is that you ruin your first dog, what I see most is people deciding they got the wrong dog. They might start out in stock work with their show Aussie and slowly come to realize he doesn't have the moves or the drive to get very far. Or they get a working style Aussie and discover they've bought more dog than they know what to do with, whose respect they can't earn. I have seen plenty of people paddling these unhappy boats. So I feel fortunate. Bonnie is a real herding dog but she is not too much dog for this novice. We may not be the greatest team in the world, but we are a team.
Every dog you train is your teacher, and how much you invest is directly proportional to what you reap.
Like many people who work Aussies, I am regularly asked why I don't have a Border Collie. Yesterday someone offered to outright give me a granddaughter of Alasdair MacRae's Ben, a famous trial winner. She was a pretty little dog, with almost no training, but clearly as sharp as could be. She was afraid of me, and of the world in general, but when put with sheep she forgot everything else.
Even an amateur like me could clean up in arena trials with a dog like this. She was a bucket of nerves, who cringed under my hand. Like most of the Border Collies I've met, she was ultra-sensitive, flinchy, intense, hair-trigger—the very personality traits which create the possibility for a superb sheep dog. In comparison, Bonnie looked like a slob out there. Half the time it wasn't clear she was even working the sheep. The Border Collie was racing circles, weaving and stalking, while Bonnie just walked or jogged along, seemingly casual. Why work harder than necessary? she obviously was thinking. The sheep are in the right place.
The thirty Barbado ewes and lambs we were working viewed Bonnie with extreme initial dubiousness, but after ten minutes they had relaxed so much that the distance she needed to be to move them had shortened from a hundred feet to ten. When I told Bonnie that'll do, the flock wandered away slowly, to lie down in the shade again.
This is my old-time farm dog, who isn't stylish, who will probably never fill my house with rosettes, steady, easy to be with, devoted and responsible: my workin' Aussie. The right dog for me.