The old saw (maybe Tony Rohne's old saw) says that working stock with a dog is a three legged stool. There's the stock, there's the dog, and there's you. They all need to be trained, and they generally get trained in that order. The weakest leg of the stool is usually the last one.

A lot of novice handlers don't think about the stock much at all. They are using pantleg sheep that stick to you like burrs, and almost nothing you and your dog do really affects that. But eventually, you will begin to work what Dana MacKenzie calls "real" sheep. Then you will realize that stock work is about stock, not dogs.

One recent week, Bonnie and I worked three very different kinds of stock. Every morning, she gathers my goats out of their home field, brings them through the little barn, and down the road a quarter mile to their grazing ground, and every evening this is reversed. She still has a hard time getting her courage up to gather the home field, not because of the goats, but because of the wasp stings she remembers getting there, last fall. Often she stalls out and stands hesitantly, obviously nervous.What works best is for me to stand below at the barn and encourage her whenever she makes even one step forward. Once she gets going, she'll go on and get the goats.

My goats don't gather like sheep. Each one needs to be poked and sometimes gently chewed before they'll move. Bonnie lifts them through what appears to be annoyance--she makes herself so irritating that they jump up and head in the direction she proposes. Sometimes it takes a few moments, but I've learned to shut up and let her do it her way. If I try to make things happen faster, she'll bite them too hard and then they run in all directions.

We also worked a small group of sheep a friend keeps nearby in a flat five acre field. These couldn't be more different. When they catch sight of Bonnie and I they instantly flee to the other end of the field at top speed. These sheep have learned to be like this. The person who owns them uses them for "dog exercise". She doesn't trust her dog in any way, and fends her off the sheep with a long, long pole. Her dog barks hysterically as they approach the sheep, and her gather is like a bullet train.

Naturally, her sheep don't trust dogs at all. And who could blame them? Trust is a contagious thing. When I began to trust my dog to take responsibility for keeping her stock calm and in order, she became calmer herself— which communicated itself to her stock. Every time I work these particular sheep, they start out panic-stricken, and slowly relax. But they seem to start from scratch every time.

The hardest part of working these sheep is gathering. They have learned that running away works pretty good, since my friend downs her dog and calls it off if it begins to lose the sheep. Bonnie's idea of an outrun is about five feet to the side, which is a poor strategy for these sheep. So we worked on gathering in two ways. One, which works well when the sheep get more relaxed, is to coach her to go slow. She can gather the sheep quite easily at a jog trot once they have remembered that she is not that other dog.

The other method I was trying was what I call the incremental drop. I try as best I can to set her up to go out wide, and just as she bears in again, I stop her, walk up, and push her out wide again. It took about four re-directs per gather. But it was such a slow process that the sheep became pretty relaxed anyway.

The third place I worked had weanling lambs in an arena next to the older ewes in a pen. The draw of the ewes upon the lambs was in the nature of a tractor beam, like the kind that drew the Enterprise toward destruction while Scotty was frantically trying to restore the warp drive. Unglueing those lambs was a kind of lift Bonnie had never done before. She could scoop them up, and they would just split up and run back as fast as she scooped. I was at the other end of the arena, just watching and saying nothing, since nothing I could think of to say would have helped.

I'm not sure how she did it, but she finally got them clumped and moving toward me. That was a tough little fetch. I bet a human couldn't do it if they tried all day! And of course, while she could keep them fetching away from the ewes, once we turned around and went toward the ewe pen again, it was catch em, catch em time, as they tried their best to race back and she had to head them over and over.

Each of the situations we found ourselves in required much different skills in my dog, and in me. Sometimes, I had to let my dog figure it out for herself. Sometimes, I had to intervene. And all of the time, I had to try to read the stock: what are they thinking? Can we change their minds about that? How?

That's why stock work with dogs is never dull.