Customer Reviews

Herding Dogs: Progressive Training

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book covers the basics of herding. It presents the concepts clearly and provides some good trouble shooting sections. The diagrams could be improved and I could do without the cartoons. They were very hard to understand. The author obviously knows herding dogs and conveys very well what it takes to make a good "working" dog. I would recommend this book for anyone who is beginning to work a herding dog or who is considering purchasing a Border collie.

Was a good book, if your into border collies and sheep trials. They make the book out to be a manual for all types of herding. All it really told about was sheep herding and told little about working cattle, and the author compared everything to border collies.

An excellent job of detailing often complicated and difficult scenarios encountered when training. I have purchased several copies to give novice handlers for a good introduction to the world of livestock and herding. I reference the book repeatedly for tips on problem solving. Thank you, Vergil!!

This is a complete guide to teach your dog to work sheep, step by step. Different types of dogs and their approach to stock are beeing mentioned which is very helpfull to make your own trainingprogram. Text is explained by funny pictures and photographs. A special chapter is dedicated to the specific problems you can experience during your program and clear solutions in excercises are given. This book is a great help in reaching your goal: Work the stock with your dog!

The author obviously loves Borders..and so do I. There is a bias in the book toward explaining Borders (over other breeds) but there is also worthwhile knowledge that other herder owners can learn from. In short "learn from your dog" and adapt is the primary message. What "makes a dog stress out and react" positively or negatively is worthwhile reading. In the end it is about the dog and training the handler.

The cartoons are sweet and make it fun for my grandkids to understand why I do these crazy things and why they should too! Still...this is a book not written for 10 year olds...it is written for me to get in the mind of my herder so we can both get the job done, intelligently and calmly and not stress out my sheep....and with as little help from me as possible!

A worthwhile book on my shelf and one I will refer to again and again.

I first read this book when my first Aussie was about three months old. Frankly, I did not get it. I think it is difficult for the average person to learn how to work with a herding dog. Vergil Holland has not only put down all of the steps one might need to become successful at this activity, he has a lot of great advice in the book including very useful exercises and as the subtitle suggests, a progressive training method.

However, the reason I did not get it when I first read the book was that the meaning of much of what he says is dependent on having the actual experience of herding. After many years of training stock dogs, I went back and re-read this book. It was very revealing in that I found myself agreeing with almost everything he said about training. I also found it helpful to get a clear picture of exactly what I wanted to do in a training session to read the portion of the book-- usually fewer than two pages at a time-- that was relevant to what I wanted to acheive in the session. So for me, this has become a valuable hands on training tool.

I still recommend it to beginners and I think it would really help anyone getting ready for their first exposure to stock to have read the preliminary sections on getting started and basic commands. It would help the beginner become familiar with common training techniques and concepts so that a clinic experience would be more valuable than going in without the insights that are offered in this book.

But this is not just a book for beginners. It can be useful at several levels. For the more experienced trainer/handler, the troubleshooting section provides very useful exercises for solving common problems that are likely to be encountered.

I do think the section on herding breeds is a bit simplistic and in the case of Aussies not really accurate. But I think it is only there as a summary of what one might expect from herding breeds and therefore does not take into account the variance of different lines within a breed. I would not recommend the traits listed in this chapter to select your dog. However it does contain some very good advice such as basing your decision in part on the parents' abilities and characteristics.

The diagrams could be improved as was mentioned elsewhere, but they are accurate. The pictures are not very clear and they could be improved to actually demonstrate better the points they are intended to make.

Overall I give this book high marks and recommend it to anyone who is building up a stockdog library. But remember that there is a lot more information in this book than there appears to be at first reading. Go back to it often as your skills develop to really get the full potential of the book which really does offer a progressive training method.

I suppose a person can learn to remove an appendix, fly a plane, or conduct a defense by reading a book; but I know I would prefer my surgeon, pilot, and attorney to have had some hands-on experience before practicing on me. Same thing goes for herding livestock - there just is no substitute for a good trainer who knows what they are doing. Having a background in obedience, tracking, and agility gave me no headstart in herding - and no amount of bookreading changed that. When I found a trainer who was able to read me and my dogs, communicate with us, and be fair but firm, we made great progress.

With that said, I think this book is very helpful as a supplement to practice sessions. Learning to read stock and dogs, understanding pressure and release, draws, balance points - all those concepts have to be learned by the human and there is no substitute for learning in the field, in actual practice. If a friend wanted a basic herding book to look at to see if it is something they might want to do, this would be the one book I would probably recommend. Better yet, though, would be to have this person actually come out and watch dogs working stock.

If you are doomed to be an armchair shepherd, then this book is fine. Otherwise, your money is better invested in a herding instinct test, a stock handling class, or a day spent observing at a herding training facility. Books are an adjunct, at best, to learning to work with your dog in herding.

an excellent book for a novice herder with a border collie; clear, and as the title says, it takes you one step at a time toward more advanced work. However, it is has little to offer those with other herding breeds with different herding styles and different common problems. My own breed (working-bred australian shepherd) is one of the scant few besides the border collie still in common use as a stock dog; it is described by the author as a "driving" dog, i.e. a breed which does not instinctively bring the group of stock to the handler, as a "fetching" dog does, but takes them in any direction. This is completely false, as any competent aussie trainer will tell you; aussies are as much fetch dogs as borders are. Perhaps the other breeds are more accurately described, but they are all given extremely short shrift. For example, the section on teaching a dog to come in close is pointless if you have the naturally close-working aussie (or almost any other breed except borders), but is useful for many border collies which are wide workers and lose their heads in close quarters.
In response to another reviewer who found the diagrams hard to follow--once you start working stock it all makes sense. Before that, it makes no sense at all.

This book contains some really great information. The author gives details about all of the herding breeds, including many that I didn't expect. He gives insights about what each breed has been specifically bred for, i.e. driving, gathering, etc., that is very helpful in understanding your dog. A careful study of the personality types of dogs as it affects their approach to stock is also extremely helpful. He also gives several progressive excercizes that that seem very useful. Also, I appreciated the calm, quiet, but firm training style emphasized in this book.

Despite that, I was disappointed with the lack of explanation and clarity. If you are just getting started in herding, as I am, this might not be the book for you. I was often confused and feel that this book lacks enough details about the training process to be useful for beginners. Also, the author's clear preference for Border Collies as the ultimate herding dog was emphasized at points in such a way that made me a bit defensive about my "inferior" non-border collie.

I have always had an interest in herding dogs and have owned them and been around them most of my life; however I have never known anyone that had any real knowledge of training for herding, or had a dog that was trained for that matter. This book is fantastic for a total novice. It takes you carefully and "progressively" into the world of herding and explains everything from the very beginning, including the somewhat confusing language that is used to communicate with the dog while the two of you are at work. Thank you Mr. Holland!