Customer Reviews

A Way of Life: Sheepdog Training, Handling and Trialling

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If you own and work (or plan to work) stock dogs then you'll want to own this book. I borrowed this book many years ago and now that I am getting back into working stockdogs I just ordered it for myself! The book takes you through choosing and raising a puppy, step-by-step training from start to finish, and trialing. The book is mostly geared towards Border Collies working sheep but most of the same techniques can be used with other breeds. If you have another breed working cattle may want to look into purchasing Scott Lithgow's "Training and Working Dogs for Quiet Confident Control of Stock".

Glyn Jones,a top Border Collie handler gives his insights about working as a team with your Border collie on the trial field. He also explains how to train your dog and how to become a team. This book goes into detail from choosing your dog, training you dog in all the stages to trialing. A top book with lots of pictures, diagrams and great explanations.

This book.... let's say is a little old fashioned. I was looking forward to the tips and hints about finding the right puppy and it tells you to look back in the breading line for champions, not qualities the dog should have that you are looking at. It tells you not to name your dog with more that one syllable... And it's just so odd! The part on housing is setting up a shed with straw for the dogs to lay on, tells you how to chain them up, and it doesn't want you to teach your dog anything for the first 6 or 7 months besides come, lay down and stay... When it starts a section called From Play to Work it spends almost 3 full pages talking about a dog and what he would do in trials vs on the farm. The book takes about 35 pages until you get to the more important things, like training your dog to herd sheep (Finally!). It's not too long till it goes back into confusing talk about such and such dog and so and so handler and how with proper training and finding the individual traits of their dog they released the full potential of their dogs... I'm sorry this just wasn't the type of book I wanted, I was thinking it was going to be more straight forward with how to train Border Collies and I got way more information that I consider irrelevant. I do like the training tips but if I had to separate the training from the other stuff it would be 1/8th training and 7/8ths other stuff that isn't really relevant.

This book was designed to a different time, and I'm sorry if my review is harsh, I'm sure the book was more useful back in the day, but in today's time I would find a different book on training Border Collies.