Sheepdog breeder and trainer Jon Cantrall at his property outside Dubbo. Talks about training dogs before the Dubbo Sheepdog Trials. Dubbo Daily Liberal 17th October 2023.
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00:00 I'm John Cantrell from Dubbo Sheepdog Club and at home here at Wonga Borough we have
00:05 working border collies. Most of them have short hair, they come in a variety of
00:11 colours that you may have seen. We have a few different ages here as well so my adult dogs over here are 2, 6, 7 and 8
00:24 and we've got some 6 month old pups that we've bred for a couple of them and there are a couple of other dogs from other bloodlines that we have as well.
00:33 They're all fairly well bred dogs so it's up to us to be able to train them as best we can to get that potential out of them.
00:41 Being a dog from a pup to being able to go to work is probably realistically a 12 month project.
00:49 From the very basics where the pups start to show you instinct on their livestock and then learning to call off from the stock because that instinct or that desire to drive is very strong.
01:02 And so when you start training your dogs you need to put a command over that instinct so even that early stage when the dog, their desire is to go to their stock, you have to put a command over that to stop them and call them away again.
01:16 And so then when that training starts, rewarding the dogs is very important as well so a big reward for the dog is to be able to go back and work their stock again.
01:27 And also when they start to learn slightly more complex things is reassuring and through repetition that they're doing the right thing.
01:37 If they're doing the wrong thing try and stop that and try and correct it with the correct behaviour that you're after so that constant practice of good things during training will then translate to obeying commands and good work later on.
01:55 [BLANK_AUDIO]