We are a husband and wife team who are working dog trainers and breeders based in SW Victoria. Dave was born and raised in QLD and has been working dogs & stock since he was 14 when he left school to go droving. I’m English and was raised on a farm in the southeast and we always had collies. I got my first collie at 15 and went out to Australia and started working for Dave when I was 20.
We’ve been breeding and training our own working dogs for the last 15 years together, we used to be contract musterers in QLD so had to have some handy dogs for the jobs we were doing then but have only been trialling for the last 6 years and training outside dogs for 4.
We had an old stumpy tailed collie called Stump who was extremely smart and would just turn up at the right spot at the right time and save the day. Mustering large mobs of cattle on different properties you would never know what your about to come across if there was a hole in the fence by the time you realised the fence was down he would be there blocking the cows he was such a great dog and saved our bacon on a weekly occurrence.
The breed we have now are really biddable and thrive off of affection the most important thing in their life is working stock and always trying to please us so it make training so much more rewarding, easier and enjoyable. There’s always exceptions but Kelpies are more suited to yard work, loading trucks, Crutching trailers & shearing sheds. It’s something that some kelpies have been bred for and they thrive off of that kind of work and it comes more naturally to them. You also get some very handy kelpies in the paddock that can travel really well. In our opinion a Collies natural instinct is for gathering stock they have a more natural outrun so are more suited to paddock work.
It was an amazing eye-opening experience. They have very different commands to us, similar to the UK style. The landscape varies so much so the dogs jobs are quite different from another persons which is similar here. Some people bring their stock to them, and others drive them away. The biggest difference we noticed is their cattle trials are based on who can get around the obstacles in the fastest time whereas here it’s more about emphasizing low stress stock handling.
Our Puppy,
Plus working dog.
Enduro is a top-quality dog food that doesn’t make our dogs scour, they have shiny healthy-looking coats and put on weight, they don’t heat up and they don’t chase water like they have done on other brands. It works well across a range of breeds, age, sizes and eating habits, even our fussy slow eaters eat all their enduro. It’s overwhelming to see the difference in the dogs since we have switched over and once their condition picked up we have had to drop some of their portion sizes down because they get too fat! It’s also been fantastic to see the change in our clients’ dogs after switching over too. We love the puppy and feed it to our pregnant females. The mums do such a fantastic job on it and the pups thrive on it.
We will be focusing on our younger dogs who are coming to a good age for training. Running some working dogs’ school and then we will be heading back to the USA to run some more schools but across more states.
