Fairgoers Thursday night had the opportunity to see something that helps livestock owners bring in their livestock on the farm.

John Tate, Seneca, demonstrated how to use border collies during the livestock working dog show.

“We have got some sheep in there, that are kind of wild, they never been off of the farm,” John said. “And these dogs that we are going to work are border collies and they are cattle, not sheep, dogs. But they called me and wanted me to do a demonstration.”

John noted it was too hot to bring in cattle for the demonstration. So he brought in sheep for the crowd-pleasing event. John began his work with dogs about 12 to 15 years ago.

“I have had blue heelers, Australian shepherds — I think that the border collie is the Cadillac of all stock dogs,” said John. “I don’t think that there is a dog alive that knows more about stock than what a border collie does.”

But there is a problem with border collies.

“The biggest problem with border collies is most of them are a little on the timid side and they are actually sheep dogs, they have been bred for hundreds of years to work sheep and they really not bred to work cattle, because it is a lot tougher when you got to work cattle,” John said. “But if you get one that is capable of working cattle, they are the best.  We have sold dogs to people in California, west Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana.
They use a lot of them on wheat pastures, they can gather a 150 head off of a wheat pasture in 30 minutes, where as it would take several guys on horseback.”

The dogs respond to commands and it takes about three months to train the man’s best friend.

“To train one takes quite a bit of time,” said John. “To get one to know where he knows all of his commands, there are so many things that he has to know. If they happened to miss some livestock that is in brush and they can’t see, and maybe you are on horseback and you can see them and they can’t, you can give him a whistle. They look back and they will turn around and go back the direction that they came from. They realize that they missed something, And very few dogs you can do that to.”

Some of the commands include ‘come-by’ and ‘away-tome.’

“Well, your flanking command, your right and left command, would be your clockwise command, would be ‘come-by,’ and your ‘away-tome,’ would be counterclockwise,” said John. “The dogs don’t know that, they just know the verbal sound of it. I have trained them on right and left, they pick that up just as well.”

But every dog can’t be just called “dog.”

“They know their names, they usually give them a one-syllable names,” said Karen, John’s wife.

With an open arena at the McDonald County Fair, located on the grounds of McDonald County High School, John, one of his dogs, Mac and sheep were ready to do their demonstration.

“We are going to take the sheep down there and kind of let them look over the arena,” John said. “We laid those barrels down there so that we can use that like an alley. And we are going to try to get those dogs to put the sheep down that, like we are working on an alley. Then we have a barrel in the corner, like a little trap and we will try to bring the sheep in that corner and round that barrel. People can see what the dog is actually doing.”

John takes great pride in his training. He is one of a few that does the training for the livestock dog training.

“I don’t know of very many. I don’t know of any young people,” John said. “And that is interesting because the fellow that has some of my bloodlines that of my dogs go back to Wales, he said international teams are getting older and older, gradually dying off.
There is not enough young people getting involved in it. One thing, it is a lot of work.”