Adding to our pack of Border Collies

[BCSnob]

Last fall one of our pups (owned, trained, and run by a friend) placed 5th in the 2013 National Sheepdog Finals. This dog was out of my Peg and is a litter mate to our Nell and BJ. We decided we did not want to lose our line of dogs we've been running for over 10 years. We found a male to breed to our BJ; they bred today. Assuming all goes well we will be whelping pups during lambing season in March. Our plans are to keep 2 or maybe 3 pups from this litter and we already have a couple of other pups spoken for without advertising.

Our pack will grow from 7 Border Collies to 9 or 10 (the absolute maximum number of crates for our van).

Mark

[Deb_and_Ed_M]

Cool! I understand what you're saying - when you have great dogs who just "click" - yeah, I'd want to preserve that, too!

[BCSnob]

What we do with our dogs is team work. You want to find dogs with personalities that you do well training; some are very stubborn (we call it hard) while some are very soft (cannot take much yelling). All dogs will have issues (genetic flaws) in their working ability; we find that there are some flaws we hate training on while there are other flaws that we don't mind training on and are good at training on. Since these flaws are genetic, they will always be there and training will be required to manage these flaws.

I suppose you could think about our dog handler teams like beach volleyball doubles; pairing two players can make a poor team (teammates always fighting with each other) or a great team (individuals with complementary skills that cover the other’s flaws).

Since we started competing with our dogs we have been watching a handler from Ontario running a line dogs she has been breeding (she breeds, trains, and competes with her own dogs); her dogs are consistently in the top 10 of North America. We believe her dogs have the personalities and working characteristics (styles) that we would do well working with and this male has characteristics we feel will complement those in our female.

[CA_POPPY]

That's exciting! March will be busy at your place. Hope you get a big, healthy litter. How'd you pick the sire this time? (The genetics are interesting to me)