Teaching new Farm Dogs the ropes.....

Starting new dogs in farm work is always interesting and each pup requires a flexible approach depending on their intelligence and how quickly they pick things up. You dont want to rush them and overstress them, so they build a good foundation and learn to problem solve in various situations. Huntaways are generally backing dogs, which means they use their big loud deep bark to bring the cows out of the paddocks and follow through from behind.

We use one of the older working dogs close to retirement, to show the young pup the ropes and this works really well. Huntaways are highly intelligent and young Bruce here is proving to be very clever and picking things up quickly with Jed showing him whats needed. He is doing well with the cows and already has a huge deep bark, but his quadbike riding skills are a little unusual in this photo.

Huntaways are born with Heritability which is a set of biological instructions in their DNA and gives them various traits and inheritance like their loud bark and physical size. The way they interact and respond to stock are considered to be strongly inherited and their loud, deep bark and ability to back is unique to the huntaway breed.

Basically they are born knowing what to do and its a matter of bringing it out of them. Bruce is about 10 months old and Jed is a 50kg huntaway, so Bruce is going to be a big boy. They generally have completely stopped growing at two years old. All our old dogs retire to the farm house when they have finished working and Jed is due to retire but still wants to work so he is on light training duties only.