FINDING A TRAINER

Beverly Lambert

First of all you need to decide if you are looking for a person to give you occasional advice or a person to take a regular lesson from (say weekly).

If you are trying to go the weekly lesson route then you are pretty limited in who you can go to. There are still just not that many folks giving regular lessons in this sport. But if you have a choice of more then one in your area I would ask to go and observe a lesson from each.

You should be able to tell pretty fast if you feel comfortable with the instructor, if the physical set up is conducive to teaching the dog and if the instructor knows what he/she is doing and is doing it in a manner with which you are comfortable.

What you shold look for includes; does the dog being trained seem to learn anything? Does the person working with the instructor seem to be learning anything. Does the instructor have students competing in trials at the level you want to compete? I think the answer to most of these questions is going to need to be yes.

If you are not comfortable with either the person or their techniques then you are not going to be willing to follow through on the things they show you. If the physical layout of the training area is so poor that the sheep are always escaping through the fence or can't be worked then you are wasting your time.

If you are not looking for lessons so much as mentoring then you have a wider field to draw upon. There are many, many good handlers who give an occasional clinic or give advice when asked. When you are going this route find a person who works in a manner that you like. Do they look at the post the way you would like to look (tall, thin, rich:)) but seriously are they handling the way you want to? Does there dog work the way you want yours to? There are many different approaches to how to train and handle you should be able to at least dimly perceive the differences between handlers before you select one.

For example how much control do you want to put on your dog and how much do you want to rely upon the dog doing the work naturally. How much do you want the dog to push and how much do you want the dog to just follow? And don't necessarily select one, go to two and get advice on the same problem. See which advice you like the best.

The one warning I would give is about taking a young dog to a bunch of different clinic looking for the perfect instructor. I would leave the young dog home and go and observe. There are now a lot of people out there giving clinics. I am not sure that I would trust all of them with my young dog. I certainly would not want four or five different people working a young dog in the course of a few months in the high pressure sort of atmosphere that you get at a clinic.

Also no one is going to train your dog during a half hour clinic lesson. You are the one that is supposed to get trained at a clinic. You learn the lesson, you learn how to fix what is wrong with your dog and then you fix the dog. The only reason to take the dog to the clinic is so the dog can show the instructor exactly what is wrong, not so the instructor can train the dog.

I have still found that the best instructor is the dog and your imagination. Explain to yourself clearly what is wrong with the dog. Break the problem down into as many small parts as you can and then figure out a way to change the behavior. Let the dog tell you if what you are doing is working. If what you are doing is not working then think of another way to teach the lesson.

Good luck