Mist almost wins a trial!

During the summer there are sheepdog trials to be found somewhere i the south west of England almost every weekend, and although I don’t find time to get to many, I do manage to compete at half a dozen each year.

In early October, we made the trip to a trial at Bishopstone near Salisbury. It’s a trial run by a friend of mine, on a good big field and the sheep are always pretty well behaved. The competition at such events is fierce, and there were many of the best sheepdog handlers from across the south of England, so I knew that we would have to be on best form to stand any sort of chance.

Jake is now seven years old and I’ve noticed him beginning to slow down over the last year or so. To do well at a sheepdog trial the dog really needs to be at his peak of fitness, and I wasn’t surprised to find that  Jake found the course rather tough. Even so he managed to finish with 72 points out of a hundred, which wasn’t bad going.

Mist has been on pretty good form at the trials trials that we have been to this year, so when near the end of the day it was her turn to run I had some hope that she would put in a good performance. So it turned out, she put the sheep in nice straight lines between the three sets of hurdles, completed the shed and even managed to pen the sheep, which few other dogs had done that day. With a score of 87 she went to the top of the score board, and with only a few runs left, I really thought that we were in the with a chance of winning.

However, it wasn’t to be, with the second to last run another shepherd, Robert Putnam had a cracking run with his dog Seren, and took the first prize. I don’t think Mist was too worried, she won a bag of dog food for second place, and I was just pleased that with so little practice we’d put on a good performance!