Suzanne Stewart
Staff Writer
Wilfong Farms in Dunmore hosted its first ever four-day sheepdog trials, which was sanctioned by the United States Border Collie Handlers Association.
Handlers from across the country converged on the farm with trailers full of eager border collies who have trained nearly their whole lives to herd sheep.
Each year, the USBCHA hosts the national finals and handlers try to get a spot among the top 150 to compete. The trials at Wilfong Farms gave them an opportunity to earn points toward that final goal.
Event coordinator Rebecca Gibson, of Charlotte, North Carolina, said the four-day event had between 320 and 340 entries with 80 dogs running each day.
Friday, the event started at 7 a.m. and ended at 7:30 p.m.
“You’ve got some of the top handlers in the country here,” Gibson said. “There are people here who have won the national finals, who have won the Purina Trial Dog of the Year. This drew some of the biggest handlers there are.”
Gibson explained that the handlers are getting ready for The Bluegrass Classic Sheep Dog Trial this week in Kentucky.
“The Bluegrass starts on Wednesday, so this was kind of a preemptive for that,” she said.
“There are very few places on the east coast, not any really, that we get the opportunity to work with wooled sheep, so this was a great opportunity for that because they’ll ship in wooled sheep from out west for the bluegrass.”
Wilfong Farms first got involved in the sheep dog trials last year when they took 800 sheep to the national finals competition at Belle Grove Planation in Middletown, Virginia.
“I hosted the national finals last year and we used their sheep,” Gibson said.
Once that connection was made, it wasn’t long before the Wilfongs offered to host a trial on their farm.
In the trials, the sheep dog and its handler are given 10 minutes to go through a kind of obstacle course with a “packet” of sheep – five sheep in total.
At Wilfong Farms, the handler stood at a post in a field and gave the dog a command to get the sheep out of a back meadow. The sheep were gathered in the meadow by two horsemen and other sheep dogs.
Once the dog gets behind the sheep, it brings them in as straight a line as possible into the field through the center of three sets of gates. From there, it leads the sheep to its left through a second set of gates, then back to the right to a third set of gates before leading them to a pen where the handler is holding open the gate.
The dog is to always keep the sheep in as straight a line as possible. If the sheep stray or are not organized, points are deducted. Each handler and dog starts with 100 points.
There were times when the sheep cooperated for the most part, but also times when the dog couldn’t even get them out of the meadow into the center field in the 10-minute time limit.
“That’s what makes it really crazy,” handler Angie Hoover, of Florida said. “Most trials have sheep that have seen the dogs before. The hardest are the sheep that have never seen dogs before.”
At the end of the 10-minute trial run, the dogs retire to a kiddie pool filled with water to cool down and the five sheep are taken away by another dog to a field to cool down, as well.
Each dog got a fresh set of five sheep from the meadow.
Results from the event will be posted on Rebecca Gibson’s Facebook page.
