11/08/2026
🎉🎉Collie Camp September is booking now🎉🎉
There’s a couple of spaces available
September 19 - 22nd
North Norfolk
Email me to book your space 🐾🐾
4 Days. 6 Collies. One Unmissable Experience.
This autumn in North Norfolk, I’m hosting an exclusive 4-day intensive training camp designed specifically for Border Collies and the people who love them.
If you’ve ever wished you had the time, space and expert guidance to truly understand your collie and unlock their full potential — this is your moment.
Over four days, you’ll work alongside me — The Border Collie Trainer — to deepen your knowledge, sharpen your skills, and build a partnership with your collie that feels effortless, confident and connected.
By the end of camp, you won’t just have learned new skills.
You’ll see your collie differently — and they’ll work with you differently too.
“What Makes Collie Camp Different?”
Border Collies are quick-thinking, fast-acting, highly intelligent dogs with incredible stamina and instinct.
They’re brilliant… and sometimes brilliantly challenging.
At Collie Camp we explore:
• Why they struggle to not work
• Why distractions override their hearing
• Why movement triggers chasing
• Why they’re always thinking
Drop me an email to claim your space. When they are gone, they are gone.
🐾🐾🐾🐾🐾🐾🐾
Here’s a top tip for you in the meantime
Don’t look in that direction Shep!!!
One of the things about collies that most people recognise is the collie stare. The power of their ‘eye’ as we call it, is used to communicate with their prey that they should behave in a certain way.
A strong eyed collie can control their flock with a mere glance or hold the flock in check with a stare.
But here’s a thing that lots of collie owners don’t know…..and now you will 😁😁 and be able to use it to your advantage.
There’s a sport of sheepdog trialing that many will have seen on, on TV if not in person. It was a way for stockmen and farmers to showcase their collies in order to sell their offspring, a way to keep their collies in work during quieter periods when the sheep needed less husbandry, and also a good social experience that included bragging rights .
The trial is really a mini version of a full working day and includes many of the skills involved in flock work out on the farm.
Sheep will be placed in an area well away from the sight of the collie, and often the shepherd.
The collie will be sent away from the handler to perform an ‘outrun’, basically a hunt to find the prey, get behind the prey, in this case the sheep, and to wait further instructions from the shepherd, who is required to stand in one designated spot throughout.
Once the collie has located the sheep in the field, they may well be hidden from view by natural landscape features, she will wait to be told by the shepherd to take them in a designated direction, usually at the stage is it to ‘fetch’ the sheep.
This involves calmly bringing the flock back to the shepherd, often having to negotiate gates and obstacles en route.
The sheep then have to be pushed around the back of the shepherd and off in a different direction, demonstrating that the collie is capable of ‘driving’ the sheep away as well as ‘fetching’ them towards the shepherd.
Having completed this part of the course the judge will require the sheep to be brought into a small space, often marked out by piles of sawdust to form a ‘shedding ring’.
This is usually an area about 20m across.
The shepherd can now approach the space which has the sheep held in it by the collie ….using her ‘eye’.
The judge will ask the shepherd to remove some of the sheep from the group, often 1 or 2 sheep are given a collar or marked in some way to denote that these are the sheep to be ‘shed’ from the other 4 - 6 sheep.
The collie and shepherd must work in perfect harmony in order not to spook the sheep out of the area or split the flock in an undesired way.
As the shepherd gently moves towards the sheep the sheep will mill about and at the perfect moment when the marked sheep are together the shepherd will call the collie though the flock to split the marked sheep off.
Now….here’s the bit that involves us a collie owners, at this point the shepherd and collie have 2 groups of sheep to keep apart.
The marked sheep will need to be moved away from the shedding ring while the others can be left to their own devices until the collie collects them all up at a later moment.
BUT how does the collie know which are the important sheep and which to let run off????
It’s a matter of communication between the shepherd and the collie, as ever.
The shepherd will turn her body and LOOK at the sheep that the collie should be concerned with. These are still prey, still to be controlled and still to be done with as the shepherd dictates.
By looking towards and at the sheep that are ‘important’ to the shepherd, and therefore to the collie, the collie’s impulse to work will continue.
As we know the collie has been selectively bred over countless generations to work with the shepherd as a team, it’s a very strong urge for a collie to please us.
So let’s take this scenario of shepherd looking at the important sheep in order to encourage the collie to control the movement of those sheep.
When we are out walking with our collie, who might like to take control of every encounter with another dog or critter, if we, as the shepherd in that instance, look directly and with intent towards that dog or critter we are in danger of communicating to our team mate collie that they should take control of the situation and the prey.
Of course to us it’s natural to watch the potential oncoming problem so that we can be prepared, but inadvertently we could be encouraging an escalation to work mode in our collie.
Maybe a better solution would be to focus our gaze where we would prefer our collie to be looking, maybe the floor, maybe a turn of our body to change direction, maybe at the treat or toy we have in our hand to distract or reward our collie after the event?
You know your collie best of course, but it’s definitely worth understanding how and why our collie might be further encouraged to ‘eye’ if they are following our lead.
If you need more help with your collie walks there’s loads of excellent ideas in our online school. Pulling, eyeing, lunging, stalking, I’ve got you covered.
Have a think about how you might be influencing your collie without even knowing it.
If you like this level of geekiness and knowledge please don’t forget to book you collie camp space 😁🐾
You know where I am if you need further training, the online school is always open, email me if you have any questions.
Enjoy the summer, keep cool.
Al, Nibs, Bee and Tog
😁🐾🐾🐾
