Some highlights of the clinic:

We started a young “Trayer” pup in his quest to becoming a real cattle dog. When he walked into the clinic he was a great pet who was happy to lie on his back like a baby or have a ball thrown for him. We started him working with my seasoned cow veteran and personal “go-to” cow wrangling buddy, Hangin’ Tree Tyson. One of the best ways to get some of these young and inexperienced pups started is to have a solid dog to go in and show them the ropes. By the end of the weekend this pup was becoming a real working cow dog. With consistent work from his owner, this pup has the makings of a great partner out on the ranch and an obedient pet in the home.

An energetic Aussie/Border mix came in as a friend and companion dog looking to learn a little more respect around horses while riding both in the arena and out on the trail. We started with a little ground work letting this dog know exactly where the “Black and White” areas are. One of which was “you may never go ahead of me”! This translated very nicely into “you may never go past my horses shoulder; the safety zone is always beside or behind mom” once the owner was on a horse.

It’s always fun to have a family come in with their own projects and we got that with a little Corgi and a working-dog mix. Each of these folks came in with a desire to learn more about using their dogs for their intended purpose and getting a better handle on general obedience. The Corgi learned what the fundamentals of herding would be if there were chickens or ducks with a little goat thrown in the mix, along with a general obedience brush up. The working dog put in some hard and not always easy work on obedience. One of the owner’s goals was being able to have the dog “stay put” in the area for those times when there are several people moving around and no room for a pup to be running amuck. Success was achieved on this!

In the end all the dogs did a great job and the owners had a great time learning new ways of working with their dogs and getting some super results!

Thank you to everyone who came to Oct./Nov. clinic and for putting such great effort into your dogs. They were all great to work with and it was my pleasure working with everybody there.

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I guy I know, Ken, called me to help catch 4 calves. I mean give me a break, 4 calves? NO PROBLEM! The day before I left for elk hunting, I loaded my horse badger and my two best dogs, Hanging Tree Sport and Chick, and drove out to meet Ken. When I got there we trapped the cows with grain but the 4 calves wouldn’t come into the pen. Well, we decided to go ahead and load the cows and the bull and then work on getting the calves caught up. I’m not sure why I did it but I attempted to bring the 4 calves into a half mooned pen with the little 4 foot walk gate in the middle.

Heck, we even left one cow in a little pen inside the bigger pen so the calves would come in easily. WRONG! I’m not sure why I tried it this way. We only had about one hour left before dark. As it turned out, I could stop the calves with my two dogs but couldn’t get them into the pen. I finally got one big double-bred scat- cat heifer in the pen but then she tore it down and got out. So I got to chasing these calves with my horse but then he went down in a spring and that ended that! After me, my horse and my dogs were all wore out I told Ken that we needed to quit as it was getting dark. So we had to unload the cows and bull and headed home.

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When I got back from elk hunting I called Ken to see if he got the cows and calves penned up.
He said he hadn’t. I hate to lose at anything so I asked him if he was ready to give it another shot and he said he was. We set it up differently this time! We started out at 10.00 am on a Sunday so we would have plenty of day light hours to work. I also asked my son, Jason, if he wanted to come along and help which of course he did (he knows we always have a good time gathering cattle). That Saturday night I didn’t get a lot of sleep because I was thinking about those 4 little calves.

We met Ken and his wife on Sunday morning and Ken asked me how I wanted to do it. This time I told him we’d open a big 12 foot panel, angel it out, then I’d send my two dogs out to hold the cattle up. I believe there were about 5 or 6 cows, 4 calves and one big bull.

Once I got the cattle settled down, Ken dumped grain into the feeders and I started having the dogs move the cattle back to the corral. Some of them went on in but there were a few that wanted nothing to do with that corral. So they kept trying to get around it and Sport and Chick would get them stopped. This lasted for about 2 minutes then they all went into the corral. The cows didn’t want to stay in the corral so they tried to leave but my two great dogs, Sport and Chick, got them stopped. The calves didn’t even try and run – they had enough the last time they meet those two dogs!

We shut the panel but a couple of those cows headed to the back side of the corral hoping to bust their way out. I sent Chick around the outside of the pen and one look at that dog biting through the bars at their head got them stopped.

The heard settled down really nice and the whole process took maybe 5 minutes.

What I learned from these little calves is that you should really think out what kind of dog power you have and set up the situation so you can win! I had plenty of dog power but I should have opened up a panel and brought the whole herd in at one time. I could have even gotten the 4 calves in if I would of opened up a panel at either end of the corral. Because of my mistakes, I thought about those darn 4 little calves the whole time I was gone hunting!

The thing about working dogs with cattle is that you’ll probably make mistakes – you just try to learn from them.

You can still access the site using www.piercesstockdogs.com as well as www.piercescowdogs.com. This way you don’t have to go and change any of those book mark settings in your browser.

Marvin hopes you keep coming back to the site to read the stories he puts up and to check out the photos he’ll be adding. Lots of interesting tales (no pun intended…) and great dog action stuff.

The new website will be dynamic with lots of updated content to keep you, the viewer, interested…at least that is our goal!

We hope you enjoy the site. If you have any technical questions please contact me, the webmaster. If YOU want a site that’s dynamic and easy to update and add content to whenever you want, be sure to contact me…please! That’s the kind of stuff I do and I can give you a totally unique look for your site – one you help to create. Check out my design and development services at www.equineonlinedesign.com.

If you have any dog related questions, then by all means get ahold of Marvin…he’s the cow dog man! If you’re interested in purchasing the training video Marvin made you’ll have to do it the old-fashioned way for now…give Marvin a call or email him (I guess that’s not too old-fashioned!), make payment arrangements with him and he’ll ship it out to you. Soon however, we’ll be higher tech with a connection to good ‘ol PayPal where you can do it all with one “click”! Ah, technology…gotta love it.

Marvin would love to hear your comments of course on the new look of his site so if you have nice things to say, be sure to drop him a line. If you don’t have nice things to say…just remember what your mother told you – “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all!”. Well, if you do have a complaint about the site or a suggestion to make it better, just send it off to me…my skin is thicker and of course it’s my job to field this kind of stuff.

Thank you for visiting Pierce’s Cow Dogs and we hope you come back often!