A sunny Sunday

Last Sunday was bliss. Klaas and I woke up early to take Flo to her first sheep herding class. We had her fixed a little over a month ago and we've noticed her putting on some weight. In addition, she's also started to dig holes in our backyard again, so we wanted to find something that would keep her busy and help her lose some of her energy. When we go on walks with her and let her off the leash, she never goes far and constantly (like every 5 seconds) turns her head around to see if we're still following her, so we already knew she might have good herding instincts. She also has "the eye", something that is typical for Border Collies (although we haven't noticed it in Juul yet) and means that she will go and stand in front of a cat, for example, and just stare at it to try to control it.

So anyway, we got to the class and she was immediately focused on the sheep. There were other dogs all around her and while she usually isn't very sociable and often tries to dominate other dogs by barking or growling at them, she didn't this time. All of her attention went to the sheep.

She was second in line to go into the sheep pen. At first she had to stay outside of the pen to see how she'd react to a flock of sheep, while Klaas was in there with the sheep and the trainer. She immediately ran around to get to the side of the sheep and just stared them down. The trainer quickly let her into the pen (without a leash even!) and she started swarming the sheep, running around them in circles. I tried to take some pictures of the action, but I was quite far away and the sun was very low and directly in front of me. So yeah, blurry pictures.

Several people told us our dog has good instincts and will definitely be good at sheep herding. We even had people come over to us and tell us that they'd heard others say that "the guy with the blue sweater has got himself a good dog"! Needless to say, we were insanely proud.

I hope I'll be able to take some better pictures next week, because we'll definitely be going back! We're also going to take Juul with us to see if he has any interest in it, but we're not too sure that will be the case. Maybe he'll just have a good time running around with other dogs and exploring the fields?

Afterwards we went out for lunch and when we got home we just lounged for the remainder of the day, both of us blogging. Sunday at its best.