It’s not going well. For a start, the sheep are over there when they should be over here. And the dog is over here when he should be over there. I’m also trying out some of the dog language that Julie Hill has tried to teach me but it’s obvious I’m not a natural at sheep herding. There is some good news though: by the end of day, I’m going to pick up some very useful training tips that can be used by anyone who owns a dog.


Julie Hill calls it the natural way of training and she has honed it as a method over 30 years of working with dogs. Her base is a stocky little farm in a valley on the Carcant Estate in the Borders where she works a large herd of sheep over 600 acres but also trains dog owners in how to better communicate with their animals. Sometimes it’s other shepherds; sometimes it’s just people who have a pet dog who need to improve their human/animal relationship.


Her qualifications for passing on advice are unquestionable. She may not be from a farming background – she grew up in Scunthorpe – but she has 30 years of experience as a shepherd and sheepdog trainer and has won numerous local and national competitions.


Next month she will be taking part in the International Sheep Dog Trials near Moffat in Dumfries-shire. At the centre of the event, which will be attended by the Princess Royal, will be a competition between some of the best shepherds in the country and it’s happening at an interesting time when shepherding appears to have gone mainstream again. In the 1980s, the TV show One Man and His Dog was a constant favourite, but it’s now back on television again, on ITV this time, in the shape of the celebrity sheep dog contest Flockstars.


Julie has seen it all before, but always looks forward to competitions and her wide experience with dogs is obvious immediately when I meet her and see her working with her dogs. She and her partner Bobby have 14 collies in all, from puppies to older dogs, but she introduces me to her top two: seven-year-old Ban and Mac, who’s eight. It takes around three years to train a good sheep dog and another three to get their experience to the top level. They are then retired at 10 years old or so, which means a top sheepdog doesn’t have a long working life: around four years at most.


Ban and Mac are still a good way off retirement though and are beautiful animals and an unusual mix of pet and working dog. Many working dogs have none of the softness of pets, partly because their owners work them hard, but when Julie releases them from their kennels, Ban and Mac immediately demand cuddles and nuzzle their noses into her legs and mine.

 

Julie Hill doesn't approve of Barbara Woodhouse's methods

 

Then, suddenly, it’s time for work and the dogs are off, ears up, shoulders down, eyes wide. Apparently, Julie just gave them a signal to get started, but I can’t say I noticed it was so sublte. That’s the way her technique works: there’s no flapping of arms, no shouting, no histrionics, just calmness, quietness, and a form of body language that Julie calls pressure/release.


It’s a technique you could use with your own dog and it works like this: to encourage your dog to follow a command, you should apply pressure, which doesn’t always mean physical pressure – it can be making the tone of the voice harder, or using your body to block the dog’s path, although it can also be gentle physical pressure. Julie will either cup her hand over the dog’s muzzle in the way a mother dog would with her jaw or she will gently nip the dog’s shoulder, which is also something a mother dog would do when a pup gets out of line. Releasing pressure works in the same way: you can either soften your tone of voice, or step back out of a dog’s way or release your hand from the dog’s muzzle. All of this says: good dog, well done.


Leaning on her crook in the field by the side of her farmhouse, Julie explains a little more about how the technique works. “It’s a language,” she says, “it’s communication. To work your dog to a high level, to even get a bond and an appreciation of what the dog is capable of, you have to understand their language and I don’t mean words, I mean posture, the dog’s language and the language is the sheep’s language too.”


All animals, she says, speak this silent language. “All animals including ourselves have it,” she says. “Posture, body language, eye contact, the way you move into someone’s space – are you making them comfortable or uncomfortable? And the way a dog holds its tail – it’s telling you what it’s thinking, the way he holds his ears, the way he looks at you; if he gives you a dirty look out of the corner of his eye, it means something. Over the years, I’ve not only learned what their reaction to sheep is, I’ve learned what he’s telling me as well. So sometimes you feel like your dog is saying to you ‘you stupid devil’ and he probably is saying that.”


The key to good training, says Julie, is to learn to interpret the language but also to use it to pass messages to the dog, and that is not easy as I find out when I have a go at herding a small flock of sheep. It’s obvious that the dog is so highly trained that it’s doing much of the work itself but Julie shows me how to add pressure to the dog by blocking its path and showing it where I want it to go. You can also add pressure by looking directly at a dog and not breaking your stare.


“It is not about how you hold a dog, it’s about how you look at the dog,” says Julie. “People think it’s a physical thing, whereas it’s not just physical. It’s about an energy, it’s about your demeanour, your posture – that’s all the stuff I had to learn. I had no dog sense when I started.”


Julie tells me that she got her start with horses rather than dogs when she was growing up in Lincolnshire. She was desperate to have pets but her parents wouldn’t allow her anything bigger than a guinea pig. So she would walk the neighbours’ dogs and used to cycle five miles to and from a stables so she could ride.


He first job after she left school at 16, at a local factory, only underlined her desire to work with animals and she found a job at a stud farm in Cambridgeshire and it was there, as she helped to break in young horses, that she first developed a skill for understanding and communicating with animals, dropping her eyes and turning to the side to become less threatening for instance.


Her first dog, Meg, was a pet rather than a sheep dog, but her interest in becoming a shepherd was growing and she began to train. After moving to Aberdeenshire to work on a farm, she trained with her neighbour Allan Gordon and began to show real skill. In 1989, less than a year after the move to Scotland, she and her dog Gwen began finding success in trials and competitions. In 1991, she won the Scottish National Championships and in 1996 she was named Supreme International Champion at the trails at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire – the first woman to win the title.


By this point, Julie was starting to develop her natural technique, mostly through watching her pack of dogs and how they would behave with each other, how they held their bodies and the subtle gestures they would use with each other. Once she knew those, she could start using them herself to become a better shepherd.


Twenty years on, Julie runs a small business from the farm passing her skills on to other dog owners and part of it is trying to undo what she sees as the mistakes of the past. Some shepherds, she says, will try to break a dog and she doesn’t have much time for the old techniques of Barbara Woodhouse and the like. Her technique is less about domination and more about going naturally with the dog and the way it behaves. It’s about being confident rather than dominant.


“Owners have to unlearn a lot,” she says. “It’s the obedience thing that’s wrong – sit down, come here, it’s pressure in the wrong places. The problem with domestic dogs is that people are too busy thinking I have to be nice to this animal – they forget that there are rules and you still have to discipline and the dog has to realise why it has been disciplined.


“It’s just like bringing up children – I haven’t got children – but there are boundaries. If you crush someone through command, they are not going to give you 100 per cent.” Julie also believes that dog attacks on humans are down to the lack of boundaries. “Look at society – there’s no discipline in society and we’re doing the same with animals and we wonder why? There are no boundaries. You have to allow people to be their true self, but you have to guide them to bring out the best in them.”


Julie particularly warns against shouting at a dog, or running towards it when it does something wrong. “I see the mistakes all the time,” she says “It’s the same with domestic dogs and working dogs – shouting means nothing to a dog because it’s just excitement.” She believes that domestic dogs show problems when there is no balance in the family home and no leadership. “There has to be a leader in the world of dogs and if you’re not able, then the dog will do it,” she says. “And if they are not able to do it, then you’ll have this erratic dog.”


Aggression towards other dogs is a similar cause and effect. “It’s again because a lot of the dogs don’t know boundaries and they are running their family – they’re the top dog and the top dog has to protect the rest of the pack. But if you’re the one in charge, then the attitude of the dog will be different – you can say ‘come on, I’ll deal with this.’|”


Fixing the problem is about applying some of the pressure in her natural way technique. “You have to start putting a bit of pressure on the dog and blocking him – you have to think about what a pack animal would do. You learn to see what they do to each other. If there is a bone, you would own the bone and the other dog would have to go. “


Julie shows me some of these techniques in action and it’s impressive. The land round here is hilly with lots of rough moors so Julie will often be working with a dog that is anything up to half a mile away. With a sheepdog there is also an interesting balance between hunt and control. What the shepherd is essentially doing is harnessing the dog’s instinct to kill.


“As the pack would hunt, they would bring the sheep to the alpha to kill,” says Julie, “but if there is an imbalance in the relationship they are going to kill the sheep themselves because they are the alpha. That’s where all the hassle comes from.”


There’s certainly no hassle from Mac and Dan, who have finished herding the sheep and are waiting for another command. Quietly, calmly, almost unnoticed, Julie tells them to return to their kennels and they do and it’s noticeable how the movements of the dog mirror the movements of the shepherd.


“When you learn how to handle a dog,” says Julie. “It makes you more aware of what you are yourself and accept yourself and read your flaws.” Good training, she says, is about learning how to speak to the dog, but it’s also about changing your own behaviour. You might think you’re changing your dog, but what you’re really doing is changing yourself.


For more information on Julie Hill and The Natural Way, visit www.nethhillbordercollies.co.uk. The International Sheep Dog Trials are held near Moffat on 10-12 September 2015. Day tickets are £8 (children can attend free of charge) and are available from www.internationalsheepdogtrials.org.uk

 

Julie Hill's dog training tips

The Natural Way is about applying and releasing pressure through body language, voice, eyes and commands.


A stare adds pressure, a blink releases it. A growly voice adds pressure, a lighter voice releases it. Other ways to add pressure are to block the dog with your body, hold it on the muzzle or touch the shoulder, or walk in towards it.


Ways to release pressure are to crouch down towards your dog, turn away from it or walk back. Stroking the dog’s cheek also releases pressure.


Julie also warns against some other common mistakes. First, don’t run at your dog. “What would you do if I ran at you and shouted lie down? Owners wonder why the dog doesn’t lie down – it’s because they are actually chasing the dog away with their body language.”


When you do issue a reprimand, make it proportionate. “You want your dog to trust you, not fear you,” says Julie. Do not use exaggerated gestures or flap your arms – the dog will not understand them.


Learn to understand the signals that a dog is giving you. For example, sniffing the ground when you call it means it is showing disrespect whereas a quick lick of the lips means it does not want a confrontation. Yawning is also a submissive gesture.


An excited, bouncy stance, says Julie, means the dog is not taking you seriously and you have probably inadvertently given the dog signals that you want to play. If the tail is held up tight over the body, that means the dog thinks it is the dominant one.