I just love this dog! We opened up a new 3 acre pasture for the rams -- 4 adults and 8 ram lambs. Because of all of the alfalfa and clover, we could only let them graze for about 1/2 hour at a time to begin with. So when it came time to bring them back in, I sent Belle out to do the job. The top photo shows Belle having a "discussion" with the big rams, and you can see that they are listening to her. Below you can see that they have turned away from the fence and are heading to the back of the field.

Belle instinctively knows to keep "flanking" the rams, keeping them in a group, and not letting any of them break away from the direction she is heading them. The reason I say this is because she has had absolutely no formal herding training at all. She just has always known what to do. I basically just say "Some on Belle, let's bring the sheep in" and off she goes! Kyssa is following in her mom's footsteps, except she's still young and overeager and doesn't quite want to stop yet when I say "enough." But because she wants to please me, she will come back to me when I call her and I have no doubt she'll be great at herding too.

The rams are now headed closer to their gate and Belle turns for acknowledgement from me of a job well done. As you can see, she's pretty happy to be working. At this point I had her go far to the left to gather the 8 ram lambs who were in the north part of the pasture and she worked them along the east fence line and into the gate shortly after I took this photo. Unfortunately the darn camera ran out of "memory" so I couldn't record the movement of the other rams during this session.

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