Herding Books
For learning more about herding, your dog, and stock.
All links will direct you to a outside website
For Training
Herding Dogs: Progressive Training
By Vergil Holland
Herding Dogs: Progressive Training is the only book of its kind to guide the owner toward training the complete herding dog. Whether you are involved in farming or ranching, or simply want to explore your herding dog's heritage, you will find a wealth of information here. For those with competitive goals, Herding Dogs will enhance your knowledge with a philosophy that has the dog's individual breed and personality as the central focus.
Stockdog Savvy
By Jeanne Joy Hartnagle-Taylor, Ty Taylor, Ernest Hartnagle
Recognizes more than 60 different herding breeds and their style of working. Along with organization and course explanations for AKC, AHBA, CKC.
Jeanne Joy Hartnagle-Taylor is the third of four generations to enjoy a lifetime association with working stockdogs. She has titled her Australian shepherd, judged in Europe and North America. C0-authored with her husband, TY, who has handled stockdogs from ranch to sale yard.
Lessons From a Stock Dog: A Training Guide
By Bruce Fogt
A wonderful book that is easy to read and understand, it will help you avoid costly mistakes with your Stock Dog and will start you down the right path to success.
Sheepdog Training and Trials
By Nij Vyas
This comprehensive and invaluable book describes innovative ways of training sheepdogs and addresses a number of subjects that have not been adequately covered in previous publications, such as working with sensitive dogs and dogs lacking confidence, the 'square movements' method, and the 'concepts of opposites'. The volume is brimming with practical advice that will help handlers to find solutions to difficult problems
S is for Sheepdog
By Sue Main
Gwyn Jones, Penmachno, is renowned for his Rhythm, and Flow method of working sheepdogs. Gwyn's methods of training go back to the methods used back when the dogs served an 'apprenticeship', a time when they learnt how to handle stock. With work came the calm dog with its adrenaline channelled into its abilities.
"A dog needs confidence to learn to use the power it has and the guidance to use it correctly."
For Trialing
From The Handler's Post
By Vergil Holland
Vergil Holland's first book, Herding Dogs: Progressive Training, is considered a classic introduction to the theory and training of working stockdogs. From The Handler's Post, is his much-anticipated guide to succeeding at sheepdog trials. Useful for both novice and advanced handlers, this book contains a lifetime of knowledge from one of the most successful sheepdog handlers in North America.
Biographies
Gus: One Women's Champion
By Victoria Yablonsky
This book is a love story, a dog story, a sports story, a nature story. It describes the intense partnership and subtle communication between a human and her talented border collie as they learn the refined art of sheepdog trialing. It illustrates Gus's power, beauty, sheep sense, intelligence, flaws, and extraordinary sense of responsibility. It provides a window into the art of sheepdog training and the ancient world of sheep farming and shepherding in the UK--a moving story about a remarkable animal spirit and the woman who documents it.
The Shepherd's Life: Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape
By James Rebanks
The Shepherd's Life the story of a deep-rooted attachment to place, modern dispatches from an ancient landscape that describe a way of life that is little noticed and yet has profoundly shaped the landscape over time. In evocative and lucid prose, James Rebanks takes us through a shepherd's year, offering a unique account of rural life and a fundamental connection with the land that most of us have lost. It is a story of working lives, the people around him, his childhood, his parents and grandparents, a people who exist and endure even as the culture - of the Lake District, and of farming - changes around them.
A Shepherd's Life
By W.H. Hudson
Wiltshire looks large on the map of England, a great green county, yet it never appears to be a favourite one to those who go on rambles in the land. At all events I am unable to bring to mind an instance of a lover of Wiltshire who was not a native or a resident, or had not been to Marlborough and loved the country on account of early associations. Nor can I regard myself as an exception, since, owing to a certain kind of adaptiveness in me, a sense of being at home wherever grass grows, I am in a way a native too.
One Girl and Her Dogs
By Emma Gray
When 23-year-old shepherdess Emma Gray breaks off her engagement, the chance to take over an isolated Northumberland farm seems just the fresh start she needs. But while the beautiful scenery certainly offers plenty of scope for contemplation, a night out with an eligible bachelor soon seems more remote than the farm itself. And once you add fugitive sheep and freak blizzards into the mix, Emma's dreams of a happy future at Fallowlees Farm quickly begin to fade.
My Farming Life
By Emma Gray
Emma Gray was just twenty-three when she moved to an isolated farm in Northumberland, becoming Britain's youngest solo shepherdess. In the seasons that followed, Emma fell in love with its rolling fields, surrounding forest and sturdy farmhouse, tending her sheep and training her dogs - and even found romance.
Jack Knox: Learning Life's Lessons Stock Dogs
By Jack Knox
In Jack Knox: Learning Life’s Lessons with Stock Dogs famed herding dog trainer Jack Knox retraces his steps from learning to use Border Collies to tend sheep as a lad in the border region of Scotland to becoming one of the foremost characters in the stock dog world in America today.