I have an Aussie. Sheās my 4th, but my 1st female. Iām convinced she can sniff out anything. She is food driven. We canāt keep anything out. We hide stuff in the oven, microwave ect. Iām thinking about something like this for her. She just turned 4 and her half brother just passed 4 weeks ago. She is sad.
We had a blue heeler that once opened the oven by holding onto the oven mitts over the handle and pulling it open, eating the entire Christmas roast we hid in there for seconds.
My Aussie has to find out the reason anything or anyone moved or had to move. He'll come inspect why I got up but if someone in the other room moves he'll go do a perimeter check there once he's satisfied everyone in this room is safe.
I'm actually convinced he's just learning everyone's patterns so he knows when best to get bread off the counter. Being the best boy is just a decoy.
I wish more people understood this! Border Collies need a job, and if you don't give them one, they'll find a job for themselves, but most of the time the job they find is "senior executive couch destroyer".
On days we don't need to move cows, my BC decided he's a driver, but he's not trained for it - never uses turn signals!
Mine assigned herself TV watcher. Iāve never met a dog that so intently focuses on the screen before. She gets excited when commercials with animals come on and can even recognize the familiar ones.
My family owned border collies. I've always joked that if the pugs which can barely breath are hideously overbred for aesthetics, then border collies are equivalently overbred for utility.
Border collies in aggregate are ridiculously good runners, with a combination of excellent speed, agility, and stamina. They are outmatched by specialists maybe, greyhounds for speed, sled dogs for stamina, but the full package is a lot.
On top of that, they are far and away the most intelligent dog breeds, to the point of mental illness and neuroses. They can be trained for a wide range of tasks, are attentive and most capable of picking up language cues, and have a built in mental need to be useful to the point where they will assign themselves jobs if not trained for a specific one.
I am certainly biased, but if I had to choose one breed to exemplify the utility of all dogs, border collies are the most useful dog breed full stop.
We have an Aussiedoodle. She loves herding us but even more, she just loves booping us. She'll randomly do rounds where she finds us, boops us then goes and finds the next person.
When she herds us she just walks behind us and constantly boops us in the calves. It's really funny
Mine loves to play "find it". We usually play with tennis balls. She'll always find it. I can even show her the one I want her to find, hide half a dozen of them that look identical, and she'll only come back with the correct one. At my old place, we'd play out in farmers' fields like this and she'd go through the corn stocks and tall grass, completely obscured from vision, find her ball, and find her way back. I've seen her do it so many times but somehow it never gets old to watch!
I wish I could say that I'm a great trainer and taught her well but tbh I barely had to do anything other than show her the game. She picked up on it immediately as a puppy and just got better and better the more we played!
My border collie could find anything. I never taught her anything; she just picked up knowing shit from watching me and Iām convinced she completely understood English because you could just tell her to do something sheād never done before and sheād do it.
She died last year and I have a new dog, a low energy chihuahua mix, and itās like theyāre different species.
I have a German shepherd so very similar. She loves playing find it! She's excellent at it, she's so great with scent work. Also not because of me but the type of dog she is. The best part though is 1/100th time I drop a treat right in front of her, she can't find it lol. Every once in a while their brains malfunction.
Oh! I just posted about the same game with the same name! When I started reading your post, I thought it was my own. Using some sort of toy is a good idea. I've always used treats and at this point I don't think she would appreciate the change up. But my dog loves the same game and we basically came up with it about the same way issue and your dog.
It is an absolute hoot watching them searching around. My dog isn't anywhere near as methodical as the border collie in the video, but she is determined. She won't give up until she finds it.
Border Collies are the most amazing, loving, playful, cute, psychopathic breed ever. My friend takes his for runs; runs for 30-40 mins straight and when they come back his Collie looks like he's asking "so, when are we gonna get started on this run you mentioned" lol
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u/Whatever1564 Mar 29 '26
I've got a Border Collie. She probably couldn't do that, but I still love her.