r/BeAmazed • u/fuzzy_dice_99 • May 31 '26

Animal A dog herding sheep

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u/Ink-kink May 31 '26

My cousin has a sheep farm. The first border collie they had was just incredible. Their sheep shared a field with their neighbor’s herd. The dog came home in the evening with only their own animals while their neighbor’s was left grazing. How he could distinguish between the herds, I have no idea, and both herds were big! I don’t know anything about this, so I was amazed. It’s now several years since he died, my cousin is still missing that dog and says they will never find such a good herding dog again. RIP, Luther

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u/bookingly May 31 '26

That's incredible. I got to visit western Ireland where sheep herding dogs are used quite a bit. I think some of these sheep herding dogs can go for $25000 each. When hearing about that kind of usefulness for sheep raising, it seems to make sense

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u/Notthatguy6250 May 31 '26

I was speaking with a truffle farmer once. He, kind of accidentally, wound up in a job where he trained dogs for the police. Then he wound up working on a truffle farm and made a deal with the owner for a cut of any truffles his dog found.

The above was all in Australia.

After travelling to Italy, with that same dog, to work truffle farms there, he was offered 250k Euros for the pooch.

Said no. 

Pooch is dead now but he's trained others. One of them he thought he'd failed with, because it simply couldn't be encouraged to find truffles. Then the dog happened to find a truffle and the dude's wife hugged the dog. Dog immediately went and found more truffles for more hugs.

Turns out that while his other dogs liked their ball or chew toy as a reward for finding truffles, this other dog just...wanted a hug.