Ebony and I went herding for the first time this morning with some of our other Shiloh Shepherd friends, and we had a blast. She'd been up to see the sheep once before, just enough to tell that she "turned on" to them without trying to eat them, but that was back when Marti was still fostering her and my main focus was just trying to keep her from clawing her way back to Marti the entire time. I'd taken her in, but we just didn't even know each other yet.

This time she was still quite excited about the sheep, and I felt much more comfortable with directing her. She, ahem, left quite a bit of wool around the round pen but she definitely showed some potential (in the above picture, she's still showing a bit more "chase" posture than "herd" posture). And I'm getting the gist of it, and training me might be harder than training her anyway. We're actually going to enter a trial in January to see if we can get her first herding title. I hadn't been all that interested to get involved in herding because it gets expensive to train for something that we can't even practice on our own, and well, we just have a bunch of other irons in the fire, but we really had a good time so I'm looking forward to going back for more.