r/WorkingBorderCollies

Its still winter here in Australia, but im hopefully looking for suggestions before it starts to get more into beach time. I have a 18 month old border collie who loves the beach. This summer will be her second with me and I need advice in how to keep her fur from being matted. She absolutely loves swimming in the sea then rolling in the sand and it just creates huge dreads. Last summer I just spent forever with the conditioner picking them out, but is there a better way? Any one have any products they use. Her fur also gets quite dry and heat damaged is there something for that??

I'm a software developer, not a shepherd. Over the past few months I've been building a sheep herding game as a side project, and the part that took the longest wasn't the graphics it was trying to make the flock behave like an actual flock.

I based the model on Jadhav et al. (2024, Communications Biology), the study that put UWB trackers on a border collie and 14 merinos and recorded them at 2 Hz, plus a Swedish student thesis on herding behaviour and the older Strömbom shepherding model. What came out of that:

Sheep react to speed, not just distance. A dog walking in applies gentle pressure; the same dog sprinting at the same distance blows the group apart.

Flight zone with a threshold, wider when the dog barks.

Topological neighbours — each sheep tracks about seven of its nearest and picks a few of those to follow, re-rolled a few times a second. This is what keeps a small flock coherent without it moving like one rigid blob.

A front-to-back order. Bolder individuals react earlier and end up leading; the shy ones lag. The dog works the back and the front decides where everyone goes.

Sheep can't see through each other, so the back rank reacts first.

Dog-broke sheep. Early in a journey the flock is jumpy; later they have seen enough of the dog that terrain matters more than he does.

A balance point that isn't always directly behind them — the flock wants its own ground, and the line to the gate is rarely straight.

Commands are come bye, away to me, lie down, get out, and look back. There's shedding work on later stages, and stages that end at open grazing where a pressed sheep simply won't put its head down.

What I'd really like to know from people who do this for real:

Does the pressure-scales-with-speed thing match what you actually feel? It's the single mechanic everything else is built on.

How long does it genuinely take for sheep to get dog-broke, and does it change how you'd work them as much as I've assumed?

I have a stubborn ram that will square up and charge a dog that comes in too close. Is that a real thing a single dog handles, or would you just leave him?

Would a handler ever use look back the way I've set it up — turning the dog off the group to fetch one that got left?

Anything in the list above that made you wince.

I'm aware there's a gulf between a paper and a hillside, and that's exactly the gap I'm asking about. Happy to be told the model is wrong — that's more useful to me than praise.

It's on Android, free, and currently in open testing. I'll leave the link out of the post since I don't want this to read as an ad; happy to drop it in a comment if anyone wants to poke at it.