Ian & Goose — Northwest Championship Trial
Thirty years, one philosophy
Ian Caldicott has spent more than three decades training herding dogs and teaching handlers at Wolston Farm in Scio, Oregon. He works primarily with Border Collies — reading livestock, reading dogs, and, most of all, teaching people to read both.
Wolston Farm is a working sheep operation and the home of trial-quality Border Collies. Over the years it has become a training ground for handlers at every stage — from complete beginners picking up a crook for the first time to competitors preparing for national-level trials.
This resource grew out of a manuscript Ian has been writing for years: Becoming a Herding Dog Trainer — The Five C's Approach. It isn't a collection of techniques. It's an attempt to put on paper the underlying way of thinking that makes any technique work — the framework Ian has used to teach hundreds of handlers, refined over thirty years of getting it wrong, figuring out why, and getting it right the next time.
It's not about what to do.
It's about how to be.
Most herding instruction is a list of techniques. Ian's starting point is different: get your own attitude, presence, and consistency right, and the techniques get a lot easier — for you and for your dog.