Saturday afternoon, we headed back down to the National Western Stock Show to watch the "Stock Dog Trials (Intermediate Sheep)." We'd never seen herding dogs in action, except for one late fall afternoon when a young Merlin, our first Bouvier des Flandres, tried to round up a flock of Canadian geese.

"Intermediate" was a gentle overstatement of the herding capabilities of most of the border collies in this round of trials, which involved three sheep, one dog, and one dog owner in a large arena. Each dog had to herd the sheep through a gate, around a post, and into a pen in four minutes or less, following the voice, whistle, and/or hand commands of its owner.

We watched the competition for two hours, and perhaps two dogs made it through the entire sequence. Many more were DQ'd for biting the sheep; as the announcer commented, it's pretty hard to claim innocence with a hunk of wool hanging out of your dog's mouth. To be fair, though, some of the sheep trios sent into the arena were more sheeplike than others, i.e., they huddled and ran together as a 12-legged unit, making them easier to herd. One collie drew a group of sheep that included an animal with an independent streak. This particular sheep kept running off in an entirely different direction than the other two, leaving the young collie clearly flummoxed.

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On this final weekend of the show, the traditional ranchers had departed with their cattle, leaving the stockyards to specialty stock: Miniature Herefords, Texas Longhorns, Scottish Highland cattle, and Tibetan yaks.

The Miniature Herefords looked just like their full-size counterparts. The Texas Longhorns were impressive, but ill-tempered: One stuck his head through a slat in his pen and butted me with one of his horns while I was taking pictures. (I couldn't help but wonder, as Carrie Bradshaw would say, if that was karmic payback for all the mean things I've said about a certain Texan over the past eight years.)

The Scottish Highland cattle (affectionately known as "Highland coos", "shaggy coos", "toffee coos", or "hairy coos" in parts of Scotland*) appropriately bore the red hair of their native countrymen.


But it was the Tibetan yaks that I fell in love with. Smaller than wild yaks, these domesticated animals are, one owner told me, mellow and friendly. They're so sweet, in fact, that many people keep them as "pasture pets." The adults are imposing and exotic looking.


If I had the space and the money for a "pasture pet," I would have adopted the four-month-old yak on the right, who had the curly, shaggy coat and shoe-button eyes of my Bouviers, and the calm, cheerful demeanor of the Dalai Lama.

* Wikipedia