138. Utility Trials with Gary White & Kevin Howell

Kim Dodson farms with her husband Shane at Kaniva in western Victoria, 15 kilometres from the South Australian border. They run about 6,000 acres, mostly cropping, with a bit over 3,000 sheep. She won season three of Muster Dogs with Banjo, and she's only been in dogs seven or eight years. Kim came to the district in 1999 to ride track work and planned to stay six months. Horses were the whole thing until her back gave out, and dogs filled the gap. Her first one was a Gumtree pup with no breeding behind it, which she rehomed after a Neil McDonald clinic set her straight on pedigrees. The one that actually started her was Barkell Peters Kate, an eight-year-old fully trained bitch. Four months later she was at Sheepvention having never watched a full trial, and came third in a strong encourage. She's good company on a lot of this. The bit worth staying for is her case for buying an older dog when you're starting out, and why nobody says it out loud.

Scott Stokes runs a building company out of Greenbank in south-east Queensland and has only been trialling about five years. In that time he's won an open at the Queensland Supreme, beaten his mentor to do it, and made the Queensland rep team with Gage, the station bred kelpie he bought off Gumtree at Inverell for $300. He grew up on farms in the Waikato in New Zealand until he was thirteen, then moved to the Gold Coast with his family. Dogs weren't really part of the plan. He bought Gage as a mate to bring to work and only put him on sheep because the dog had too much go in him to sit in the ute. We cover a fair bit in this one. Scott talks about training around a business and a young family, including the years when the sheep were 35 minutes away and he'd get home in the dark. He's honest about whether 3-sheep is a collie game or just a numbers game, and about the pressure that got to him at Stanthorpe when he was chasing a spot in the Australian team. He also makes a good case for new triallers putting their hand up to judge, and passes on the advice Jeff Gibson gave him when Gage started blowing through his stops.

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Tony Whitehead is 90 years old, still on the block he's held since he was a child, and still letting sheep out at trials across NSW and Victoria. This one's a sit-down with a bloke who's seen more of the working dog world from the yards than most of us will ever see from the arena. Tony grew up at Urana in the NSW Riverina, was a jackaroo on Tubbo Station on the Murrumbidgee during the 1956 floods, spent four years as a ringer north of Winton in Western Queensland, and tossed a coin to decide between coming home and getting his pilot's licence in Cairns. He's carted grain, built tunnels at the Williamstown naval dockyard, owned a £35 racehorse that won 22 races, and came to sheepdog trials in his sixties because his wife reckoned he'd work himself to death on the farm otherwise. What you'll hear: Life on a Riverina station in the 1950s, with two full-time rabbiters running 30 dogs each How Tony went from helping in the yards at the Supremes to trialling his own dogs, and the dogs that got him there: Hamish, Horace and Bear The put-away dog he refused to sell, no matter the money Tony's let-out method: ropes, a white rock at 20 metres, proper side barriers, and why "prevention is better than cure" in the yards The best run he's ever seen: a small white bitch of Greg Prince's that got attacked 23 times by sick sheep and still penned Why he thinks more women in the sport has been good for stock handling Narrandera, Koroit, and what makes a well-run trial His advice to a 20-year-old: never be in a hurry, do it right, do it once

This episode we sit down with Oscar Thorpe and chat about how he got into the industry, what he loves about it and so much more.