Local Raises & Trains Border Collies
Robin Brown’s love of Border Collies began when she spent summers working on ranches that her grandfather, Gordon MacGregor, a Council and Wild Horse logger, purchased in Emmett, Sweet and Cascade.
Brown was raised and went to school in Boise, but during the summer months, she worked on those ranches, particularly the one her parents owned in Cascade.
“Every summer for two weeks, we used to herd a thousand cattle from Emmett to Cascade. The older cowboys all had Border Collies, and I watched and learned how they used them to work the cattle,” she said.
Brown participated in this cattle drive until there was too much traffic and too many yards the cattle would have to go through to make it feasible, but she learned to love Border Collies.
When she attended Boise State University, she took her beloved Border Collies Birdie and Pooh with her. That arrangement didn’t last long, and she was kicked out of the dorm and forced to find a place off campus where the three of them could live. The dogs also accompanied her to Rick’s College in Rexburg, where she earned a degree in architectural design. But her love of training and working with dogs remains her passion.
She read books and watched cowboys and eventually became a dog trainer herself. When she and her first husband divorced, they were each able to use the Broken Circle brand that had been in his family for generations because he moved to Nevada, and she stayed in Idaho.
She recalls attending a sheep dog trial at a winery when she was about 20. “Watching the border collies work was like poetry,” she said.
She married her second husband, Rocky, who had worked as a cowboy on Governor Brad Little’s brother’s cattle ranch in Emmett 16 years ago. Together, the couple have become expert dog trainers. They bought a place in Mesa and eventually moved to Indian Valley, where they have lived ever since.
Their business is called Broken Circle Border Collies, and when Brown is not holding clinics, she, and her husband train their dogs. They raise sheep, and the dogs learn from this expert couple just how to herd them.
Brown has spent weeks of her time traveling the country, holding Border Collie training clinics for people all over the United States. In the past two months she has held clinics in Colorado, Seattle and in Boise.
Brown also finds time to compete with her dogs and has won The National Cattle Dog Association Trial once, and the United States Border Collie Handlers Association Trial twice.
She says she’s slowing down now and trying to stay closer to home. She holds training clinic/retreats at her home, and 40 people and their dogs come from all over the country to attend. She also holds a puppy clinic for dogs who are under the age of two.
Brown sells her dogs all over the world. She requires prospective owners to be introduced to the dog and to the training methods she has used. She has sold dogs to people living in Santiago, Chile, Canada, Germany, the Czech Republic, and Italy.
And every year she sells dogs at the Pendleton Cattle Baron Stock Dog Sale in early May. A portion of the proceeds go to fund scholarships for area students who plan to study agriculture.
Brown said she is cognizant of the fact that dogs trained by a female handler may respond differently to a male handler and visa versa, so when she has trained a female dog who will be purchased by a man, her husband does the final two months of training. And she will complete the last two months of training for a dog who Rocky may have trained, and who will be purchased by a woman.
For Brown, the most important thing one can teach a Border Collie is stockmanship; the dog is trained to cause the least amount of stress to the stock it is herding. She said she also breeds her dogs to have strong legs and wide feet, so they can scramble through brush and rock easily.
When asked whether her dogs ever get bitten by rattlesnakes, she said they did when she was living in Sweet, so they were all vaccinated with the rattlesnake vaccine. She said there are no rattlesnakes in Indian Valley, so she has not needed to give the vaccine since moving there.
She has a DNA profile on each of her dogs, and does genetic testing for collie eye, early onset deafness, and hip dysplasia.
While training her dogs (she currently has 5 males and 7 females) she uses universal commands and whistles (come by means go left, come to me means go right) and she always has a shepherd’s whistle around her neck, but her own personal whistle is clear and bird-like and seems like it would be difficult for another person to emulate; it is perhaps a gift, and one that has helped she and her dogs achieve greatness.
For more information about Broken Circle Border Collies their website is https://sites.google.com/a/brokencirclebordercollies.com/brokencirclebordercollies/breeder-dogs-information
