A demonstration of horse-drawn farming equipment is given during the Horse Progress Days at the Michiana Event Center in Shipshewana Friday. Photo by Joseph Weiser | The Goshen News
SHIPSHEWANA — There’s something for everyone at Horse Progress Days at the Michiana Event Center, which continues Saturday.
The annual event features agricultural and homesteading information, vendors, and education from across the region ranging from soap making, beekeeping, livestock dentistry, and sawmill demonstration to classes on how to keep small dairy farmers viable and preserving agricultural heritage — and of course, horses and other livestock abound.
Tyler Shupe took the stage at the Horse Progress Days on Friday afternoon to show off the working powers of three of his sheepdogs. In the morning, he did a demonstration of sheep herding, and later in the afternoon, he showed visitors how his dogs can herd just about anything, including ducks.
Shupe, Eminence, has been raising Border Collies since his teen years. Shupe recalled, he was watching someone else working with dogs and said he was mesmerized.
“Everyone always is,” he said.
Coming from a family of farmers raising livestock and produce, Shupe was the first in his family to explore the world of sheepdog herding and begin raising them for others to benefit from as well.
“We’ve always had dogs, and we’ve always farmed, and I realized what we could do with them so I started training higher and higher and it made our lives a lot easier,” Shupe said.
Now, he not only raises them to sell as working dogs but competes with them, too. The Border Collies are trained in a universal style, so anyone that knows the commands of working dogs can give commands that the dogs can follow.
“They’ll work for anybody — they love working,” he said. “They don’t mind it at all. We sell a lot and they switch right over to the next person fine.”
Shupe teaches the dogs the task first, then he teaches them the command associated with the task.
“We use our body language and pressure of our body to get them to do what we want — to bend out, to go clockwise and counterclockwise, and then we put a command with it,” he explained. “We’ll have them actually doing a procedure before we put a command with it that way they can start referring to that word.”
It’s a process that’s virtually identical to obedience training, but much more extensive.
“They want to work,” he said. “It’s something where we have to teach them to work, we just simply have to harness and get them to work how we want them to.”
Last year, Horse Progress Days was held in Montgomery, and Shupe participated for the first time.
“We do competitions more than demonstrations,” he explained.
Still, he enjoyed participating and educating, and visitors unsurprisingly responded well to the talents of the dogs, so he was more than happy to return to Horse Progress Days for the 2023 show in Shipshewana as well. Shupe explained that in raising Border Collies for herding, there’s generally a cohort of exceptional students that he can take to competitions nationwide through the United States Border Collie Handlers Association, and some that aren’t cut out for it.
“It’s like the Olympics for dogs compared to just doing it in high school,” he said. “They all have different personalities, too.”
Shupe generally has two or three dogs that are fully trained, and two or three that are still training.
“We’ll get them trained up as far as we can until we can see what potential they have and then we’ll send them to a farmer — a producer that raises sheep. If they don’t make high-end trial dogs, they’ll normally work good for a producer.”
“They want to work so bad,” he added. “It’s bred into them. It’s their instinct. Basically, we just harness their instinct.”
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