About Us
A bit about me...
I have grown up on our small family farm and I have always taken an interest in all of the animals, especially the dogs. We have always had collies and it was my father that trained them for every day work along with training for dog trials.
Eventually he started competing in trials which I went to along with Barbara Carpenter who was our neighbour and she helped to point him in the right direction. After several years of competing he struggled to find the time to train his dogs for trials and concentrated on training for farm work.
I started training and tried to improve our dogs we had at home and really enjoyed it. I decided I would like to pursue this further and maybe trial if I was good enough. I asked for help in the form of lessons or work experience from experienced dog trainers and handlers. A few people offered me both and I gladly accepted.
When I had my first dog Alfie I decided to not go down the route of sheepdog trialling but dog agility instead. I did this for many years and was fairly successful! We managed to compete for Wales in the Open Junior Agility Championships, Crufts in the main arena, and got to grade 6 in Kennel Club competitions.
Slowly I lost interest in agility so decided to focus on the training of our sheepdogs, when I had my second dog Nell.
In January 2017, I was offered a 6 week placement living in Cumbria
with Derek Scrimgeour (Killiebrae Sheepdogs) and Rachel Scrimgeour
(Now Winter Crag Sheepdogs). This is where I learnt the basics to the method of training that I currently use. It is a simple method that is easy for both handler and dog to understand and revolves around body language and applying pressure on the ground.
My training skills greatly improved in my time there from trying out their method on numerous dogs and watching lots of handlers work their own dogs too.
I came back from Cumbria and started up 'Sheep & Leap'. I have gained more knowledge and experience every single day from working with people and their dogs and trying to resolve their individual problems and assess their needs.
I started trialling in 2018 and in 2019 I managed to qualify with my home-bred, nursery bitch 'Gin', for the South Wales Nursery Final too.
In 2021 'Sheep & Leap' dog training was then changed to 'Kingsdean sheepdogs'. I have also acquired the prefix of 'Kingsdean' from the ISDS so that when I breed a litter in the future then they will all have my name in front of their individual one.