Sheepdog competition wraps up this weekend

Minden will see some of the best border collies in North America competing in the 2022 National Sheepdog Finals held in Carson Valley for the first time.

The are being conducted on Park Ranch Holdings property off Buckeye Road.

The Semi-Finals competition will be today and the finals are Sunday.

Tickets to the competitions are $5 a day per person. Gates open 7 a.m. each day. Parking is located south of Buckeye while the competition is across the road.

“Three weeks before our event, we needed to change the event lo-cation, and Park Ranch graciously stepped in and offered us the use of some of their fields,” spokeswoman Michele Howard said.

The event is hosted by the local USBCHA & Northern Nevada Finals Committee, in conjunction with purebred Merino yearling sheep supplied by the Borda Family Ranch.

The trials

There will also be a competition for the National Nursery Champion, for dogs 3 years and under.

“All year long, handlers and their dogs travel all over the United States, participating in numerous trials, hoping to accumulate enough points to qualify to be one of the top 150 teams to compete in their ultimate challenge of the year, the National Sheepdog Finals,” Howard said. “A sheepdog trial is designed to test a border collie’s intelligence, training and instinct, by duplicating various tasks that a herding dog would do in farm or ranch work.”

The competition is sponsored by the U.S. Border Collie Handlers’ Association, American Border Collie Association and Purina.

Border collies are widely considered the finest stock dogs in the world, whether herding sheep or cattle.

The finals showcase the abilities for which these dogs were bred.

Qualifying runs have been underway since Tuesday and wrapped up on Friday.

For more information on this event, visit https://www.sheepdogfinals.org