Anyone heard of Treibball, Ball herding!!

It's a new dog sport - seems to be great as a substitute game to channel the herding instinct for collies who can't work real sheep! lol

In Treibball, dogs learn to herd large inflatable exercise balls (surrogate sheep) into a pen, handlers learn distance work, directing the dog to go out around the "flock", wait for direction, go left or right and drive the ball into the pen.
...maggie would LOVE this!

Treibball originated in Germany so hence Treibball (German for Driving Ball). Or I think they call it Ball Herding in the US.

Take a look:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBJ9DVp9dyM&feature=related

Not convinced on the replacing sheep herding as it seems a very different attitude the dog has to what id expect from a dog herding.

Still looks like its having fun though! :)

Looks like lots of fun... Keeping dogs mind and body active!!

I read about it on someones blog and apparently there are different variations on it too where they have teams and stuff working to different goals.

I have just been having a look to see if they do anything like this in the UK...

I have seen treibball. Getting popular in US. Good for mental stimulation but not as hard on the body as agility. I think just right for some BCs. Anybody interested in setting this up in UK?

After posting this originally I did get some cheap exercise balls and tried it with Maggie in the garden and she was really into it - however, she burst them after a while and I couldnt afford to buy the proper ones at around £100 a time!! so we didnt try it again with those balls (although I did do it with footballs).

Since then I have actually seen it done with lots of different sized balls on the field in all different colours and sizes and the dog has to learn to heard all of it into a pen or a goal...

Im in Surrey - dont know whereabouts you are? ...when I get my field it would be perfect for training in :D

Here's a video on teaching the basics at home with an exercise ball:
http://youtu.be/qFpH_WLC4qs

And an explanation of the 'sport': http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/5...any.html?cat=53

I thought it looked rather boring, but that's just me :)

Yeah I originally posted this over a year ago when Mags was only just one. It was something pretty cool to do with a highly energetic pup to keep her brain working, as I was running out of ideas of tricks! Mags LOVES balls, any kind of ball and she was so excited when she saw the massive exercise ball - her eyes were like saucers!

She LOVED herding the ball...so definitely not boring for her. I like teaching her tricks and all sorts, so it was pretty good to train her to go round behind either direction and to push the ball where I wanted...I transferred it onto her footballs too so she could herd them.

It co-oincided with some stuff I was teaching in foundation agility handling too at the time so it was quite good with working away from me and directions.

And also I started having different balls that she needed to differentiate and bring the one I asked for so I kind of made up extra stuff for the game to make it more fun.

Actually a 'side effect' was that before training this she had started to sort of part bite stuff on the 'touch' command instead of just nose touching it. But doing this refreshed her concept of 'touch' so she stopped doing the open mouthed nudge with teeth and just pushed with her nose!

I didnt like the way the dog in the video in my original post sounded a bit wound up though, so I didnt allow mags to be like that - in fact it actually made her better and more controlled around balls and it was a lot easier to control her around balls in the park since then.

I think its something quite fun to train as an extra game - but I cant say I would want to do it regularly like a sport.