165. Oscar Thorpe

p 171: Peter HoganThis week on DogTorque, Laura McKillop and Daniel Camilleri sit down with Peter Hogan, a stockman, trialler and breeder from Glencoe in the New England, just south of Glen Innes. Peter has had dogs since he was a kid, spent ten years training them full time for other people, and is one of the handlers behind the Glen Innes working dog sale, now in its fifteenth year.In this episode we chat about:Growing up in a tin shed at Coleambally when the irrigation area was first balloted, and the road from there to the top of the rangeLearning to train dogs out of a book, because there were no schools and nobody offered advice at a trial back thenThe four-week program he built for client dogs, and why he reckons discipline, respect and manners come before anything elseThe $14,000 auction dog that came back to him ten months later, and what actually went wrongHis pig dogs, and why they might be his favourite dogs in the kennelWhere he thinks yard trialling is heading, speed trials versus stockmanship, and the standards he’d like to see in the lower gradesPeter doesn’t dress much up, and whether you’re starting your first pup or thinking about what you’d pay for a trained dog, there’s plenty in here worth chewing over.Enjoying DogTorque? Follow the show, leave us a rating and share it with a mate who loves working dogs.

Kate Willcocks runs Kelpies for Kids out of Western Australia. It’s a soon-to-be registered charity that raises awareness of what country families go through when the medical care they need is only in Perth, and raises funds for Telethon along the way. Five WA farmers each train a pup over the year alongside a “master trainer”, a child receiving treatment through a Telethon beneficiary. The dogs are auctioned at the Perth Royal Show.It started in December 2023. Kate was mowing the lawn with her eleven-month-old asleep inside and her husband Rowan away harvesting when she was stung by a swarm of bees. She went into anaphylactic shock 150 kilometres from the nearest hospital, then into premature labour at nineteen weeks. The storms over Perth meant no airlift that night, so it was a police escort between towns to keep adrenaline up to her. She and Rachel ended up living in Perth for five months.The first year she thought she’d do one pup. It ended up being four. By the second year she wasn’t watching the kids in the hospital window anymore, she was one of them, and that changed what the whole thing was for.

Kim Dodson farms with her husband Shane at Kaniva in western Victoria, 15 kilometres from the South Australian border. They run about 6,000 acres, mostly cropping, with a bit over 3,000 sheep. She won season three of Muster Dogs with Banjo, and she's only been in dogs seven or eight years.Kim came to the district in 1999 to ride track work and planned to stay six months. Horses were the whole thing until her back gave out, and dogs filled the gap. Her first one was a Gumtree pup with no breeding behind it, which she rehomed after a Neil McDonald clinic set her straight on pedigrees. The one that actually started her was Barkell Peters Kate, an eight-year-old fully trained bitch. Four months later she was at Sheepvention having never watched a full trial, and came third in a strong encourage.She's good company on a lot of this. The bit worth staying for is her case for buying an older dog when you're starting out, and why nobody says it out loud.

Scott Stokes runs a building company out of Greenbank in south-east Queensland and has only been trialling about five years. In that time he's won an open at the Queensland Supreme, beaten his mentor to do it, and made the Queensland rep team with Gage, the station bred kelpie he bought off Gumtree at Inverell for $300.He grew up on farms in the Waikato in New Zealand until he was thirteen, then moved to the Gold Coast with his family. Dogs weren't really part of the plan. He bought Gage as a mate to bring to work and only put him on sheep because the dog had too much go in him to sit in the ute.We cover a fair bit in this one. Scott talks about training around a business and a young family, including the years when the sheep were 35 minutes away and he'd get home in the dark. He's honest about whether 3-sheep is a collie game or just a numbers game, and about the pressure that got to him at Stanthorpe when he was chasing a spot in the Australian team. He also makes a good case for new triallers putting their hand up to judge, and passes on the advice Jeff Gibson gave him when Gage started blowing through his stops.

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Tony Whitehead is 90 years old, still on the block he's held since he was a child, and still letting sheep out at trials across NSW and Victoria. This one's a sit-down with a bloke who's seen more of the working dog world from the yards than most of us will ever see from the arena.Tony grew up at Urana in the NSW Riverina, was a jackaroo on Tubbo Station on the Murrumbidgee during the 1956 floods, spent four years as a ringer north of Winton in Western Queensland, and tossed a coin to decide between coming home and getting his pilot's licence in Cairns. He's carted grain, built tunnels at the Williamstown naval dockyard, owned a £35 racehorse that won 22 races, and came to sheepdog trials in his sixties because his wife reckoned he'd work himself to death on the farm otherwise.What you'll hear:Life on a Riverina station in the 1950s, with two full-time rabbiters running 30 dogs eachHow Tony went from helping in the yards at the Supremes to trialling his own dogs, and the dogs that got him there: Hamish, Horace and BearThe put-away dog he refused to sell, no matter the moneyTony's let-out method: ropes, a white rock at 20 metres, proper side barriers, and why "prevention is better than cure" in the yardsThe best run he's ever seen: a small white bitch of Greg Prince's that got attacked 23 times by sick sheep and still pennedWhy he thinks more women in the sport has been good for stock handlingNarrandera, Koroit, and what makes a well-run trialHis advice to a 20-year-old: never be in a hurry, do it right, do it once

This episode we sit down with Oscar Thorpe and chat about how he got into the industry, what he loves about it and so much more.

Join us as we catch up with Gary White from Whites Kelpie Stud almost 5 years after his first DogTorque #8.

James Rayner from Stoney Creek Kelpies joins us to discuss his story.

This episode see Roland Pell tell us about his life, working dogs and so much more...