MUSTER DOGS: COLLIES AND KELPIES
Series return
Sunday, February 2, 7.30pm, ABC
A special guest proved wildly popular with all the attendees at Nathan Obst’s year 12 formal – his border collie Chief. “Mum made him a big orange bow tie and I had a navy suit and orange tie to match,” says the 17-year-old. “He sat up proud as punch on the back of the ute. He was the star of the show. They did a write-up in the local paper that said, even a farm dog made an entrance. We read it and said, oh jeez, he’s a bit more than a farm dog.”
Nathan Obst and his dog Chief in Muster Dogs: Collies and KelpiesCredit:
Nathan and Chief are one of the human-and-pup pairs featured on the upcoming third series of ABC’s heartwarming hit Muster Dogs, this year subtitled Collies and Kelpies. The new season switches things up by pairing three graziers with border collies and three with kelpies to see which of the two working breeds will come out on top to be crowned champion muster dog with only 12 months to train the pups.
For Nathan, who grew up helping on his family’s cattle farm, even though at only 17 he had already trained several dogs, it was something new to be paired with a collie. Previously, he had always had kelpies. “Before I got Chief I thought [border collies] were very robotic dogs, you had to be on their case and you had to control them a lot.”
Working dog and livestock educator Mick Hudson, who gives expert guidance on the show and supplied the border collie pups for the series, says it’s common for graziers to stick with whatever breed they’re used to. “What we find is you’re either one or the other,” says Hudson. “It’s a bit like a Ford and a Holden. Some people like Fords and some people like Holdens. They’re both good cars, but it’s very hard for people to switch.”
So what’s the difference between border collies and kelpies? Hudson says while they are both good working dogs and there are exceptions to any generalisations regarding the breeds, he has noticed a few things over the years.
“We find the collies more trainable and more biddable, whereas the kelpie is more independent. He was bred that way, because it’s only in the latter years that we’ve started to educate people how to train a dog. So kelpies were developed in the early days with as much natural ability as they could have, so that the farmer took them to work and they learned on the job, because he didn’t know how to train a dog properly.”
An additional challenge for Nathan, the youngest grazier on the show, was that he was juggling his final year of high school while training Chief. “Winter turned out to be training the dog in the morning and homework in the afternoon, because you just ran out of daylight.”
Muster Dogs gives city and suburban folk a glimpse into rural life in Australia. Nathan was particularly keen to sign up as a proud ambassador of the new generation entering the industry and maybe even encourage his fellow Gen Z cohorts to consider it as a career.
