My name is Ferreh Hiatt, however I've also been known in other circles as Ferreh Anderson, and (quite tragically) I was known as Ferreh Sherwood for a brief stint in the late '90's. But really, how many Ferreh's do you come across in a lifetime? You're smart -- if you knew me as one of my previous incarnations, I'm sure you figured it out already.
I started on this journey in 1999, in Western Washington state, with my first Aussie, Jack. He was a rescue, but he ended up saving me too. I took him to his first herding lesson about four weeks after bringing him home and we were both bit by the bug. Hard. Within nine months he had finished his AKC PT and his ASCA Started Sheep titles. We might not have been the best thing going at the time, but we sure had a great time learning and rolling with the punches together.
Unfortunately, life and its inherant pitfalls kept us from training and trialing much beyond that point. In the summer of 2000, I moved back home to Indiana, got divorced, and found myself as a working single mother. There was only one training facility in the state at the time, (over 2 hours away), and I had too much on my plate and not enough change in my pocketbook to splurge on extra gas and lesson fees. So Jack and I took a forced hiatus and just hung out for awhile.
Over the course of the next three years, many things changed, and most for the better. I met and married my now husband, Mark Hiatt, I got two more Aussies, BJ & Reese, and I moved to the 90 acre farm that Mark was renting at the time. Things were moving in the right direction.
In early 2004, I took Jack to a Larry Painter cattle clinic where it became painfully clear (quite literally) that Jack wasn't cut out to be a cowdog. He took a swift kick right between the eyes, shook his head, then walked over to the gate and sat down as if to say, "I didn't sign up for this bullshit, lady. I'm done." Shortly after that experience I started looking for my first working bred Aussie, which led me to my Hoss.
A little more than a year later, Mark and I bought a farm of our own (Honey Creek Farms) and I started teaching herding lessons and building a training facility of my own that I call Stockdog U. In the time since then I've added some new dogs to the family and had a great time training them and learning the lessons they were sent here to teach me.
That is where The Stockdog Diaries comes in. I started this blog in early 2009, when I had hit an extremely rough patch with a young dog that I was beginning to train. The blog became my online training journal and it has helped to serve as a reminder to me of how my training is progressing, as well as a place for my stockdog pals to keep up with what we're working on from day to day.
So please, feel free to "snoop through my diary", if you will, and follow along with us on this never ending journey. We're always learning, laughing, and loving.
