“I don’t want another Lucifer.”
That was the heartfelt prayer Lily Davies-Etheridge sent out to the puppy gods as she awaited the arrival of her fledgling working dog in the first episode of the new season of Muster Dogs.
Remember Lucifer? He was the problem child in season one of the ABC TV series.
Unable to work sheep properly for his trainer, the unruly kelpie was surrendered to series winner, Frank Finger, who has since turned Lucifer into a capable cattle dog.
But back to season two, which premiered on Sunday night.
All five of the new trainers are hoping for a pup they can train to be the champion muster dog. And this time their pups are border collies, not kelpies.
Interestingly, the trainers’ existing working dog packs are dominated by kelpies (one has exclusively huntaways) and all felt some trepidation about tackling their black and white pups.
And training expert Neil McDonald agrees they’ll have their work cut out for them to train these dogs in just 12 months — several times during the show we were reminded it usually takes three years to fully train a border collie as a competent working dog.
“These trainers have rough diamond pups they’ll have to chip away at to get them to sparkle,” Neil said.
The key milestones for this season are set at five, seven, 10 and 12 months. Can this litter of pups be trained in 12 months to be quality working dogs and what will we learn about their natural instincts along the way?
If instinct has anything to do with, then the five pups are all winners.
These pups were bred by dog trialling champion and dog educator, Mick Hudson, and their bloodlines come from more than 100 years of Australian dog trial champions.
So he has high hopes as he chooses five puppies from a litter of 10 to go to the excited new trainers.
The first episode is dominated by the puppies’ birth (to mum Debbie and dad Snip) and early development at Mick’s property near Dubbo, and then the first meeting between trainers and the three-month-old pups.
Spread across Australia, the trainers are: Zoe, a contract cattle worker in the Northern Territory; Steve, a grazier from Winton, Queensland; Lily, who runs sheep and goats with her mother in Wilcannia, NSW; Cilla, who is juggling her farm work with three young children in Ban Ban Springs, Queensland; and Russ, a grazier in Bothwell, Tasmania.
They all bring their own stories to the bigger picture.
Zoe and her husband have just bought their first farm and she already works cattle across the NT with 12 dogs. Steve is the ‘dog whisperer’, confined to a wheelchair after a rodeo accident. Lily is only 21, but has the confidence and experience of someone years older. Cilla is the least experienced, juggling children and trying to prove herself as a grazier and trainer. Russ is the seventh generation of his family on the land.
One of their first jobs is to name their puppies. But we don’t find out all their names until almost the end of the episode — Buddy, Indi, Snow, Ash and Molly.
The naming was not without a few hiccups. Especially for Cilla, who gets the final words this week.
And the final words are “Ass” and “Asshole”. It seems Cilla’s toddlers can’t say “Ash” or “Axel” — the names of the family’s two new dogs (Axel joined the pack at the same time as muster pup Ash).
Let’s hope Ash doesn’t live up to her mispronounced name and winds up being another Lucifer.
Muster Dogs screens on ABC TV each Sunday night and is available on iview.