It started with a Border Collie named Raven.
 

Yen had been in dog sports for years by then, competing in agility as a hobbyist who took it seriously. She wanted proper grounding in behavior, so she went and got it - a Certificate in Behavior Adjustment Training in the Netherlands in 2014, then a Certificate in Training and Counselling in 2016.

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Then Raven arrived, and made it clear the certificates weren't going to be enough.

 

His herding instinct switched on at five months old. The need to control movement, the fixation on cars, the chasing that had no off-switch. It was a lot. The training we knew how to do wasn't touching it, and we spent a long stretch feeling out of our depth with our own dog.
 

Living in the city made it harder. When we went looking for sheep-herding alternatives, the answer we kept getting was fetch. But fetch is a retrieving game. It's closer to what you'd train into a spaniel than anything a Border Collie is actually built to do. Throwing a ball for a Border Collie and calling it enough never sat right with us, and it didn't work for Raven either.
 

So we went looking. Herding literature, working sheepdog training, existing herding-style outlets, behavioral science - we pulled from all of it, kept what held up, and reworked the rest into something that fit the dog in front of us.

That became Better Than Fetch™ Herding Games.
 

What we didn't expect was how quickly things changed once he had somewhere to put it. He stopped being so worked up. He could relax at home, and he started paying attention to us again instead of every moving thing outside.
 

These days we spend most of our time helping other Border Collie and Herding Dog guardians find the same door. We know what it's like to be stuck with a dog whose instincts don't fit the standard playbook, and we know the specific relief of figuring out you don't have to fight their genetics - you can just work with it.
 

Raven taught us most of what we now teach. Everything here is built on what he showed us.
 

- Yen and Claire