Border Collie Gets Lost And Starts Herding A Stranger’s Sheep

SPOKANE, WA — In the end, Tilly rescued himself.

Let’s back up to the moment on Sunday when the 2-year-old dog was forcefully ejected out the back window of an SUV that crashed into the back of a car on Idaho State Highway 41.

Stunned, scared and perhaps confused, but uninjured, Tilly ran off, away from Linda Oswald and the family who loved him, and from about half a dozen strangers who mounted a 10-hour search to find him as he tore across the prairie south of Rathdrum, Idaho, about 30 miles from the Oswalds’ home in Spokane, Washington.

“People just kept going out” and looking for Tilly, Oswald told Colin Tiernan of The Spokesman-Review, a newspaper in Spokane. “We were just sore and exhausted.”

When Tilly did not turn up in the physical search, Oswald and her family moved the effort to find him to Facebook, where they posted photos of the border collie-red heeler mix. The photos were shared thousands of times, eventually landing on the newsfeed of members of the Potter family in Rathdrum.

Meanwhile, the Potters had a dog dilemma of their own.

What was wrong with Hooey, one of their Australian shepherds? Why did his red fur look so much darker Tuesday morning? And why, when Hooey’s name was called, did the dog tightly pin back his ears — a gesture animal behaviorists associate with fear and timidity?

“Hooey really comes right away when you call him, and this dog put its ears back and started running off,” Travis Potter told Tiernan of the Spokane newspaper.

There was another troubling aspect in the story of the odd-looking dog: The Potters’ sheep got out of their fenced-in pasture and were standing near the road.

When Potter and his brother got a look at the dog, they realized it wasn’t Hooey at all. It was Tilly, whose photo they’d seen on Facebook.

And he had moved some of their flock of sheep. Border collies were bred to herd sheep in the high country between Scotland and England. Red heelers are natural herders, too. Both breeds are highly intelligent — in fact, border collies are among the smartest animals on the planet. One, a dog by the name of Chaser who died in 2019, had a vocabulary of 1,022 nouns, National Geographic reported, citing published scientific research.

“I think that dog was trying to herd,” Travis Potter told The Spokesman-Journal of the interloper.

That’s how Tilly rescued himself. He relied on his natural-born instincts and drew attention to himself. Oswald is not surprised.

Her dog will herd any animal and even people.

“When I go to the dog park,” she told The Spokesman-Journal, “he tries to herd people into one group."