What I See with Peter Fiorenza: The TV show that I love also gets my two border collies excited

I just love the television show, Muster Dogs. I suppose that doesn’t surprise you — if you know me, you know how much I dote on my dogs, Billie and Joel. For the uninitiated, Muster Dogs is a series about working dogs. Last season it starred kelpies, but this year the focus is on border collies. It’s an Australian documentary, where five working dog pups are gifted to a number of farmers and station owners in different parts of the country. In this series, border collies only a couple of months old, are homed with owners in New South Wales, Queensland, the Northern Territory and Tasmania. Over a year, the dogs are trained by the owners and tested at selected times via certain trials. The dog who best completes all these trials is crowned the ultimate muster dog. Now, I got hooked on the show last series, but this time around because of the involvement of border collies, my interest even further heightened. Now, my two border collies are inside/outside dogs — basically, where I am, they are too. So, therefore, when I’m watching TV, they also take up couch space. More often than not, they just sit there and gaze at the screen or, simply, lie back on the pillows. But if animals come on the screen, it can be quite different. When this happens, they often race up and eyeball the screen, and bark or make other noises, with their tails pricked up in the air. You could say, they get a tad bit excited. The other evening, not thinking much about it, I grabbed my coffee and settled in to watch an episode of Muster Dogs. Well, from the moment the show started, Billie and Joel were up and about. OMG. They actually came running into the living room, looking up at the screen and running over the couches and me, as if they had been hypnotised. I kid you not. At times they began barking and running around behind the TV to see where their onscreen friends had gone — like they were trying to round them up. It was truly hilarious, to say the least. I did worry, though when, on one occasion, Joel ran straight up to screen — It was at such a pace, I thought he was going to topple it over. Suddenly, awful visions came into my mind of the screen wobbling forward and falling on to the tiled floor, smashing into a thousand pieces. Fortunately, this didn’t happen, but next time I decide to watch Muster Dogs, I might need to prepare things a bit better. Peter Fiorenza is a City of Greater Geraldton councillor who hosts Sport Shed Saturday from 9am and Fiorenza on Sunday between 10am and noon on Radio MAMA