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Recent Battles
Queen Victoria
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Juicing The Sheep
09 April 2009 11:11 AM | No CommentsThe Journal of Queen Victoria Thursday, October 21, 1868 “Juicing the Sheep“ At a quarter to twelve I drove off with Louise and Leopold in the waggonette up to near the “Bush” (the residence of William Brown, the farmer) to see them “juice the sheep.”...
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Queen Victoria’s Border Collies
26 January 2009 4:40 AM | 18 CommentsFor well over a century the “Collie” name has been co-opted by show breeders who have created a monster whose face looks like a door stop with beady eyes set in triangular slits. These same people have co-opted the notion that Queen Victoria was deeply...
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Show Me the Collie
22 January 2009 3:38 AM | 1 CommentHaving established that Queen Victoria’s direct influence on the proliferation of the show Collie is insubstantial at best, let’s explore what impact the Monarchy may have, in fact, had on the culture of dogs during her reign. Five. If the show Collie owes more to...
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The Queen and the Collie
20 January 2009 2:57 AM | 2 CommentsThe old wisdom on the rise of the show Collie is that Queen Victoria met them on a trip to Scotland in the 1860s, became infatuated, acquired them, sponsored them in shows, bred them, and her abundant trend-setting prowess lead to their bountiful rise to...
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The Victorian Collie Myth
19 January 2009 8:03 PM | 5 CommentsThe prevailing creation myth among show Collie enthusiasts is that Queen Victoria’s infatuation with the breed set the ball in motion, elevating the humble farm dog to aristocratic splendor. Queen Victoria saw her first Collies in the 1860′s, and she enthusiastically began to sponsor them,...
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Juicing The Sheep
Archive for September, 2008
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Pissing Off Patrick
Posted on September 30, 2008 | 4 CommentsIt seems that calling out Patrick Burns (a.k.a. Terrierman) over his apologist whitewashing of the bigot Jeremiah Wright is still a sore spot for my fellow dog blogger. Not only did Pat immediately remove his link to my blog from his blogroll, he deleted several... -
War Puppy, Armed and Dangerous
Posted on September 26, 2008 | 1 CommentIt seems that a Border Collie puppy on the outskirts of Glasgow, Scotland didn’t get the message that those War Kittens are just a gimmick to sell credit cards or that the Border Collie war is one of words and deeds and not bullets. Little... -
A Sense for Words
Posted on September 25, 2008 | 1 CommentOne of the tried, true, and now extinct tests of language acuity on the SAT is the analogy. I mourn its passing. Analogies bring out relationships between words and concepts that I find fascinating. The short hand for analogies compares two words, presents you with... -
Embrace Cloning
Posted on September 19, 2008 | 2 CommentsIt’s been ten years since Dolly the Sheep was cloned and it amazes me that many a dog breeder believes in inbreeding (and line breeding, if you must differentiate, but realize that it’s still drunk driving with the gene pool, just at a slightly slower... -
A Breed Apart II
Posted on September 18, 2008 | 5 CommentsThe culmination of the previous post is this statement: Our phylogenetic, clustering, and principal components analyses all suggest a genetic split within the breed between working and show Border Collies that is probably as large as the genetic distances between some breeds. Is this true?... -
A Breed Apart I
Posted on September 18, 2008 | 2 CommentsThose of us in Border Collies have long known that they’re in a class by themselves in the arenas of intelligence, agility, drive, and trainability. They’re different than other dogs and that difference is often wide. And we know that the difference is in their...
Queen Victoria's Border Collies