The Easter EGGEs, originally uploaded by AstraeanBorderCollies.

In these tough times, it’s hard to keep up with the supposedly recession proof (read: you’re still going to spend a fortune, broke or not) pet toy industry. But I have a great tip for the best 5 cents you’ll ever spend on a dog toy.

A few years ago I picked up an EGGE at a local dog show for $30, and it’s proven to be a great investment. It’s lasted longer than almost all the dogs’ other toys and they are so obsessed with it, I have to put it away when they’re done playing.

You can find the EGGE online selling for $20 now (plus shipping) and if your dogs like it as much as mine, that’s probably worth it. But why spend $30 if it turns out your dog couldn’t care less?

Solution: Visit Hobby Lobby right after Easter. They sell a plastic lawn ornament that is a near-perfect substitute for the real EGGE. They sell for a couple bucks before Easter, but the price quickly drops to nothing after the holiday is over.

Last year, my Mom bought an entire Jeep full of the things for $2 and we gave them out to all our Border Collie friends. Last year’s model had an embossed Bunny on it that is actually the perfect place for the dogs to dig their teeth into the toy, which makes them rather worthless since the dogs can pick it up instead of herding it around the yard, but this year the hobby eggs have no embossed figures.

The thinner plastic of the cheapo eggs means that they aren’t going to last as long as the $20+ model, but at a fraction of the price, they are well worth picking up to share the Easter spirit with your dogs.

In my recent correspondence with a pet rescuer who has yet to embrace No-Kill, I saw firsthand the phenomenon that Nathan Winograd discusses in Redemption: that we hear so much about pet overpopulation, but has anyone seen it?

The e-mailer wrote:

[Shelters] only kill the animals because THERE ARE TOO MANY! Hello? Have you heard of the overpopulation problem?

Why yes, I’ve heard of it quite a lot. I’ve also heard extensively about Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. If the modus operandi of the shelters in this country were to throw dogs off cliffs because the Easter Bunny commanded it, there’d be an uproar. If you had to trade Santa Claus a euthanized shelter dog for each present, the tragedy of “Christmas Puppies” would have a much darker and more sinister outcome.

I’ve heard a lot about “pet overpopulation,” but I’ve never seen a feral dog colony or a single dog starving in the street. I’ve never seen a dog abandoned at the dog park. Every loose and stray dog that I’ve picked up has always had a tag and an owner. I’ve never seen a pet store going out of business. The breeders I got my dogs from two decades ago are both still in the breed with occasional litters. Every breeder I met in the last few years who are active in some aspect of the dog world are actually “growing” their business. They are all expanding their activities and having more frequent litters. The only breeder I know who is “getting out of the business” was paralyzed in an accident.

Last October I became a dog breeder and just a few weeks ago I became a dog seller. I certainly didn’t get any hint that there was a Border Collie overpopulation problem. I had to go out of state for both of my last two dogs, and I sold two of the four puppies out of state. If I were just out for money I could have sold my litter five times over in one week. That’s all it took to find really good homes. One week. And I’m only catering to a very small fraction of the dog owning and buying world. People who are interested in purebred Border Collies who have had the breed before, who have a good sized yard, who won’t have to leave the animal at home for long periods of time, who are active and healthy themselves, who are willing and able to offer vet care to a high standard to the pup, who are willing to sign a contract, who agree to spay and neuter their pets or who pay a premium to keep them intact, who are willing to pay a premium for pedigreed dogs, who are willing to pay a premium for extensively health tested dogs, who are willing to put up with my interviewing them, who are interested in dog sport, etc.

I found four really excellent homes for four really excellent puppies and a handful of other A+ to A- homes that I’d gladly sell a dog to, and by that I mean make a contractual and emotional commitment to for the lifetime of that dog. Around 10 homes that would probably make excellent homes for a Border Collie but who just didn’t outshine the best homes, or excellent homes who just weren’t ready for a Border Collie now (new baby or too many very young children which would mean little time to train the dog during the crucial early months, their current dog is old and infirm and probably wouldn’t appreciate a new puppy, excellent experience with other breeds but brand new to Border Collies, too many Border Collies already, etc.). And then a slew of people who may or may not be great homes but who were either too far away, too inexperienced with dogs or Border Collies, or who were uninterested in training for dog sports for me to take a chance and who would be better served by a breeder in their area or a different breed of dog. And that doesn’t count the legions of callers who just wanted a price quote on a puppy.

In other words, if an aspiring Breeder like myself, first time breeding, who is an elitist, ultra picky about where my puppies go, selling puppies in the $450-600 price range (unregistered BCs go for $100, average price for a papered dog off of a Ranch is probably $250-300, show quality pups being sold to show homes sell for $600 and up, and rare colors like Merles go for about twice the market price for each of those classes), selling dogs in a relatively unpopulated area of the country, can find homes and put people on a waiting list in only a week, I have no evidence of a pet overpopulation problem.

The very existence of all these new designer dogs speaks volumes against a pet overpopulation problem. If there are mutts overflowing our shelters, filling the streets, and bringing about their own destruction, why are people paying $1200 for “designer” mutts? Perhaps it’s a shelter advertising problem, not a pet overpopulation problem. If shelters have too many dogs coming in, why are they importing them from overseas, and across our borders?

If I had to go out of state for my last two dogs, and so did two of my puppy buyers and many of the potentials, that speaks to a greater demand than supply, not an overpopulation problem.

I’ve licked my finger and placed it in the wind, and every indicator tells me that dogs are getting more popular, more homes are opening up their doors to them every day, and as we grow as a society our animals are becoming even more significant and being given higher status at every turn.

If we wouldn’t throw dogs off cliffs for the Easter Bunny or sacrifice puppies for Santa Claus, why are we so accepting of killing dogs for another myth that there is little evidence for: the “pet overpopulation” problem?

The Myth of Pet Overpopulation

“Custom will reconcile people to any atrocity.”

— William Shakespeare (circa 1600)

Sometimes the obvious eludes us. We are told something so often that we accept it a priori. We ignore evidence to the contrary, even overwhelming evidence. It is so because we believe it is so. And we believe it is so because we have been told it is so for as long as we can remember. Each time we say, read, or write it, we reconfirm it. It is so. It is so. It is so. But pet overpopulation is not so.

There is little reason why most people, your average animal lovers in the United States, would know pet overpopulation is a myth. The one fact that would dispel the myth is something they almost never see consistently because they do not go to shelters everyday. But animal rescuers see it. Animal activists see it. And others in sheltering do also.
They see it daily, but still believe in pet overpopulation. What do they see every time they go into animal shelters? They see empty cages. Shelters kill dogs and cats every single day, despite empty cages.

The City of Los Angeles Animal Services Department kills every day despite empty cages. A veterinarian who tried to keep more animals alive by keeping the cages full was fired in 2005, in part, due to staff complaints of “too much work.” In September 2006, the Department killed twenty-five kittens because they had a cold, despite empty cages. In Eugene, Oregon, activists noted a high percentage of empty cages at their local shelter in the summer of 2006 due to killing that shelter management blamed on pet overpopulation and lack of a cat licensing law. The Lane County Animal Regulation Authority kept all but a half dozen cat cages empty at the height of the busy season, even though it killed approximately 70 percent of cats during the last year, many of them ostensibly for “lack of space.” According to local activists, doing so makes it easier for staff to clean. In Philadelphia before a new leadership team took over later that year, I counted over seventy empty cat cages in February of 2005 on a day they were killing “for space.” These are not isolated examples. They are epidemic–and endemic–to animal control.

Empty cages mean less cleaning, less feeding, less work. Some shelter directors simply don’t care and do it for that reason. Others do it because they falsely believe that no one will adopt the animals anyway. Still others kill because they believe the cages will get full. And others–such as Tompkins County before my arrival–require a certain number of animals to be killed in the morning to make room for the new animals they expect that day–animals who might or might not come, animals who might come after those animals killed could have been adopted, lost animals who might be reclaimed, thereby opening up space without the need to kill, animals who instead could have been transferred to rescue groups or placed into foster care.

There are many reasons why shelters kill animals at this point in time, but pet overpopulation is not one of them. In the case of a small percentage of animals, the animals may be hopelessly sick or injured, or the dogs are so vicious that placing them would put adoptive families at risk. (This killing is also being challenged by sanctuaries and hospice care groups, a movement that is also growing in scale and scope and which all compassionate people must embrace). Aside from this relatively small number of cases (only seven percent of the animals in Tompkins County), shelters also kill for less merciful reasons.

They kill because they make the animals sick through sloppy cleaning and poor handling. They kill because they do not want to care for sick animals. They kill because they do not effectively use the Internet and the media to promote their pets. They kill because they think volunteers are more trouble than they are worth, even though those volunteers would help eliminate the “need” for killing. They kill because they don’t want a foster care program. They kill because they are only open for adoption when people are at work and families have their children in school. They kill because they discourage visitors with their poor customer service. They kill because they do not help people overcome problems that can reduce impounds. They kill because they refuse to work with rescue groups. They kill because they haven’t embraced TNR [Trap, Neuter, Release] for feral cats. They kill because they won’t socialize feral kittens. They kill because they don’t walk the dogs which makes the dogs so highly stressed that they become “cage crazy.” They kill them for being “cage crazy.” They kill because their shoddy tests allow them to claim that animals are “unadoptable.” They kill because their draconian laws empower them to kill.

Some kill because they are steeped in a culture of defeatism, or because they are under the thumb of regressive health or police department oversight. But they still kill. They never say, “we kill because we have accepted killing in lieu of having to put in place foster care, pet retention, volunteer TNR, public relations, and other programs.” In short, they kill because they have failed to do what is necessary to stop killing.

What allows them to continue killing without total condemnation for doing so is the religion of pet overpopulation. It is the political cover that prevents even the animal rescuers and advocates from demanding an immediate end to the whole bloody mess. And, at its core, it is an unsupportable myth. The syllogism goes as follows: shelters kill a lot of animals; shelters adopt out few of them; therefore, there are more animals than homes. Hence, there is pet overpopulation. It is as faulty a syllogism and as untrue a proposition as exists in sheltering today. But people believe it, and because they do, local governments under-fund their shelters, appoint and retain incompetent employees in animal control, and give shelter directors the carte blanche they need to kill because the problem is portrayed as insurmountable.

This also begs the question of why pet stores and commercial breeding operations (sometimes referred to as “puppy mills” or “kitten mills”) are still in business. Hobby breed enthusiasts notwithstanding (since these groups often support No Kill and assist in animal rescue), pet stores and puppy/kitten mills are motivated by profit, and they would not go into the business if homes weren’t available. In addition, the more animals dying in a given community) which traditionalists claim means lack of homes), the greater number of pet stores that sell dogs and cats (which show homes readily available). Generally, pet stores succeed when a shelter is not meeting market demand or competing effectively, and because animal lovers do not want to go into a shelter that kills the vast majority of the animals as this is usually accompanied with under-performing staff, poor customer servie, and dirty and unwelcoming facilities.

- Excerpt from Redemption: The Myth of Pet Overpopulation and the No Kill Revolution in America by Nathan J. Winograd

9 members, members can post, people can request an invitation to join, only members can read

Description: The fallout from the Pedigree Dogs Exposed has been unprecedented. This private group, open to only a select few who are in a position to effect real change in the dog world, is designed as a forum where information can be exchanged in complete confidence.

Group email: PDEconfidential@googlegroups.com

I found this group back in January when I noticed some traffic from a google alert for “Pedigree Dogs Exposed” coming from a message posted to the googlegroup. The first two visitors were from Arlington, Virgina and Bournemouth, England.

It’s interesting that most graduations happen in the spring, as they more often mark an ending of the old ways rather than the beginning of the new. In school terms, the new doesn’t begin until the fall, when nature is resplendent in death. A decided lack of symmetry.

But as cliché as it sounds, my graduation speech was the perfect culmination of my high school career. The following video was taped as I spoke before the ~10,000 people who attended Cherry Creek High School’s Class of 1999 commencement, but this was not the golden moment. That came about 10 minutes before as I gave my speech in front of my class and the faculty inside the school gym.

Since the first three speakers performed before the teachers and students had entered the stadium, the Student Body President, our Class President, and I gave our speeches twice. At the end of our speeches we introduced the faculty, the special guests, and finally the student body. Because those groups were waiting outside the stadium during their introductions and couldn’t really hear what we were saying, the three of us had already given our speeches to the 806 graduating seniors and numerous faculty who had assembled in the gym for one last rally.

If you think about it for a second, the actual objective characteristics of the dogs have NOTHING to do with how well their hair is groomed nor how well their humans have sucked ass. And, both of those traits are more likely to help poor specimens win over better dogs. An objectively better built dog should not need to be groomed to highlight good traits and hide poor ones, nor should it need its human to grease the wheels by getting in good with the judges or the breed club or by out maneuvering the competition outside of the ring.

And if the goal is to pick the best breeding stock, how come very little of the competitions have anything to do with rewarding good breeding practices?

An objectively good dog wouldn’t and shouldn’t need to compete any more than once. It could be evaluated, scored, and sent on its way. Objective traits are unlikely to change.

In the world of college admissions, the standardized tests scores are supposed to evaluate ability in a form that is comparable across the board with all other students, and the idea is to develop tests that are unlikely to change with multiple repetitions. Although judging intelligence or the accumulation of knowledge is much more difficult than judging physical conformation, the SAT and ACT seem to do a much better job at a much harder task than fancy shows do at evaluating dogs fairly.

Dog showing is closer to GPA as a metric, as it’s about endurance and ass kissing and pleasing a judge over and over again, shopping for the right situations and avoiding problem judges or kids who ruin the curve. GPA is much easier to manipulate and game, and thus it’s not a good means of comparing students at different schools from different states.

Part of what makes a good college student is the ability to multitask and game the system, so colleges still use that metric. But gaming the system plays no positive roll in a dog’s ability to pass along good genes. Yet the crappy system remains.

If this really was an objective sport, you would see cameras, calculators and tape measures being used to assess the dog’s conformation and the judges would be engineers and orthopedic specialists. Movement would be assessed by motion capture computers just like golf swings and running patterns are analyzed for human and equine athletes.

And instead of continued head to head and breed to breed competition, your dog would get a score–much like a PennHIP test–which would compare its conformation to an ideal standard and rank your dog against all others in its own breed. This doesn’t preclude such nonsense events like Group placements and Best In Show, in fact it would clearly determine a winner. The Beagle that has a margin of error of 2% from the ideal Beagle Standard beats the Poodle who has a margin of error of 5%.

This system would even allow you to measure breed wide success in improving conformation. You could tell exactly how much better today’s dogs are than those of 10 years ago. There is no such metric today except the observation that many breeds today are horrible shadows of their former glory (or normalcy). I still don’t know why the entire German Shepherd community hasn’t given up and admitted that they have butchered their dogs and that they should no longer be allowed within 100 yards of an animal.

There are some Germans who still deny the holocaust, and there are many German Shepherd breeders and enthusiasts who deny that there is anything wrong with their dogs or that “good breeders” had anything to do with it.

Under my system, you wouldn’t even need to have shows. It could all be done online and instantaneously. You could have your dog assessed once and have a permanent evaluation of where he stood in the entire realm of dogdom. Such information could be shared all over the world and there’d be no need for all the hair spray, chalk, ugly shoes, dremmels, industrial wind tunnel vacuums, and ass kissing.

In these few hundred words, I’ve laid out the perfect solution for the entire realm of conformation dog shows; assuming, of course, that we want to do what they tell us they want to do: specifically: judge conformation against an ideal standard.

Any ideal standard can be put down into numbers: measurements, ratios, and symmetry. We don’t need to leave things open to interpretation, we can set them down in exact proportions.

But that’s not what really happens, so that’s why the system has never changed. What really happens is that uppity, self involved people want to use dogs as a means to aggrandize themselves and they want to feign objectivity while being utterly subjective and obsessed with transient fads. They don’t want to fit their stock to an ideal, they want to get one judge to say that their dog is mystically better than another dog which should earn them ribbons and points and fame and championships!

The fancy would never adopt an objective standard, because objective standards can’t be pressured or cajoled or bribed. There would absolutely be one dog in the breed that would come the closest to the ideal. And they’d have to set down that ideal in firm language and hard numbers. It couldn’t be left up to vague interpretations which could be argued over and
cover multiple dogs.

You’d never need to do research on which judge prefers which style of dog, or which breeder you need to get in good with to succeed. You’d never have to attend parties or travel out of state or pay some dandy to trot your dogs around rings. You’d be able to give your puppy buyers real information that would tell them exactly how ideal your breeding stock is. There would be no more trying to figure out the difference between a Champion who won all his shows running away in one weekend and one who finally earned the points through brute force and shopping for sympathetic judges and shows with sand bag dogs entered only to get the numbers up to earn Major points.

And your dog would never need to be tarted up with expensive dye jobs, perms, eight different styles of scissors, chalk, mascara, or even lead. No more torture devices which would restrain your dog while you exact your lengthy and uncomfortable grooming procedures on their blank canvas of fur.

The fancy hair do would do nothing for the objective standards, as the grooming of the hair has nothing to do with conformation. It wouldn’t matter if your dog had blown its coat (the number one reason dogs are pulled from competitions) or if you were too fat to waddle beside your dog and needed to hire a professional handler. No amount of handling would make a poor dog score higher on an objective test.

Since my ideal, honest, dog show will never come to be, I’ve peppered this post with images from a dog show competition that is based upon grooming and artistry alone, just like conformation dog shows, but in this competition, the artists and the judges are honest and admit that it’s simply how good the dog looks after the groomer has worked their magic.

And just like regular conformation shows, the Poodles are the canvas of choice simply because they offer the hair stylist more to work with.

I personally think that the “Leonardoodle” is the best dog, but the judges gave it to the rideable Harley Davidson Poodle. It seems that even in such frivolous, but honest, shows, you can’t beat the pure blooded Poodle for top honors in fru-fru gaudy “art.”

As I look back across my seventeen years on this planet, I can see that I am a soul in search of a hero. My first recollection of needing a hero was in my third year. Grandma came every Wednesday night to take me to her regular Bingo game where I dazzled and delighted the other grandmas with my witty nursery rhymes and clever songs. On the ride to the big game, Grandma coached me to answer, “President of the United States,” whenever one of the old ladies asked what I wanted to be when I grew up. In 1998, being the President has lost its appeal. I don’t want to be fifty-two, fighting both a Viagra addiction and a dysfunctional Congress that wants to impeach me. Being the most powerful man in the world just isn’t what it used to be.

I went through the normal selection process of the standard heroes, but as the years passed, I failed to make that special bond that leads to a lifelong commitment. TenderHeart is caring and sharing, but—like Hamlet—Carebears have trouble taking decisive action. Batman (chiropterarum homo sapiens) relates better with chiropterae than he does with homines sapientes. Michael Corleone lacks sensitivity. Han Solo is brave in Starwars; yet, in the final analysis, he is just a deadbeat who stiffed Jabba the Hutt. Last year, John Elway won the Super Bowl, but his own coach doesn’t trust him enough to allow Elway to call a single play.

In high school, it became painfully obvious to me that I was different: a man with no hero is always an outsider. The only car in the student parking lot without a bumper sticker was mine. All the other cars were decorated with signs proudly announcing the owner’s commitment to a sports figure, a rock star, or a political candidate; even the school bus had a “Go Broncos” sticker. I longed for that special moment in life when I could connect with a hero by performing that sacred ceremony of attaching my commitment with glue to the bumper of my car.

Last Saturday morning, I was answering my e-mail—with both the stereo and television playing to provide the proper amount of ambient noise to drive my parents out of the room—when the power went out. Deprived of electricity, I decided to entertain myself with pre-historic technology and began reading a book on Eastern religions. The first chapter convinced me to look inward for my hero; he should be someone like me, only better and more complete. He needed to be a thinking competitor who took joy in making a plan and executing it. He would be a modern hunter who stalked his prey with a combination of the latest technology and his own natural talent. A string of tragedies that would send a Greek hero whining blindly into exile would not dent the spirit of my American hero. He would always try again. Even if success never touched his hand, my hero would take satisfaction in knowing that the supreme act is the hunt, not the kill. Then the power came back on.

In a sudden, blinding surge of excited electrons that danced across the cathode ray tube, my own great American hero was finally revealed to me. He was strapped to an Acme rocket sled that was suspended in the air over the Grand Canyon. He even waved goodbye to me just before gravity sent him crashing to the bottom. In less than an hour, I was gluing my new “Wile E. Coyote, Super Genius” sticker to the bumper of my car. Life is good!

–Christopher Landauer, Super Genius

A healthy transatlantic Collie industry supported the rist of the large kennels in North America. In 1888 the banker and financier J.P. Morgan set up a Collie kennel called Cragston on the Hudson River in New York and paid considerable amounts for British dogs. He purchased Wishaw Clinker, for example, for $4,000. Samual Untermyer, who joined the Collie breeding ranks in 1904, competed with Morgan for the ownership of important Collies.

- Bred for Perfection, p. 73

In 1900, J.P. Morgan paid the record sum of $8,500 for an imported dog from England. While there are several common ways of evaluating the magnitude of such a purchase in today’s dollars–ranging from almost $200,000 to well over $5 million–the conclusion is the same: this was a serious purchase that not only set records, it set the tone for frivolity and excess that makes the fancy, well, fancy.

In 2007, $8,500.00 from 1900 is worth:

	$216,511.92	using the Consumer Price Index
	$185,441.57	using the GDP deflator
	$575,611.19	using the value of consumer bundle
	$992,678.57	using the unskilled wage
	$1,437,377.28	using the nominal GDP per capita
	$5,706,274.98	using the relative share of GDP

- Measuring Worth.com

The battle between American Collie fanciers would escalate and reach $10,000 and up for a single dog before the first decade of the 19th Century was over. Here’s an article from 1900 that describes the purchase and also delves into the state of the Collie in general.

While exorbitant prices were paid for these famous British dogs, it doesn’t seem like anyone really got their money’s worth. None of these imported dogs ever produced offspring that lived up to their sires and the general attitude of the British was that they sold their crap dogs to the Americans for a premium.

The San Fransico Call

November 11, 1900

Collie Dog Worth $8500

By paying $8500 for Southport Perfection, the grand collie dog from the famous Stretch kennels in England, J. Pierpont Morgan has established the record price for a dog. The next highest price (paid for a champion St. Bernard a few years ago) was $1500 less than this sum.

Southport Perfection is an Ormskirk collie. Mr. Morgan and his kennel manager, Bob Armstrong, pin their faith on this grand strain, with much good reason, for most of the champions of the past few years are almost straight Ormskirk blood. One need mention merely such names as Ormskirk Connie and Ormskirk Galepin, owned by Mr. Morgan; Ormskirk Emerald, owned till recently by A. H. Megson of England; Roy, owned by Queen Victoria; Sowerby Squire and Ormskirk Cornishman, still owned by Mr. Stretch–to realize how powerful and reliable this blood is.

Until the arrival of Southport Perfection the star of J. Pierpont Morgan’s Cragston kennels, in his beautiful place in Highland Falls, was Ornament, notable for his size as well as for the beauty of his coat. Before him there reigned Sefton Hero and Ruford Ormond, both dogs which, all things considered, probably were in their day (and not so long ago, either) as beautiful collies as there were in the world. Sefton Hero is out of Gladdie and Lady Wonder, and Rufford Ormond is out of Ormskirk Chriss and Lady Margaret.

No other dog in the world to-day combines so many fine points as does the collie. In mere beauty he leads all other breeds easily. He is as stately and proud as a king. Few other breeds equal and none excel the collie in intelligence. He is as gentle as a child and as affectionate as a fine type of human being. He is large enough to satisfy any one except the man who loves dogs for the sake of size alone.

It is not likely that the Scotch collie ever will be come a cheap dog. Few dogs are so difficult to breed. Litter after litter from even the best obtainable strains have an exasperating tendency to turn out worthless from a fancier’s point of view. The pups are deficient either in bone or coat, or their ears insist on pricking instead of being semi-erect. This point about the ear is one of the most difficult to overcome. Some of the best dogs shown in recent years have had the prick ear to such an extent that it was found necessary to doctor them by slitting the skin inside the ear and stitching it down to hold the ear as it should be. Veterinary surgeons are being called on perpetually to perform this operation. A collie that is deficient in bone generally is hopeless. Sometimes careful feeding while he is still very young will help him, but generally such a dog remains undersized. This uncertainty about breeding makes blood that will tell like the Ormskirk blood particularly valuable. It made Rufford Ormond worth $1000 a year to his original English owner as a stud dog.

The fashionable color is now sable and white. Apart from fashion, there is no question about its being the most striking and beautiful color for a coll
ie. Handsome as the black and white or the tri-colored dogs are, there is something about the sable and white that makes the dog look absolutely regal. Almost all of the better dogs in the Cragston kennels are of this color, and it predominates so much generally nowadays that last year’s show in New York was made up almost exclusively of dogs with this marking.

The word “sable” when applied to the collie’s markings does not mean black. It means red. And the nearer the sable of a collie’s coat approaches the color of the fox the better is the breeder pleased. A fine dog with perfect coat of this color, with his wolf-like face and lithe movements, certainly looks more like some superb wild creature of the highest type than like a domesticated dog.

It is this “wild beast” feature of the collie which has instilled into many minds the idea that the dog is snappish and treacherous and dangerous. Nothing can be further from the truth, however, and if one will study the beautiful, deep and truthful eyes of the breed he will have no reason for adhering to any unfavorable opinion. When a collie’s temper is bad he is about as bad a dog as can be. The only safe thing to do with such a specimen is to give him away at once to one’s enemy. But there is hardly one thoroughbred collie in five hundred that is anything except lovable from the top of his honest head to the tip of his glorious brush.

The collie, as he has become known in the United States, is a dog far different from his progenitor, the working sheep dog of Scotland and the north of England. He has been bred too “fine” for many generations to withstand the weather and the hard work which are the lot of the shepherd’s dog. Exposure like that to which the working collie is subjected night after night and day after day would carry the pure bred type off with pneumonia in twenty-four hours. In order to maintain ruggedness in their dogs the shepherds cross the collie every few generations with other breeds. This produces a dog with much more bone and chest, and without the perfect beauty of the collie as we know him. Black and white are the predominating colors of the working collie. The head is shorter and the face is blunt as compared with the fine fox-like mask of the show dog.

Size and bone have been a predominant feature of the collies that have been exhibited recently in the United States. But in England there is a fad just now for dwarf collies, and delightful little creatures they are. They have all the typical collie points. Indeed, it is demanded that they be pluperfect. They must be fully as fine in coat and their shape and limb must be exactly as good as they are in large collies, but they are not much larger than a spaniel. Dwarf collies may turn out to be a fad even more expensive than the ordinary dog, for if it is hard to breed a perfect large collie it is still more difficult to breed a perfect dwarf. Few have been seen as yet on this side, but it is said that there will be an importation in time for the next dog show. One was bred in New Jersey and now is owned in Brooklyn, which is said to be a perfect type.

She is a blue-blooded little collie, for she has Sefton Hero, Rufford Ormond, Duncan Gray, Rose Hill Certainty, Lady Christopher, Ormskirk Dolly, Champion Scotilla, Bertha and Bendico in her pedigree. She illustrates in a marked manner the uncertainty which attends collie breeding. Almost all her line were large dogs. None was unusually small.

The standard of excellence in judging collies now is as follows: The dog must be a lithe, active dog of elegant and pleasing outline, with a combination of speed, strength and intelligence. The head should be moderately long, covered with soft, short hair, skull flat and with very little stop, eyes almond-shaped, of fair size, but not prominent, placed rather wide apart, and the darker brown in color the better. The ears should be small, covered with soft, short hair, and carried semi-erect when at attention, but at other times thrown back. The neck should be long, arched and muscular; the chest deep and narrow in front, but wide behind the shoulders, and the back short and level with the loins, rather long, slightly arched, yet powerful. The legs should be straight, muscular, rather flat of bone, hind quarters slightly drooping and very long from hips to hock and hocks well bent, the pasterns long and springy, with the soles of the feet well padded and the toes arched and compact. The tail, to be carried low when the dog is quiet, of moderate length, and when he is excited to be carried gayly, and almost straight when he is running.

The coat as required should be abundant, except on the head and legs’ the outer coat straight, hard and rather stiff; the inner coat soft, furry and very dense, so as to make it difficult to find the skin; the frill (a mass of hair on the breast) very abundant; hair on the tail very profuse and on the hips long and bushy; forelegs slightly feathered, while the hind legs below the hocks are smooth. Weight of dogs, forty-five to sixty pounds; bitches, forty to fifty pounds.

The defects most to be avoided are a domed skull high-peaked occipital bone’ heavy, pendulous ears; full, round eyes; heavy feathered legs and short tail.

As an example of a collie head, that of J. Pierpont Morgan’s Ormskirk Galopin may be cited. His head is 11 1/2 inches long, very fine and tapering in the muzzle, and is considered typical.

The above description is a fascinating snapshot of a breed which is already distinct from the Border Collie, a pale imitation in intelligence and temperament, but not yet a total inbred wreck. The difficulty in “breeding them well” comes from heterzygosity and a diverse gene pool. This is a good thing for health, a bad thing for show breeders who want to produce clones.

The description also lets us know that the dog is useless for work, starting to show nasty problems in temperament, and is well on the way to having structural exaggerations inbred sufficiently to breed true. The little almond eyes, the ornamental ears, the excess coat, and the pointy face.

My dogs love a good ice cube, as long as I wet it first so it doesn’t stick to their tongue. It’s a great way to cool them off on hot, sunny days–their black fur soaks up the heat–and the best way to stop a tongue bleed–which are bound to happen during a day of disc doggin’ Frisbee fun.

I always bring a baby wading pool and an ice chest to Frisbee days so my pups can cool their bellies fast to prevent heat stroke. It seems that this Border Collie doesn’t need a human to feed his ice habit: