And no, anyone who breeds a purebred dog is not torturing their animals with malgenics all in the name of racial purity. The ABCA, the largest Border Collie registry has no purity requirement. They don’t even have a conformation requirement. You can cross breed and demonstrate through ability that your dog meets the only standard they care about: behavioral ability to move stock with eye, and they will register your dog and it becomes a purebred. Their definition of purebred is very different than yours.

My own breeding brought together BCs from very different registries and backgrounds. In fact, my bitch goes back to undocumented farm stock only a few generations back. Her daughter was bred to an unregistered ranch dog and all of their offspring work, and are thus Border Collies. Any one of them can be brought back into the registry at any time. There’s no great fear that they are 1 generation away from being mongrels or 15 generations. Bringing these dogs back in doesn’t require the entire community to cast their vote and changing the rules, there’s an established process and it’s not prohibited. I’d even argue that it could be more open and be more beneficial, but it’s decidedly better than the unthinking and closed stud books that are extant in other neighborhoods in the fancy.

In fact, I’d love to expand my breeding program and bring in more collie landrace dogs such as English Shepherds, just for the sake of genetic diversity, not racial purity. I’d venture that a program to bring in some sight hounds to bolster the hips would be an excellent endeavor as well. So yeah, my dogs come from mongrels and are bred to mongrels, and in the future I’ll make them even more mongrel. And soon after that they’ll be back in a registry and “pure” again. And the sky will not fall and the seas shall not drain.

And, far the record, anyone who breeds a purebred dog is breeding for racial purity, including yourself and your border collies. So good try on turning the tables.

Hope all is well Chris. Just dropping in for your posts. I always enjoy the good reading!

We look at do-gooders as a special sort of breed; people who possess extraordinary traits of altruism, or self-less concern for the well-being of others, even at the expense of their own existence. It seems I and others now consider this an addiction to being good.

http://www.science20.com/rogue_neuron/addicted_being_good_psychopathology_heroism-60137
“As crazy as it sounds, there may be a closer link than most people would think between the extreme-altruistic personality and sociopathic personality. Would it shock you to know that two people, one with the traits of extreme-altruism (X-altruism) and the other the traits of a sociopath, could be related? Even siblings? And that their personality traits are very similar, with only a few features to distinguish them? Research by Watson, Clark, and Chmielewki from the University of Iowa, “Structures of Personality and Their Relevance to Psychopathology”, present a convincing argument in which they support the growing push for a trait dimensional scheme in the new DSM- V to replace the current categorical system. “