But the offense the Aussie breeder took speaks to the reality of the Narcissism of Minor Differences:

“the phenomenon that it is precisely communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other in other ways as well, who are engaged in constant feuds and ridiculing each other.”

It is more important to this breeder that her dog not be confused with a Border Collie than it would be if it was confused with a more distantly related dog like a German Shepherd or a Flat-coat.  A gross misidentification wouldn’t really speak to the merits of her dog, unless it kept happening; but a common misidentification is clearly more grating because it threatens the communal identity of her breed; and similar looking breeds are more likely to get confused for eachother.  In the show world, the realm of Platonic ideals, things that are different need to look different.  And even if the differences are small, the appearance should accentuate what is not the same and perhaps obfuscate the similarities.

Is that a Border Collie, Aussie, or English Shepherd?

It doesn’t matter that the list of attributes that describe both the Australian Shepherd and the Border Collie is much longer than the list of qualities which separates them.  I suspect that it wouldn’t take a lot of searching to find an Australian Shepherd with a tail, a Border Collie, and an English Shepherd that would be indistinguishable from looks and conformation alone.  Perhaps you could even find such dogs that would share a great deal of temperament and behavior as well.  There are Border Collies who work more upright than crouched and there are Aussies that show stronger eye.  Form does follow function and it’s entirely conceivable that a moderately sized cattle farm could chose any of our three look-alike breeds (or others) to satisfy their demands.

But this was a formal conformation event where some breeders are so eager to accentuate the differences that they work to create a line of dogs within their breed that is distinguishable from others in the same breed by looks alone.  Have a look at these Border Collies and you can easily see what this particular breeder has chosen as their signature:

Can you hear me now?

I don’t know if those ridiculous ears are accentuating a difference–they are genetically/physically different than many other BC ears–or if they are obfuscating a similarity–those ears would look normal but for the breeder artificially styling them with tape and braces to establish a look that is not passed along in the genes; but, those ears are clearly being used as a trademark aesthetic of this breeder.  My gut reaction to these “Sheltie Ears” is disgust that is likely generated by the NoMD. I don’t mind those ears on Shelties or Collies, but they look disproportionatly out of place on a Border Collie.  They’re otherwise handsome dogs save for the radar dish ears.  To me, these particular Border Collies fall down the “uncanny valley,” being in many respects more similar to the Border Collies I cherish than the Australian and English Shepherds depicted above, but my feeling toward them is unsettling.

But unlike the sheeple and showple I describe in the previous post, I don’t feel that there should be institutional barriers between these dogs and mine.  I do not need a registry to prevent me from breeding to these dogs nor do I need a conformation breed standard that would tell me that those ears are correct and ideal for the breed (let alone pretend that they are not the work of glue and tape instead of inherent and inheritable conformation).

But the sheeple would tell me that those dogs are Barbie Collies so I can’t breed to them in their sand box, and the showple would tell me that some of the dogs in the previous image are not purebred Border Collies and thus I can’t breed to them in their sand box.  Neither of them seem to appreciate that when you make your sand box so small by kicking other people and their dogs out of it, the only thing it’s good for is to collect cat feces.

History, as portrayed in this film, has been a succession of conquests of stronger races over weaker ones. As played out on the stage of Monument Valley, long ago, tribes of Indians defeated the ancient cliff dwellers; then came the Europeans to conquer the Indians.

The film picks up at the start of WWI and the Indian’s horses are wanted for the war effort.  After first being exploited for their naiveté by an unscrupulous horse broker, an honorable Army Captain convinces them with the help of the white school teacher to not only donate their horses to the war effort, but to enlist and fight for their new country.  The Indians embrace this challenge but the world they return to doesn’t reward them for their service.

I can’t help but see parallels in the themes of this story and the fate of the working Border Collie.  History is marching on and we’re leaving the agrarian lifestyle further and further behind.  America was never a big sheep country and we’re becoming less of one every day.  In a piece appropriately titled The Vanishing American, Derry Brownfield documents the tide going out for the American agrarian industry:

When I was growing up on the farm, there were very few farm families that didn’t have a few chickens, a few hogs, a few cows and maybe some sheep, ducks or geese. We grew most of our vegetables and all the feed for our livestock and poultry. The typical farmer was completely self sufficient. The chickens and eggs paid for the food items that were not grown at home: flour – bananas – coffee – sugar – salt. The hogs and cattle made the farm mortgage payments and paid for other farm expenses and living expenses.

Economies of scale, government handouts, mechanization, fashion, and specialization have lead to the death of the versatile farmer and the versatile farmer’s dog.  Changes in the market also make it a steep uphill battle to preserve existing family ranching and farming culture, let alone grow it to a level that can be said to maintain a large enough Border Collie gene pool.  It’s not that there aren’t enough working and trial people to justify them breeding their own flavor of Border Collie, it’s that the prevailing opinion from this group is that they want to be the only ones breeding Border Collies.

Since 1980, 32% of the nation’s sheep producers, 41% of the beef producers, 81% of the dairy producers and 91% of the hog producers have been forced out of business.

In the story, Indians have a technic–an object of technology that is well adapted to a particular task–that is still valuable in a modern world.  They are also presented with a war that is perhaps greater than their own struggle to maintain a static cultural identity.

The Border Collie is likewise a technic that is well adapted to a particular task that is swiftly becoming obsolete and a valuable tool in new applications.  The working community being asked if they want to join in and be relevant contributors to the new “wars”–in this case activities, sports, and new off-ranch jobs–being “fought” with Border Collies or if they are satisfied to build walls and exist as living museums on their reservations.

Jim Thorpe, football star

Critics have contended that The Vanishing American is a commentary on the life story of Jim Thorpe, and like Thrope’s life story, it doesn’t end well for the Indians despite them making a valiant effort to fight for America in WWI.  The crucial difference today is that there’s no stigma against working Border Collies, no racism or breedism that prevents us from appreciating their accomplishments.

If anything, my own vision of the ideal Border Collie matches Jim Thorpe.  He was a hybrid of several Native American and European bloodlines, born on the reservation but raised in the modern world.  His first job was working on a horse ranch, but he would go on to be the most versatile athlete America, if not the world, has ever seen.

As a teen, he excelled at the high jump, track and field, football, baseball, lacrosse, and even ballroom dance.  He played football under the famous Pop Warner while at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School and lead his team to a national collegiate championship almost single handedly.  He played running back, defensive back, place-kicker, and punter.  In that season he scored 25 touchdowns and 198 total points.

It was during that season that Thorpe put an end to Dwight Eisenhower’s dreams of football success when Eisenhower busted his knee in a failed attempt to tackle Thorpe while playing for Army.  The future president said of his rival:

There are some people who are supremely endowed. My memory goes back to Jim Thorpe.  He never practiced in his life, and he could do anything better than any other football player I ever saw.

He won Olympic Gold in the Pentathlon and Decathlon, and was hailed by Czar Nicholas II of Russia as “the greatest athlete in the world.”  He won the Amateur Athletic Union’s All-Around Athletic Championship.  He played professional baseball in the major leagues, professional football and guided the American Professional Football Association into becoming the NFL, and he even played professional basketball.

He was called the most versatile athlete in the modern era, if not ever, and can that same honor not be given to the Border Collie?

Jim Thorpe, baseball star

The sheeple are essentially demanding that while they’re willing to send their dogs off the reservation to compete in silly activities like dog sports or goose patrol, SAR or pageants, but they don’t want the dogs bred for those activities by people involved in those activities.  They contend that breeding a dog for anything other than stock work won’t create the best stock dogs. And this isn’t a point even worth debating, because no one is asking people with stock or who are in stock sport, to use dogs bred by someone else.  And despite the continued decay of American agrarian culture and demand, no one is even contending that the sheeple shouldn’t breed their own dogs on their own standards.

This position of primacy and exclusivity of breeding rights  is only held by the sheeple.  This is their reservation, and I suspect this is going to play out long term just like the conquest of the American Indian did.

While it’s compelling to look at the downfall of Jim Thorpe as the result of latent bias against the Indians, racism, or some great conflict in culture, I don’t think history bears that out.  Jim Thorpe was given every accolade they could throw at his feet and that some tried to profit off of his success without paying him his due is not unique to Native Americans.  The greatest insult to him was by the IOC (decidedly NOT an American institution) when they stripped his Gold Medals over his accepting money to play baseball earlier in his career.

Jim Thorpe was undone by the Great Depression and his own alcoholism, the later of which could be easily ascribed to his Irish and Native DNA.  A predisposition for alcohol intolerance and addiction.  Will the working Border Collie community be undone by their own DNA as well?  Do they have it in themselves to change or will they become morbidly obsolete and irrelevant?

Related Posts:

• Too Many Working Dogs, Too Little Work
• A Dying Breed
• Rural Decay

Although the Border Wars are appropriately framed as a fight between the ABCA and the AKC, the Wars are wrongly categorized as a fight over Border Collies or “the future of the breed.” The true spoils of war aren’t dogs, but people. The numerous people who buy Border Collie puppies and who are mostly unaware or disinterested in BC politik, ethos, and theory but who still buy “purebred” dogs with papers. Papers that cost money.

The elite in the ABCA and the AKC fight for those people because the lifeblood of both registries is the money they make from puppies who are registered and sold to pet homes. The AKC could not survive off of Conformation puppies alone, nor could the ABCA off of trialing puppies alone. Both groups must milk the massive Fourth Estate pet buyers for their sustenance. Conformation dogs and Trialing dogs are loss leaders for the two registries, the registries spend and lose money facilitating shows and trials, even with sizable volunteerism and sponsorships.

The Fourth Estate is, ironically, the group that should place the least value in herding or conformation, pedigrees, and breeding philosophies. They don’t herd and they don’t need dogs with good conformation (cute is more desirable, and really, all puppies are cute even if they grow up to be ugly). The trialers are not lying when they say that dogs suitable for working do not make good pets and a laymen would have a horrible time trying to figure out how their dog differs from the breed standard as written or why any of that matters for what they value in a dog.

The Fourth Estate doesn’t have a clue about what the names on a pedigree mean (and none of those names are there because they were good pets), and most breeding practices of the show and trialing elite are repulsive to pet buyers (inbreeding, ikh! gross!). So with all that going against them, the show people and the trialing people have to sell their dogs to the masses with romantic (and often false) histories, nostalgia, and kitsch…. and the belief that being “purebred” and “papered” is inherently good. They literally have to speak out of both sides of their mouth to accomplish this: ‘if you’re going to get a border collie, then you should get one from real working lines even though working dogs don’t make good pets’ … and … ‘these rosettes are proof that my lines meet the highest ideal in structure and movement for the Border Collie but you’ll still have to pay the premium for this, ahem, pet-quality puppy.’

The First and Second Estates have to be diplomatic because they want and need to sell you their culls without making you feel like you’re getting the rejects.

The Third Estate of the Border Collie doesn’t need to be sold on romantic stories, they are much more prone to buy on merit. If you are a successful Obedience/Agility trainer with dogs that have lots of titles, you have buyers in the Third Estate. If you are a successful trialer with dogs that win trials, you have buyers in the Third Estate. The Third Estate doesn’t need to be as diplomatic with the puppies they sell, because their activities are inclusive and inviting and accessible. Puppy buyers need not feel inferior or subject to a lower “pet” quality dog because dog sports allow for all levels of participation.

The small elite group of conformation breeders are Platonists; they believe that the substantive reality of Border Collies is only a reflection of a higher truth, and their activity is the key to divining that perfect essence. The small elite group of trial breeders also believes that there is a higher truth to the Border Collie, that their activity is the key to approaching that truth, and that their philosophy stands above and to the exclusion of all others. But they are not Platonists, as their search is accomplished on a field, not in the mind. The ideal Border Collie is discerned by function, not by a proposed ideal form.

This new Plato seemed familiar to common-sensical Victorians. What do we mean when we use the word “table” if not a real object which resembles more or less well the ideal “table”? Aren’t our real-world tables imperfect examples (“Platonic shadows”) of the ideal?

And living, breathing dog — are they not slightly imperfect versions of the ideal foxhoud or greyhound, setter or collie?
- Donal McCaig, The Dog Wars p185

The AKC Border Collie Breed Standard is tantamount to a bible. It describes the ideal, the platonic, and the perfect. It is the good book that should be followed and mere mortals can’t hope to change what is written. Border Collie conformation faithful are left to interpret the whims of the demi-god judges as they lay out judgment without any sort of feedback or critique; understanding why events happen the way they do is like trying to divine the will of god.

Dog fanciers and their creature, the AKC, really do believe that what is most valuable about any dog can be judged in the show ring, that the show ring is the sole legitimate purpose and reward of all dog breeding. They even believe, against all evidence, that the show ring “improves” breeds.
-Donald McCaig, The Dog Wars p153

The priesthood are those people who are attached to the registry because the dogma of the registry is their dogma, regardless of the practicalities of what other things the registry does. The Third Estate doesn’t have a single platonic breed standard nor a single unified activity. And for what is has in enthusiasm, it lacks in lock-step uniformity and an easy to recite mantra. It is that lack of uniformity that makes the Third Estate easy to dismiss by the koolaid drinking elite within the AKC and ABCA.

The priesthood of the ABCA are the top trialers and their jock-sniffers who are interested and active in the governance and politics and the priesthood of the AKC are conformation showers and their groupies who are likewise active in the governance and politics. Conformation and Trialing are the moral centers, the raison d’etre and the loss-leaders of the two registries.

The priesthood is only capable of surviving because of the large and largely ignorant masses–who use the services of the registries without knowing or caring about what happens in the inner sanctum–pay the bills. The AKC loses big money putting on dog shows and the ABCA admits that without the the majority of their dogs being registered to the hoi polloi pet buyers they’d be financially unable to carry on their mission.

Despite the rhetoric being about the “future of the breed” … the war is really over people, not dogs. The trialers will always be able to breed dogs to suit their herding needs and the show people will always be able to breed pretty dogs. The “breed” is not at stake with either of those groups because they have and always will have the power to breed what they want.

To the First Estate, the Border Collie breed is what it does: a dog that herds sheep with eye. To the Second Estate, the Border Collie breed is what it looks like. The former are Existentialists of function, the later Platonists of form. The First Estate probably wouldn’t care what the other three estates did with their dogs as long as they didn’t call them Border Collies when those dogs aren’t bred specifically for the purpose of herding sheep with eye.

But the First Estate lost the battle over exclusive rights to the name “Border Collie” (who knew there’d come a time when you’d have to trademark the name of a dog breed to ensure artistic control?), and they don’t seem satisfied renaming their dogs to the original and older classification of “working sheepdog.” If the trialists couldn’t own “Border Collie” outright, then they’d have to compete in the open and free market for market-share of the breed. That’s tough since, as Donald McCaig says in this The Dog Wars:

Americans have accepted the dog show credo: “a dog is what it looks like.”
- p53

Americans are thus Platonists instead of Existentialists when it comes to their dogs. This poses a problem to the First and Third Estates who ostensibly desire function over form, and when they do desire form, it is to serve function; e.g., shepherds in the hot dusty Southwest have emphasized a smooth coated dog more appropriate for that environment and flyball breeders have emphasized their dogs’ speed making for thinner and lighter animals with a sleek appearance.

Although trialers and conformationists will always be able to breed dogs to meet their needs, they won’t be guaranteed to sell the cast offs to the pet market without competition. Thus, it’s the large and un-indoctrinated pet market that is the real spoils of the Border Collie War. They are the crude grease that allows the smaller and more sophisticated parts to function.

Registries are at their core simply record keepers of dog sex. That’s it. But that isn’t where the first two Estates stop. To them, simply handing out pedigrees is like the world’s great religions simply handing out genealogies. Religions don’t stop there, they launch campaigns to expand membership, to out-breed the competition, to nitpick who gets to play in their sandbox and who doesn’t. And they establish elaborate bureaucracies and get mired in internal power struggles.

In addition to genealogies, they hand out Bibles and Korans and Torahs, and they exploit elements in those documents to get the masses to turn over their trust, their time, and things of value. Their purview is more than simple facts and objective standards;they deal in morality and ethics and metaphysics. But that’s not how they measure success. They measure success by the number of converts. We have mo
re warm bodies than you.

So despite talking a good game in the churches and mosques and synagogues hoping that their wisdom will shine through and draw in the crowds, history tells us that the most successful religious campaigns happen at the tips of spears, and not the allegorical Spear Longinus. Very real and very contemporary spears of forced conversion and coercion.

It was with one such spear that many members of the Third Estate of Border Collies were marched from the ABCA camp into the AKC camp, never to return again.

The Ancient, Modern, and Future Language of “Dog.”

Part 3. The Future. Wherein the Author describes Dog’s presence in the babble and first words of children.

I ran across a border war today while reading up on an article I will discuss in the third part of this series. Like many of the conflicts that pique my curiosity, this one has a dog at its center. You can tell that an issue is likely a border war when you search for a topic (in this case “global etymologies”) on google and the first page is filled with rants against the fundamental idea instead of links to the original content.

Anthropologists study the history of human groups and migrations by examining the common genetic elements of those groups, searching for the most recent common ancestors (hypothetical ‘Eve’s). Interdisciplinary historical linguists study the history, migration, and interaction of language (and thus people) by comparing common sounds and word meanings between languages, and in doing so classify language families and construct proto-languages. The mother of all such languages is called the Proto-World Language.

I suspect that the Proto-World Language is like the Holy Grail for historical linguists. It’s more of a guiding concept than a reality. Many don’t believe it can be found, others don’t believe that it ever existed in the first place, and anyone who turns up a clue or a possible path is resoundingly attacked by everyone else. Some attack because they are atheistic to the idea, others because they too are on the hunt and another’s success is their failure.

Like many border wars, this one seems to fall in the “techie vs. fuzzy” mold, although to an outsider the differences between the two groups seem trivial, making the narcissism of minor differences a distinct possibility. The fuzzy linguists want to tell a good story, bask in romantic histories, ask how the languages feel about each other, and do it this way because they’ve always done it this way; this is the comparative method.

The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.
– Sir William Jones 1786; Quoted by Lehman 1967 and Szemerenyi 1996:4

The techie linguists aren’t scared of letting numbers tell the story, of using new techniques to inform old debates, using old techniques with new tools, or of looking at data before they reach conclusions instead of telling a story and then looking for “data.” Their method of choice is called multilateral or mass lexical comparison. The obvious criticism from the fuzzies is that numbers can confuse coincidence for correlation, but any techies know that correlation does not imply causation. The fuzzies say that random coincidence is “quite high” although without doing an analysis of the expected random coincidence vs. the observed random coincidence (decidedly techie), I don’t know what basis the fuzzies have to state that such coincidence is tainting the techie’s results. The mass lexical comparison method seems pretty straight forward and sound to me:

If then, we find a mass of resemblances between different languages, resemblances that are not onomatopoetic in nature and do not appear to be borrowings, we must conclude that the similarities are the result of a common origin, followed by a descent with modification in the daughter languages.
- J.D. Bengtson and M. Ruhlen, On the Origin of Languages: Studies in Linguistic Taxonomy. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994, p. 43.

In my usual interdisciplinary stance, I figure there is room for both methods and perhaps the two methods can inform each other. Not too many people agree.

Needless to say, the fuzzy linguists have launched a full scale border war on the techie linguists (numbers lie and are scary, scientific fan-fiction makes you feel good and what feels good must be true). Consistent with my Confederacy of Dunces theory, where the sound and fury from the establishment against a new and provocative idea is entirely inconsistent with the weight of the idea, this border war features a preemptive strike by the comparative f
uzzies. The old school linguists actually published an anti-global etymologies paper (Joseph Salmons, 92) two years before the original global etymologies paper (Bengtson & Ruhlen, 94) was even published.

The essential argument in the Language Log article is research that the group-think fuzzies don’t agree with shouldn’t even be published, because that’s the purpose of “peer-review:” to enforce group think. I especially like the hypocrisy where the author complains that because the referees are anonymous, there can’t be a “public debate” (read: mob lynching) to force them to censor unpopular views (read: antithesis of public debate). The author’s criticism that peer reviewers are unqualified to judge outside of their specialty is code speak for ‘they haven’t been indoctrinated into enforcing the group-think.’

Doctor Merritt Ruhlen and Linguistic expert John Bengtson fall in the techie group and are the target of the above article because they used technical analysis to discern a list of 27 “global etymologies.” These etymologies, also known as cognates, are similar words in different languages that are likely to have a common origin. Critics (read: confederacy of dunces) incorrectly classify these global etymologies as “reconstructions” of the Proto-World Language, and thus they have doubly attacked Ruhlen and Bengtson and any other linguists or anthropologists who use their work. But Ruhlen and Bengtson don’t make that claim and explicitly state so:

For each etymology…we present a phonetic and semantic gloss, followed by examples from different language families. …We do not deal here with reconstruction, and these glosses are intended merely to characterize the most general meaning and phonological shape of each root. Future work on reconstruction will no doubt discover cases where the most widespread meaning or shape was not original.
- J.D. Bengtson and M. Ruhlen, On the Origin of Languages: Studies in Linguistic Taxonomy. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994, p. 14 note 3.

You’ll notice that Dr. William Poser uses “reconstruct*” no less than 25 times in his criticism. Too bad he didn’t make it to 27, it would have provided some nice symmetry to the 27 cognates Bengtson and Ruhlen unearthed. One linguist injected 25 mistaken words into his analysis because he wanted them there, two linguists arrived at 27 words because their technique spat them out. The problem with Dr. Poser is that he doesn’t have an excuse to fall so firmly into the fuzzy mindset, he studied Electrical Engineering along with Classics and Linguistics.

That’s the difference I see here: Bengtson and Ruhlen developed a method (the black box), and then took data and ran it through the box and waited to see what came out the bottom. Criticize the box all you want, substitute your own, but what drops out the bottom is governed only by the rules in the box and those rules are clear and explicit and easy to construct without bias. The fuzzy linguists don’t develop a method and then run data through it, they massage the method until the results make “sense” and tell a story. They don’t let an unbiased method put words together, they find a reason that two words they select make sense together. Untold degrees of intentional and unintentional bias infects the input data and the results when you try and make them say something you understand instead of trying to understand what they are really saying.

And what are those 27 threatening words? The source of the bitter bickering and posturing? The results of the black box and possible links to the holy grail of all languages?

You can tell one hell of a (R rated) story with those 27 words, and perhaps that’s why they are so interesting. They aren’t from a fuzzy story telling method, but a techie method. And before you think all of us techies still live in our Aja‘s basement, have tsuma on our backs and puti on the brain, jealous of prehistoric mano running around kamaing a large dinosaur kata, trying to get to pal base with kunas by bashing them on the head and dragging them back to our k’olo by their tsaku, we’re not. Some of us do shave our backs.

Now Dr. Poser isn’t all bad. He gives a very nice explanation of the ancient words for dog:

Although sound change is the main way in which words change over time, it is also possible for a word to be replaced by an entirely different word. For example, the Proto-Indo-European word for “dog” was something like *kuon. (The star indicates that this is a hypothetical form.) We reconstruct this form from attested (actually recorded) forms like Greek kuon, Sanskrit shvan, and German hund by asking what proto-form would yield the attested forms after undergoing the sound changes observed in the various languages, and also taking into account changes in word-formation. The direct descendant of this word in English is hound. But at some point the common Germanic word for “dog” took on a more specialized meaning and was replaced, as the general term, by dog, a word whose origin we do not know.

This fits nicely with the attention Ruhlen and Bengtson gave to dog in their work:

9. *KUAN—’dog’ — canine; cynic; hound; !Kung /gwi ‘hyena’; Proto-Afro-Asiatic *k(y)n ‘dog, wolf’; Proto-Indo-European *kwon- ‘dog’ > Sanskrit s’van, Phrygian kan, Latin canis, Greek kuon, Germanic hund; Proto-Uralic *küinä ‘wolf’; Old Turkish qanchiq ‘bitch’; Monglian qani ‘wild dog’; Proto-Tungus-Manchu *khina ‘dog’; Korean ka ‘dog’ (< kani); Gilyak kan ‘dog’; Chinese kou ‘dog’ (kh^jwen); Tibetan khyi ‘dog’; Proto-Oceanic *nkaun ‘dog’; Taos kwiane-, Tewa tukhwana ‘fox, coyote’

If we really could assign dates to the mutations in DNA and the changes in our language, we just might find that dogs became biologically distinguished from wolves at about the same time man used one word to describe a wolf and another to describe a domesticated dog.

• The First Estate of the Border Collie is as a working stock dog.
• The Second Estate of the Border Collie is as a conformation show dog.
• The Third Estate of the Border Collie is as a dog sport athlete.
• The Fourth Estate of the Border Collie is as a house pet.

Purists in the first estate will be pleased with their ranking, but this list is not judgmental, nor preferential. It does not extend from most important to least important, but rather from monolithic to democratic, from specific and narrow to diverse and broad. Fundamentally, the list documents the history of formal organization. You might argue that conformation showing is the most monolithic and the most specific, and you’d be right, but it is far behind trialing in history and in moral ownership of the breed.

I firmly believe that the Third Estate of the Border Collie is a significant player in the future of the Border Collie, unadorned with romantic history and unbound by a rigid and arbitrary “breed standard.” The Third Estate is a meritocracy like the first estate but is not blinded to the full potential of the Border Collie. The Third Estate is more numerous than the first two estates combined, an readily accepts more converts from the Fourth Estate than either of the first two.

Many ranchers and trialers got into Border Collies because they were in stock first. Many conformation breeders got into Border Collies after they were in another breed first. I’d venture to say that the flow of traffic from rancher -> border collie enabled rancher and conformation breeder -> border collie conformation breeder is larger and more significant than the traffic from border collie owner into either showing or ranching.

The dog sport communities and the pet communities on the other hand have great inter-mobility. There are many other breeds in dog sports, although when the ability of the Border Collie shines through, many serious competitors in other breeds upgrade to a BC. Those that don’t upgrade are forced and inspired to improve their own breeds to be competitive. There are also many Border Collie pets that inspire their novice owners to get into a meaningful activity when normal house pet duties are insufficient fare for the BC.

Dog sports are fun and inviting, and dog sport people have more avenues for training than either of the first two estates. It’s easy and convenient to pick a dog sport and find several training centers in your area, competitive clubs who will help you get trained and involved, and a free market of avenues to compete, from the non-serious fun variety to super competitive avenues that lead to sponsorships and world travel. Neither herding nor conformation can say the same.

The Border Collie was developed as a working stock dog, and it is still used widely for this purpose today. That being said, no one today developed the border collie. That was done at the same time all the other breeds came about as part of the Victorian fancy for eugenics and a growing sophistication of farmers in creating hybrid crops. Remember, the pivotal moment in genetics research came from a bean grower:

The science began to evolve in 1865 when Gregor Mendel, an Austrian botanist and monk, identified what he called “hereditary factors” — now known as genes. Three years later, Friedrich Miescher, a Swiss biologist, unknowingly discovered DNA — deoxyribonucleic acid. In 1876, Charles Darwin conducted experiments in breeding and published Cross and Self Fertilization in the Vegetable Kingdom. A year after that, William Beal, a renowned horticulturist at Michigan Agricultural College (later Michigan State University), established the first seed testing laboratory in the United States and was the first person to cross-pollinate corn to increase yields. His research demonstrated to farmers the advantages of hybrid vigor.
- Plant Breeding and Genetics: Harvesting the Power of DNA

The breed name and the romantic breed history evoke images of well dressed pasty men with lilting accents or thick brogues on lush green pastures with idyllic cloud-puff sheep milling about as the perfect dog keeps it all in order. If such images were ever true, they are not true now. Today’s shepherd is adopting the trappings of an idealized past culture just as much as today’s cowboys of the American West are adopting the trappings of another idealized past culture. This isn’t artifice, it’s natural cultural inheritance. But in both cases, these are not the good old days, those are past. These are the good old days of the dog sport athlete.

The American herding community owes much of its culture to both of the past cultures I just mentioned, the gentleman rancher from the UK and the American cowboy. Despite their many attempts to, the American herding community can’t honestly play the “we made the breed card.” They might have a good case for the Australian Shepherd and the McNab, but the romantic Border Collie will always be a product of the UK. You might take the ISDS’s decision to recognize the ABCA as the inheritors of the old guard giving respect to the new guard who has finally lived up to their standards. You might also see it as a herding community in England that is becoming increasingly smaller and less significant reaching out to their colony in America who is doing much better, bloated with legions of border collie house pet registrations.

I’m sure there are many who would say that conformation showing is crippling the breed in England, but I have yet to be convinced that any shepherd need ever seek an outside source for their dogs. If there is a dearth of quality herding BCs in the UK, it’s because the herders aren’t maintaining their own house. Holding on to a past culture is strong and weak for the very same reason: the past doesn’t change. While it is successful and logical to take what works from the past and sustain it, it also means that elements from that saved history become less relevant every day as modernity and entropy make the past more foreign and obscure.

Herding might be really fun for the dog, but I have no fondness for sheep. Herding is also the least inviting of the estates. Not only are the small elite group old and cranky, they are elitist and differentiate themselves culturally in numerous ways.

In sheepdog culture speech is laconic, and praise for man or dog understated. It
can be funny to wacth the newly obsessed adapt to that culture that nurtures their dogs. As his (her) dogs improve, many a previously garrulous suburbanite stats to mutter like John Wayne.
…
Sheepdog trialing does not attract many young people, but handlers in their seventies are unexceptional.
- Donald McCaig, The Dog Wars p17 & 23

Herding is also inaccessible because sheep are sparse and rural and trainers are hard to find and expensive. I can train in flyball for $10 per two hour class. I can train in Agility for $8 per 90 minute drop-in or two dogs for $10, with in depth introductory classes easily less than $20 per hour. Frisbee is the cost of the disc and a nominal fee for Spring Training. Herding costs me $25 for one dog and $30-40 for two dogs per hour, and those appear to be the market rates. Herding has the most expensive overhead and flyball has the least.

You can’t herd on your own unless you have a significant investment in land, sheep, equipment, and investment money to start and run a small business. You literally have to be a sheep rancher or serious hobbyist living in the country to play that game. Many trialers who have sheep and a bit of land don’t have enough of it to be competitive at the upper levels, so they increase the overhead and truck their sheep to other people’s ranches to practice 600-800 yard outruns and nasty terrain and such. Herding is clearly a career and lifestyle choice not many are willing to adopt.

Conformation is boring for human and dog. It’s also an exclusive club because it’s inherently subjective. Even if you have a beautiful dog with great conformation, you won’t be welcomed with open arms. It’s a lot about who you know and who you bought from and their status. There is an art to showing since you’re sending signals to judges about how well prepared you are and thus how likely it is that you should win. In any event where the judging is subjective, you will find favoritism that is unexplainable by probability and chance. When one hot dog sweeps several shows in a row, taking Best In Show against a few thousand dogs each show, it is simply unfathomable that it’s not fixed. Breed standards are vague, so in any given ring you could make a clear case that all the dogs have no faults, so to have hot dogs win again and again is a signal that the game you think is being played is not the game that is really being played.

Judges supposedly don’t know the name and breeder of the dogs in the ring, but this is a small community and kennels try hard to develop their own look. You’ll hear it in the language: “that’s a Wizaland head” or “those are Borderfame ears” and such. It’s also not difficult to recognize a dog, a handler, or a breeder if they are campaigning the dog. It’s also simple to cheat as the judge reading the list of dogs before the show or during the show as they fill out rankings for the breeds they are currently judging to see what arm band number corresponds to which dog.

You have to buy into this sport and it’s advisable to buy from the winning lines with a breeder who is actively showing. They have an incentive to help you along (and they might co-own your dog and are making you show) to help their breeding program along. You might find that you put in a lot of time and effort and the credit goes to the breeder. They did make the dog pretty after all.

It’s also expensive. Grooming overhead can be massive. It’s why the two most popular professions in the showing community are hair stylists and lawyers. One has expertise in the only real investment the owner makes: grooming. The other has expertise in the schmoozing and social climbing with back door deals that make the show world go round.

Showing doesn’t lend it self to small incremental investments in time, money, and effort. It really requires a balls out effort and a high buy-in cost to make a go at it and get any kind of results that will please your ego and sustain interest in the hobby. Most breeders do this because they see benefits down the road. They meet potential buyers, they earn a championship for their stock, and this improves their reputation and their ability to sell puppies to the masses.

Conformation is something people do because they are already breeding, it is not a means to graduate to breeding for something you already do. As far as the upper levels of show culture goes, the Border Collie is hopeless. The Herding Group is the bastard cousin of the show world and in the entire history of the group’s existence at the Westminster dog show (1983 on), the only herding group best in show came from a German Shepherd (which is genetically and functionally the least like the other herding breeds, it is a mastiff in sheepherder’s clothing) and he was owned and showed by a Firestone heiress. Before getting its own designation in 1983, the dogs which would eventually make up the Herding Group only won Best in Show three other times: A Rough Collie in 1929 and an Old English Sheep Dog in 1914 and 1975.

I also have a fundamental atheism to any written breed standard. There is no logic or value behind one, especially for the Border Collie. I have to refrain from laughing when people try to explain “and why do we need straight hocks, well to herd well, of course!” The breed standard is to the conformation community what the bible is to most Christians. Most haven’t read it, and despite being referenced often, the words don’t determine what wins, fads do. If you read the BC standard and then look at the top winning BCs, you’ll see that there is an implied standard that speaks to fashion fads, not the words on the page.

Pet owners, the Fourth Estate, might have the least clout and moral ownership of the breed, but every economy has businesses and consumers, and consumer demand drives many business decisions. The Fourth Estate is the consumer base for the breeders who belong in the first three estates. Anyone breeding to herd, show, or compete is going to create more puppies than they need. Those puppies need to be sold.

The Herding community is the least sophisticated at this process. If they are active trialers and doing well, they will likely have a few fellow trialers who want to try out a puppy from their dog and see what they can do with it. This is just part of the culture that trades dogs like professional teams trade athletes. Not all dogs are on the revolving pet circuit, many are pets and “forever” dogs, but a good number of dogs move around the country for various reasons, in full accordance with market forces. The herding community is unlikely to sell their dogs cheap, but they are also unlikely to do genetic testing, eye testing, hip testing, and other value-added measures, so the dogs aren’t sold at a premium. Some dogs come with papers, some not. Most are purebred, some are crosses with other herding breeds like the McNab.

Conformation stock is rarely traded or sold. Unlike herding dogs that might not work out with their current owner’s style but can flourish under another handler, a show dog is not likely to be helped by being traded. Showing also requires little training (stand still, walk straight, put your feet here, keep your tail down and your ears up) and the prime age of operation is less than two years. Many dogs get their championships as puppies under a year old. Since the dog can “compete” at such a young age, there is much more interest in spreading the seed of top stud dogs around than there is in trading dogs.

Since dogs can win so young, they can also be bred young and often. This is the key factor in population dynamics. If you look at any healthy breeding population that is growing, there are several factors that determine how fast the population grows: number of offspring per litter, how often one generation breeds (comes into heat), the average age of first mating. It turns out that the exponential effects of population dynamics means that the age of first mating is many times more determinative of the size of the population than any other factor. Even if you have only a few puppies per litter and only come into heat once a year, breeding young means that you will fit in more generations in any given amount of time.

The show community breeds sooner and more often than any other estate. It’s part of the game. If you want to make your dog look distinctive to your kennel and you have some physical ideal that you’re working toward, you’re not going to get there simply by finding a good stud and a good bitch. You’re going to need to inbreed and line breed and go through several intermediate generations until your flavor “breeds true.”

If your dog gets their championship young but you don’t think it has a shot at being nationally campaigned, then you’re out of the sport until you get a new puppy. Almost all of the “for fun” conformation show people show until they get a championship and then stop if they are not breeders. The same is true of many herding breeders as well, because the cost/benefit for taking a herding dog on a national campaign is poor.

The Dog Sport world is diverse in interest and diverse in breeding. Many people rescue dogs instead of breed them and there is a beautifully efficient effect where Border Collies that are put into shelters simply because they needed an activity find owners who take them out and train them and fulfill that need. Dog sports engender good breeding karma even when you’re not breeding.

The dog sport world also has every reason to breed for health and temperament. Sure, you need a healthy dog to work sheep, but when you have a fluid market and a lot of dogs are only as good as their work, killing sick dogs and getting new ones is just as attractive an option as expensive veterinary treatments or pre-breeding testing. The show folks DNA test because they have to. The cultural acceptance of inbreeding and the excess to which they do it and the speed with which they breed new generations means that disease genes that exist all over the Border Collie genome get seriously magnified by the show community. They increase genetic entropy.

Because the dog sport people often treat their dogs like children and keep them for their whole life, they have a vested interest in getting a healthier product as well as putting a greater emphasis on temperament and early socialization. These dogs have to live in the city with other dogs and cars and garbage and all the dangers and temptations that doing so entails. They live in homes and sleep in beds. These are needs that are not necessarily met by all herding breeders.

Whereas show people are easily tempted to but ribbons above other concerns, and whereas trialers are easily tempted to put shiny belt buckles above other concerns, most dog sport athlete owners would rather have a perfect pet and an imperfect athlete versus the opposite. I don’t believe the show or herding folks can say the same.

The dog sport world also offers a wonderful metric by which to judge quality and demonstrate ability. Herding folks will say that no metric is superior to stock work, but these people already have their own metric and have little experience in others. Despite them saying it often, the notion that a dog bred specifically and only to herd is maximally competitive in any “lesser” persuit like frisbee or flyball or agility is a lie. Herding dogs don’t need to be as fast as Flyball dogs can be, nor do they need to have the eye-mouth coordination. They don’t need to jump as high as Frisbee dogs can, they don’t need to track and catch a flying object, and they don’t need to be comfortable jumping off of their handler’s body. Nor do they need to excel at turn on a dime close handling like Agility dogs do. Nor do they need to be as calm and militaristic as Obedience dogs.

Dog sports have their own requirements and people should, will, and need to breed with those concerns in mind. The very raison d’etre for dog breeds is to have predictable behaviors and similar abilities. Strains within those lines take that notion one step further, when you want to bring out a certain characteristic but in doing so you don’t cross the line into forming a new breed.

Herding Nazis will say that you should call your dog something else if it wasn’t bred to herd. But if they weren’t being hypocrites, American border collies shouldn’t be called BORDER collies at all. That’s a reference to a time and a place very very far away, and since the style of American pasture, sheep, and herding is distinct from the land, sheep, and style used a century ago in the UK, today’s American Border Collie is certainly a distinct creature from the BCs of old, and so too is US trialing culture different from UK trialing culture: more women, more jeans and less tweed, more varieties and styles of border collies (less racism against red dogs, greater preference for shorter coats more appropriate for arid Western pasture, etc).

This is a moot point though, because the herding folks tried to capture the “Border Collie” brand to prevent the AKC from calling their show dogs “Border Collies.” They failed. It’s in the public domain and the definition is essentially determined by the masses.

They can call the show dogs “barbie” collies all they want, but they don’t have the numbers, the clout, or the connections to the hoi polloi that the Third Estate has.

The Border Collie is the dog people see walking in their neighborhood, the one catching the disc at the park, or the one streaking across the jumps at a summer fair. Those numerous and ubiquitous venues belong to the Third Estate.

Not only is this a warning call for the Third Estate to take their breeding obligations seriously, it is also a wake up call to the Fourth Estate that you can and will find great and talented pets from breeders in the Third Estate. They, much more so than the First or Second Estates are breeding for qualities that you are likely to value. And they are likely to do it without feeding you a load of dogma with your puppy.

** Some Names and Images Changed to Protect the Innocent **

The end is nigh. The apocalypse is upon is. Pigs are flying and they are playing hockey in hell. A “barbie” collie won a USBCHA Open sheep herding trial with 99 out of 100 points. And her coat looked marvelous, absolutely marvelous.

Barbie collies are fluffy, conformation-bred, AKC-registered “border collies” that don’t work stock because they can’t.
- Luisa, Lassie Get Help: Barbie collies, bandana collies and the Unexpected Pit Bull

As fellow dogblogger and Border Collie ‘expert’ Luisa points out, “Barbie Collie” is the name that petty sheep people (shall I call them sheeple?) have cleverly given to AKC (read:conformation) border collies to demean them en masse as being hollow headed, shallow, and callow…or at least victims of people who are. Famed Border Collie author and anti-AKC crusader Donald McCaig agrees:

I am happy to say that the AKC’s virtual Border Collie is widely and popularly known as the “Barbie Collie.”
- Donald McCaig, The Dog Wars p.154

Apparently, the sheeple forgot that Barbie comes in a Stanford model. And in case you’re not familiar with my alma mater, it’s the premier academic and athletic university in the nation and there’s an oft told anecdote that Playboy rated Stanford “Top 10″ in their beautiful undergrad survey. Apparently you can be brainy, brawny, and beautiful.

I can forgive Donald McCaig and the trialing community for the slight, since I’ve never really believed that anyone can “love the sinner, hate the sin.” In this case, sheeple hate the sinner (AKC), hate the sin (breeding for looks) and so why shouldn’t they belittle the spawn of such evilness? I know he has a Scottish name, and I know he has Scottish dogs, but you really can’t expect all Scots to be Rob Roy and embrace the bastard child of your aristocratic arch nemesis after he raped your wife and raise the little cuss as your own. Plus, I don’t think very many sheeple made it to the movies to see Rob Roy in 1995 to be inspired by Liam Neeson’s magnanimity, they were too busy protesting Babe.

Donald McCaig forgot to mention in his recent Dog Wars that he and his two dogs were soundly beaten by the barbie collie at the *National Finals* last year. That’s right, a barbie collie qualified for the National Finals and beat 95 of the 144 dogs there. Don’t expect to read about it in McCaig’s next book, “If (Good) Looks Can Kill” either.

The National Double Lift Finals are run tournament style with the Open Draw of 140+ dogs cut down to the Semi Finals with 40 dogs, and the Finals with 17 dogs. These are the best dogs and handlers in the nation and they have to qualify to be invited by scoring a minimum number of points during eligible trials throughout the year.

The 2006 USBCHA National Finals were held in Klamath Falls, Oregon and all the “big hats” were there. During the first round, where only the top 40 scores out of 140 dogs advance, a full fledged “Barbie” Collie named “Davidson” (who didn’t want to be identified by name for this story) finished in the top 50 dogs only 2 points out of breaking with a score of 131. Davidson’s owner and trainer “Andi Sandersen” (who also didn’t want to be identified by name for this story) was also running another dog, who came in 27th and broke to the semis with a score of 142.
Given their very respectable finish, it’s no surprise that “Andi” and “Davidson” beat out some of the top teams in the nation, including both of Donald McCaig’s dogs, and top teams like Derek Fisher and Heidi, Beverly Lambert and Bill, and Alasdair MacRae and Don. Her number 2 dog beat their number 2 dogs.

Davidson and both of his parents are conformation champions in the AKC and thus his line will never be allowed in the ABCA genepool, regardless of their merit. Not even if Andi went through the brutal Register On Merit program:

A video of the dog working livestock must be supplied to each member of the ROM Committee. That Committee will make a recommendation whether to refer to the full Board of Directors or not. If referred to the full Board, a video of the dog working livestock must be supplied to the rest of the Directors unless some of them have seen the dog and do not need a video.

A. Written proof that the dog seeking registration on merit has placed in the top 10% of three open, advertised National style and size trials judged under ISDS or USBCHA rules.

B. To pass the working qualifications, the dog must demonstrate outstanding abilities in outrun, lift, fetch, driving, and must satisfy the Directors as to his good balance, power, and eye. At least three of the Directors must see the dog in person working livestock at a place other than his home on livestock that he is not used to.

In all cases, at least three Directors must see the dog seeking registration on merit and 11 of the 12 Directors must vote to approve the dog for registration.

The objective requirements are strict, but perfectly reasonable if you’re willing to accept the mantra that a good trialing dog is the exact same thing as a good working dog. I submit that trialing is a game, not work. Think of the difference between shooters and hunters, boxers and street fighters, NASCAR and real bootleggers. When work is elevated to sport, fundamental things change, and little things that are unimportant in the field become critical in the arena.

But I’ll let that slide for now, no one would disagree that even though trialing might not be true work, it’s magnitudes more relevant to assessing working dogs than a beauty contest is.

The reason the ABCA ROM program is a brick wall is not so much the high standards for trialing (it does say any USBCHA trial, not just the National Finals) but the 11 out of 12 vote. Getting 91.7% of any group to agree on anything is a nearly impossible task, and the ABCA couldn’t even get all three Border Collie registries on board to fight the AKC.

Again, not that it matters because an AKC dog could win every major trial in the world and still be ineligible, and all of his offspring ineligible, for ABCA registration.

Davidson didn’t win last year’s National Finals, but she did come in first out of a field of 18 dogs in August at the USBCHA sanctioned California State Fair trial. Andi and her dogs took first and second in that trial last year, along with several other first place wins at USBCHA trials.

Now, Andi is not a sheep insider. Quite the opposite. She got into sheep trialing because of an AKC breeder:

“[Davidson]” was a gift to “[Andi's]” daughter as she wanted a Border Collie to show in conformation shows. As per the co-ownership contract, “Davidson” was brought to sheep one day to see what herding capabilities she had. “Davidson” showed lots of potential. From that day on “Andi” got bit by the herding bug! Together, “Andi” and “Davidson” have achieved amazing wins in both AKC, AHBA and USBCHA sanctioned herding trials! Besides earning her breed championship and herding championship titles, “Andi” and “Davidson” have garnered several wins at the Pro Novice level and now compete at the Open level in USBCHA trials many times placing in the top ten!
- “Danice JeMello,” “Nob Hob Border Collies”

An AKC breeder who makes her Barbie Collie buyers take their dogs out to work sheep? Simply mind blowing. Impossible. The sky must be falling and the oceans drying up. The unthinkable has happened and the only explanation is a fundamental disconnect between space and time, cause and effect, and the separation of good and evil.

Or the simple observation that demeaning a large group of varied dogs and breeders with a single shallow phrase is pointless. The sheeple could simply allow merit to show through without all the insults, but they can’t. They’ve even stipulated that the ABCA’s prize money only be given to ABCA registered dogs. Sure, come and compete, but you won’t get a cent of our money even if your Barbie Collie can herd.

I can tell you now that this won’t be the last time a Barbie Collie wins a sheep trial, but it will be the last time that the sheeple can pretend that it will never happen. Barbie Collies can herd? Yes, Barbie Collies can herd.

• The First Estate of the Border Collie is as a working stock dog.
• The Second Estate of the Border Collie is as a conformation show dog.
• The Third Estate of the Border Collie is as a dog sport athlete.
• The Fourth Estate of the Border Collie is as a house pet.

Purists in the first estate will be pleased with their ranking, but this list is not judgmental, nor preferential. It does not extend from most important to least important, but rather from monolithic to democratic, from specific and narrow to diverse and broad. Fundamentally, the list documents the history of formal organization. You might argue that conformation showing is the most monolithic and the most specific, and you’d be right, but it is far behind trialing in history and in moral ownership of the breed.

I firmly believe that the Third Estate of the Border Collie is a significant player in the future of the Border Collie, unadorned with romantic history and unbound by a rigid and arbitrary “breed standard.” The Third Estate is a meritocracy like the first estate but is not blinded to the full potential of the Border Collie. The Third Estate is more numerous than the first two estates combined, an readily accepts more converts from the Fourth Estate than either of the first two.

Many ranchers and trialers got into Border Collies because they were in stock first. Many conformation breeders got into Border Collies after they were in another breed first. I’d venture to say that the flow of traffic from rancher -> border collie enabled rancher and conformation breeder -> border collie conformation breeder is larger and more significant than the traffic from border collie owner into either showing or ranching.

The dog sport communities and the pet communities on the other hand have great inter-mobility. There are many other breeds in dog sports, although when the ability of the Border Collie shines through, many serious competitors in other breeds upgrade to a BC. Those that don’t upgrade are forced and inspired to improve their own breeds to be competitive. There are also many Border Collie pets that inspire their novice owners to get into a meaningful activity when normal house pet duties are insufficient fare for the BC.

Dog sports are fun and inviting, and dog sport people have more avenues for training than either of the first two estates. It’s easy and convenient to pick a dog sport and find several training centers in your area, competitive clubs who will help you get trained and involved, and a free market of avenues to compete, from the non-serious fun variety to super competitive avenues that lead to sponsorships and world travel. Neither herding nor conformation can say the same.

The Border Collie was developed as a working stock dog, and it is still used widely for this purpose today. That being said, no one today developed the border collie. That was done at the same time all the other breeds came about as part of the Victorian fancy for eugenics and a growing sophistication of farmers in creating hybrid crops. Remember, the pivotal moment in genetics research came from a bean grower:

The science began to evolve in 1865 when Gregor Mendel, an Austrian botanist and monk, identified what he called “hereditary factors” — now known as genes. Three years later, Friedrich Miescher, a Swiss biologist, unknowingly discovered DNA — deoxyribonucleic acid. In 1876, Charles Darwin conducted experiments in breeding and published Cross and Self Fertilization in the Vegetable Kingdom. A year after that, William Beal, a renowned horticulturist at Michigan Agricultural College (later Michigan State University), established the first seed testing laboratory in the United States and was the first person to cross-pollinate corn to increase yields. His research demonstrated to farmers the advantages of hybrid vigor.
- Plant Breeding and Genetics: Harvesting the Power of DNA

The breed name and the romantic breed history evoke images of well dressed pasty men with lilting accents or thick brogues on lush green pastures with idyllic cloud-puff sheep milling about as the perfect dog keeps it all in order. If such images were ever true, they are not true now. Today’s shepherd is adopting the trappings of an idealized past culture just as much as today’s cowboys of the American West are adopting the trappings of another idealized past culture. This isn’t artifice, it’s natural cultural inheritance. But in both cases, these are not the good old days, those are past. These are the good old days of the dog sport athlete.

The American herding community owes much of its culture to both of the past cultures I just mentioned, the gentleman rancher from the UK and the American cowboy. Despite their many attempts to, the American herding community can’t honestly play the “we made the breed card.” They might have a good case for the Australian Shepherd and the McNab, but the romantic Border Collie will always be a product of the UK. You might take the ISDS’s decision to recognize the ABCA as the inheritors of the old guard giving respect to the new guard who has finally lived up to their standards. You might also see it as a herding community in England that is becoming increasingly smaller and less significant reaching out to their colony in America who is doing much better, bloated with legions of border collie house pet registrations.

I’m sure there are many who would say that conformation showing is crippling the breed in England, but I have yet to be convinced that any shepherd need ever seek an outside source for their dogs. If there is a dearth of quality herding BCs in the UK, it’s because the herders aren’t maintaining their own house. Holding on to a past culture is strong and weak for the very same reason: the past doesn’t change. While it is successful and logical to take what works from the past and sustain it, it also means that elements from that saved history become less relevant every day as modernity and entropy make the past more foreign and obscure.

Herding might be really fun for the dog, but I have no fondness for sheep. Herding is also the least inviting of the estates. Not only are the small elite group old and cranky, they are elitist and differentiate themselves culturally in numerous ways.

In sheepdog culture speech is laconic, and praise for man or dog understated. It can be funny to wacth the newly obsessed adapt to that culture that nurtures their dogs. As his (her) dogs improve, many a previously garrulous suburbanite stats to mutter like John Wayne.
…
Sheepdog trialing does not attract many young people, but handlers in their seventies are unexceptional.
- Donald McCaig, The Dog Wars p17 & 23

Herding is also inaccessible because sheep are sparse and rural and trainers are hard to find and expensive. I can train in flyball for $10 per two hour class. I can train in Agility for $8 per 90 minute drop-in or two dogs for $10, with in depth introductory classes easily less than $20 per hour. Frisbee is the cost of the disc and a nominal fee for Spring Training. Herding costs me $25 for one dog and $30-40 for two dogs per hour, and those appear to be the market rates. Herding has the most expensive overhead and flyball has the least.

You can’t herd on your own unless you have a significant investment in land, sheep, equipment, and investment money to start and run a small business. You literally have to be a sheep rancher or serious hobbyist living in the country to play that game. Many trialers who have sheep and a bit of land don’t have enough of it to be competitive at the upper levels, so they increase the overhead and truck their sheep to other people’s ranches to practice 600-800 yard outruns and nasty terrain and such. Herding is clearly a career and lifestyle choice not many are willing to adopt.

Conformation is boring for human and dog. It’s also an exclusive club because it’s inherently subjective. Even if you have a beautiful dog with great conformation, you won’t be welcomed with open arms. It’s a lot about who you know and who you bought from and their status. There is an art to showing since you’re sending signals to judges about how well prepared you are and thus how likely it is that you should win. In any event where the judging is subjective, you will find favoritism that is unexplainable by probability and chance. When one hot dog sweeps several shows in a row, taking Best In Show against a few thousand dogs each show, it is simply unfathomable that it’s not fixed. Breed standards are vague, so in any given ring you could make a clear case that all the dogs have no faults, so to have hot dogs win again and again is a signal that the game you think is being played is not the game that is really being played.

Judges supposedly don’t know the name and breeder of the dogs in the ring, but this is a small community and kennels try hard to develop their own look. You’ll hear it in the language: “that’s a Wizaland head” or “those are Borderfame ears” and such. It’s also not difficult to recognize a dog, a handler, or a breeder if they are campaigning the dog. It’s also simple to cheat as the judge reading the list of dogs before the show or during the show as they fill out rankings for the breeds they are currently judging to see what arm band number corresponds to which dog.

You have to buy into this sport and it’s advisable to buy from the winning lines with a breeder who is actively showing. They have an incentive to help you along (and they might co-own your dog and are making you show) to help their breeding program along. You might find that you put in a lot of time and effort and the credit goes to the breeder. They did make the dog pretty after all.

It’s also expensive. Grooming overhead can be massive. It’s why the two most popular professions in the showing community are hair stylists and lawyers. One has expertise in the only real investment the owner makes: grooming. The other has expertise in the schmoozing and social climbing with back door deals that make the show world go round.

Showing doesn’t lend it self to small incremental investments in time, money, and effort. It really requires a balls out effort and a high buy-in cost to make a go at it and get any kind of results that will please your ego and sustain interest in the hobby. Most breeders do this because they see benefits down the road. They meet potential buyers, they earn a championship for their stock, and this improves their reputation and their ability to sell puppies to the masses.

Conformation is something people do because they are already breeding, it is not a means to graduate to breeding for something you already do. As far as the upper levels of show culture goes, the Border Collie is hopeless. The Herding Group is the bastard cousin of the show world and in the entire history of the group’s existence at the Westminster dog show (1983 on), the only herding group best in show came from a German Shepherd (which is genetically and functionally the least like the other herding breeds, it is a mastiff in sheepherder’s clothing) and he was owned and showed by a Firestone heiress. Before getting its own designation in 1983, the dogs which would eventually make up the Herding Group only won Best in Show three other times: A Rough Collie in 1929 and an Old English Sheep Dog in 1914 and 1975.

I also have a fundamental atheism to any written breed standard. There is no logic or value behind one, especially for the Border Collie. I have to refrain from laughing when people try to explain “and why do we need straight hocks, well to herd well, of course!” The breed standard is to the conformation community what the bible is to most Christians. Most haven’t read it, and despite being referenced often, the words don’t determine what wins, fads do. If you read the BC standard and then look at the top winning BCs, you’ll see that there is an implied standard that speaks to fashion fads, not the words on the page.

Pet owners, the Fourth Estate, might have the least clout and moral ownership of the breed, but every economy has businesses and consumers, and consumer demand drives many business decisions. The Fourth Estate is the consumer base for the breeders who belong in the first three estates. Anyone breeding to herd, show, or compete is going to create more puppies than they need. Those puppies need to be sold.

The Herding community is the least sophisticated at this process. If they are active trialers and doing well, they will likely have a few fellow trialers who want to try out a puppy from their dog and see what they can do with it. This is just part of the culture that trades dogs like professional teams trade athletes. Not all dogs are on the revolving pet circuit, many are pets and “forever” dogs, but a good number of dogs move around the country for various reasons, in full accordance with market forces. The herding community is unlikely to sell their dogs cheap, but they are also unlikely to do genetic testing, eye testing, hip testing, and other value-added measures, so the dogs aren’t sold at a premium. Some dogs come with papers, some not. Most are purebred, some are crosses with other herding breeds like the McNab.

Conformation stock is rarely traded or sold. Unlike herding dogs that might not work out with their current owner’s style but can flourish under another handler, a show dog is not likely to be helped by being traded. Showing also requires little training (stand still, walk straight, put your feet here, keep your tail down and your ears up) and the prime age of operation is less than two years. Many dogs get their championships as puppies under a year old. Since the dog can “compete” at such a young age, there is much more interest in spreading the seed of top stud dogs around than there is in trading dogs.

Since dogs can win so young, they can also be bred young and often. This is the key factor in population dynamics. If you look at any healthy breeding population that is growing, there are several factors that determine how fast the population grows: number of offspring per litter, how often one generation breeds (comes into heat), the average age of first mating. It turns out that the exponential effects of population dynamics means that the age of first mating is many times more determinative of the size of the population than any other factor. Even if you have only a few puppies per litter and only come into heat once a year, breeding young means that you will fit in more generations in any given amount of time.

The show community breeds sooner and more often than any other estate. It’s part of the game. If you want to make your dog look distinctive to your kennel and you have some physical ideal that you’re working toward, you’re not going to get there simply by finding a good stud and a good bitch. You’re going to need to inbreed and line breed and go through several intermediate generations until your flavor “breeds true.”

If your dog gets their championship young but you don’t think it has a shot at being nationally campaigned, then you’re out of the sport until you get a new puppy. Almost all of the “for fun” conformation show people show until they get a championship and then stop if they are not breeders. The same is true of many herding breeders as well, because the cost/benefit for taking a herding dog on a national campaign is poor.

The Dog Sport world is diverse in interest and diverse in breeding. Many people rescue dogs instead of breed them and there is a beautifully efficient effect where Border Collies that are put into shelters simply because they needed an activity find owners who take them out and train them and fulfill that need. Dog sports engender good breeding karma even when you’re not breeding.

The dog sport world also has every reason to breed for health and temperament. Sure, you need a healthy dog to work sheep, but when you have a fluid market and a lot of dogs are only as good as their work, killing sick dogs and getting new ones is just as attractive an option as expensive veterinary treatments or pre-breeding testing. The show folks DNA test because they have to. The cultural acceptance of inbreeding and the excess to which they do it and the speed with which they breed new generations means that disease genes that exist all over the Border Collie genome get seriously magnified by the show community. They increase genetic entropy.

Because the dog sport people often treat their dogs like children and keep them for their whole life, they have a vested interest in getting a healthier product as well as putting a greater emphasis on temperament and early socialization. These dogs have to live in the city with other dogs and cars and garbage and all the dangers and temptations that doing so entails. They live in homes and sleep in beds. These are needs that are not necessarily met by all herding breeders.

Whereas show people are easily tempted to but ribbons above other concerns, and whereas trialers are easily tempted to put shiny belt buckles above other concerns, most dog sport athlete owners would rather have a perfect pet and an imperfect athlete versus the opposite. I don’t believe the show or herding folks can say the same.

The dog sport world also offers a wonderful metric by which to judge quality and demonstrate ability. Herding folks will say that no metric is superior to stock work, but these people already have their own metric and have little experience in others. Despite them saying it often, the notion that a dog bred specifically and only to herd is maximally competitive in any “lesser” persuit like frisbee or flyball or agility is a lie. Herding dogs don’t need to be as fast as Flyball dogs can be, nor do they need to have the eye-mouth coordination. They don’t need to jump as high as Frisbee dogs can, they don’t need to track and catch a flying object, and they don’t need to be comfortable jumping off of their handler’s body. Nor do they need to excel at turn on a dime close handling like Agility dogs do. Nor do they need to be as calm and militaristic as Obedience dogs.

Dog sports have their own requirements and people should, will, and need to breed with those concerns in mind. The very raison d’etre for dog breeds is to have predictable behaviors and similar abilities. Strains within those lines take that notion one step further, when you want to bring out a certain characteristic but in doing so you don’t cross the line into forming a new breed.

Herding Nazis will say that you should call your dog something else if it wasn’t bred to herd. But if they weren’t being hypocrites, American border collies shouldn’t be called BORDER collies at all. That’s a reference to a time and a place very very far away, and since the style of American pasture, sheep, and herding is distinct from the land, sheep, and style used a century ago in the UK, today’s American Border Collie is certainly a distinct creature from the BCs of old, and so too is US trialing culture different from UK trialing culture: more women, more jeans and less tweed, more varieties and styles of border collies (less racism against red dogs, greater preference for shorter coats more appropriate for arid Western pasture, etc).

This is a moot point though, because the herding folks tried to capture the “Border Collie” brand to prevent the AKC from calling their show dogs “Border Collies.” They failed. It’s in the public domain and the definition is essentially determined by the masses.

They can call the show dogs “barbie” collies all they want, but they don’t have the numbers, the clout, or the connections to the hoi polloi that the Third Estate has.

The Border Collie is the dog people see walking in their neighborhood, the one catching the disc at the park, or the one streaking across the jumps at a summer fair. Those numerous and ubiquitous venues belong to the Third Estate.

Not only is this a warning call for the Third Estate to take their breeding obligations seriously, it is also a wake up call to the Fourth Estate that you can and will find great and talented pets from breeders in the Third Estate. They, much more so than the First or Second Estates are breeding for qualities that you are likely to value. And they are likely to do it without feeding you a load of dogma with your puppy.

Although McCaig uses the petition to demonstrate the general consensus against AKC recognition back in 1994, the current political affiliation of many of the people on the list is an interesting story that is not detailed in McCaig’s book.

There are significant defections in both directions: former AKC superstars are now novice sheep handlers and others who were vehemently opposed to AKC recognition because of the ills of conformation now have a resume of Border Collies with show titles.

Arthur Allen, President, North American Sheepdog Society
Deceased.

Arthur N. Allen, 92, of McLeansboro, died at 10:30 a.m. on Thursday, October 24th, 1996, at Deaconess Hospital in Evansville, Indiana.

Mr. Allen was born May 4, 1904 in Hamilton County, a son of John Logan and Martha Gertrude (Nation) Allen. He was married twice, to Mary O’Neal, now deceased, and to Sarah Evelyn Reed, who survives. He was a retired farmer and livestock operator. He trained border collie sheep dogs and performed exhibitions all over the United States and Canada and was a 25 year National Champion sheep dog handler. Mr. Allen also appeared with several western movie stars during his career. He also starred and appeared in several Walt Disney movies and TV productions. He was a member of the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association. He was a member of the New Hope Primitive Baptist Church.

One of the lesser known Arthur Allen roles was shot for the Mickey Mouse Club series:

Four episode dramatic series set in Illinois. Bobby Evans played Rob Brown, who tries to train a border collie to be a sheep dog for a contest. He succeeds with the help of an old trainer, played by Arthur N. Allen. The narrator was Alvy Moore, and the working title of the series was The Scamp.

Sharon Anderson, Trainer, OTCH

Sharon Anderson is now the Director of Agility for the AKC.

Sharon Anderson has been involved in American Kennel Club activities since 1972 when she began showing German Shepherds in conformation and obedience. She earned her first agility title on a Golden Retriever in 1988 and founded one of the largest agility clubs in existence today. Sharon has served as captain of the American Kennel Club World Agility Team since 1996. The teams have earned gold and silver medals in past events including defeating 30 countries in Portugal in 2001.

In addition to her extensive experience with agility, Sharon holds many obedience titles including the top honor of Obedience Trial Champion. Sharon’s extensive experience covers many aspects of obedience, ranging from puppy class to competitive obedience, agility, and flyball. She has also been involved in tracking and fieldwork.

Complementary to her hands-on role within the sport, Sharon has held offices in clubs ranging from President to Trial Chairperson. She was on the first advisory board for AKC Agility in 1993. Before becoming the Director of Agility, Sharon was an agility consultant and Field Representative for the AKC. Sharon has worked frequently on radio call-in programs ( public radio and national broadcast stations) answering various questions relating to dogs and Sharon has appeared on several television shows including The Caroline Rhea Show.

Through the years, Sharon has honed her skills by working with virtually every breed of purebred dog while owning three large obedience training schools. She currently lives in Minnesota with her Shetland Sheepdog, Border Collie and Parson Russell Terrier.

Chris Bach, Numerous Gaines Placements
Former Director USBCC.

Chris gives training and behavior seminars across the United States and Canada. Chris is a charter board member of the very prestigious International Association of Animal Behavior Consultants. She was asked to join the distinguished American Humane Association committee, which brought together top U.S. trainers to build a code of ethics and guidelines for logical and humane dog training. She wrote a series of articles for a renowned dog training magazine Front and Finish, and she continues to author manuscripts about THE THIRD WAY.

Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin, is home to Chris, her wonderful and supportive husband, Bill, and their precious pooches Belgian Malinois, Brass, and Border Collie, Stunner.

Her Border Collie Stunner’s full name and AKC registration is:
Top Gun Stungunned My Heart DN11659306 M 08/02/2005

out of: Top Gun Kit (DN04996301 / ABCA 186234) X Lukan’s Don’t Stop Me Now CDX MX MXJ (DL81104201 / N66767)
Neither parent is involved with conformation. Stunner was bred by Les & Diane Sanders who run Contact Sports Agility which promotes USDAA sanctioned agility trials. Unlike McCaig’s claim that no one wants to compete with the AKC in Agility, the USDAA does a pretty good job of it.

Bonnie Barry, 2 OTCH, Gaines & World Series Placements
Deceased.
Former Director USBCC.

Mrs. Barry, 64, died Sunday, Feb. 26, 2006 as a result of an injury she received at a sheep-herding clinic Jan. 28 in North Carolina. While it appeared that she took a minor fall, eventually she was diagnosed as having a spinal-cord fracture. She died after almost a month in Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, a time during which she was able to see and say goodbye to friends and family.” In the end, there was a final lesson: how to die with grace.”

Bonnie was a Director of the USBCC for several years and competed at the Open Level in sheep trials. Only weeks before her accident, Bonnie helped run the Lazy J Classic Sheep herding Trial that was held in Carnesville, Georgia. She sponsored the Fox Valley Dog Training Club’s yearly Founders Award to in memory of the founders of the club. It was given to the handler whose dog earned the 3 highest scores in regular classes at AKC Obedience trials. The Red Creek Farm Sheep Trial awards The Bonnie Barry Memorial Award to the handler with the highest score in the Open division.

She became involved in dog obedience with the Doberman breed, gaining her first advanced titles with a dog named Libby. In 1984 she opened Northern Illinois Canine Education and also served as director of training with the Northwest Obedience Club.Her work with border collies gained her the Obedience Trial Championship four times. Her dogs were nationally ranked for more than a decade, and Mrs. Barry became one of the stars of the sport and a regular competitor at the prestigious annual Gaines Tournaments.

Robert Barlow, President, American Border Collie Association

Robert is credited as one of the few names on the short list of “ol timers” who have been active in the trialing community since the 1960s. The weight of his experience hasn’t slowed him down any, as Robert is currently running two dogs in Open Trials, Mai and Todd.

Robert occasionally offers pups for sale through his Barlow’s Border Collies in Tennessee, the most recent litter was on the ground this spring.

Although it might just be a coincidence, the chivalrous foil and almost-love-interest to the female protagonist in McCaig’s Nop’s Hope just happens to be named Ransome Barlow.

Bill Berhow, Winner, National Sheepdog Trial Finals 1989 and 1990

Bill still competes in USBCHA Open trials and gives herding and trialing clinics around the country. He’s the only handler to have two dogs in the ABCA’s Hall of Fame (1998 Nick ABC 1778, and 2000 Jen ABC 5728). He currently has two dogs ranked in the Open Trial division, Mike and Pete.

George Bernard, Vice President American Boarding Kennel Association & CKO

Became President of the ABKA and President of the Federal Trade Association for Kennels. His current Border Collie registry affiliation is unknown.

Winnie Bigelow, OTCH, Numerous Honors
Deceased?

The only thing google knows is that a donation “In Memory of Winnie Bigelow” was made to the International Wolf Center in 2002.

Ethel Conrad, President United States Border Collie Club

Ethel has graduated from President to Chairman Emeritus of the USBCC.

Ethel Conrad got her first Border Collie in the 1960s, and began participating in AKC obedience and tracking trials in the early 1970s. At that time there were only two or three Border Collies competing on the east coast, and judges would ask her what kind of dog she had. She got a UDT, CDXTD (dog was injured before she could get a third utility leg) and two CDTD’s. (There was no OTCH then.) She then got very interested in herding and for nearly 20 years she has been a frequent competitor and winner in sheep dog trials. She has qualified six dogs to run in the UBCHA finals, several more than once. She was one of the founders of the USBCC in 1975, and its first co-president. Since 1976 she has put on 36 sheep dog handlers training clinics, five judges’ clinics, and 13 major sheep dog trials at her home, Sunnybrook Farm. She regularly performs herding demonstrations, including one on the David Letterman Show and one on the Mall in Washington for the Department of Agriculture.

Gail Dapogny, Two World Series Wins

Gail Dapogny is now a Director of the USBCC

Gail Dapogny is a potter in Michigan. She is currently Secretary of the Michigan Border Collie Association, and has been active in USBCC since 1977, having served as Newsletter Editor for 13 years before becoming a Director. She got her first Border Collie, Moss, in 1975, and put a UD on him with several HITs. Her second Border Collie, OTCH Nell, was for a couple of years the second-ranked obedience BC in the country. She had a couple dozen all-breed AKC HITs, had several Gaines Regional and Classic tournament placings, and won the World Series Tournament, Open Division, two different years. Gail now teaches obedience, and is training her current four BCs in obedience and herding.

Janice DeMello, 3 OTCH, Gaines Wins

Janice DeMello made her name in AKC Obedience. She is a first class trainer and competitor. She has published training videos like, “Around the Clock Method of Scent Discrimination” and “Cruise Control for Power Heeling,” which are holy canon for competitors in Obedience and Freestyle, based on the experience she gained training her own dogs to numerous championships and competition firsts. Her success has become a brand and Janice graduated from competitor to trainer to big time breeder. Not only is Janice expanding her horizons into herding, dogs she has bred are topping the charts in USBCHA sponsored trials, even qualifying for the National Finals.

Eric Engberg, News Correspondent

Eric retired in 2002. He wrote an OpEd that argued blogging is “typing, not journalism.” Mind you, he published that article AFTER his “journalism” alma mater ran with a bogus story about a bogus memo leading to the disgrace of Dan Rather, exposed by the blogosphere. Self proclaimed dinosaur. Is one of the examples of a liberal biased reporter in the book, Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News. I don’t think he ever owned a Border Collie.

Bruce Fogt, Winner National Sheepdog Trial Finals 1987

Bruce and his wife Linda still run more than a handful of dogs at the Open level in USBCHA sanctioned trials and are the publishers of The Working Border Collie magazine.

Jerusha Gurvin, 2 OTCH, Numerous Honors

Jerusha continued to excel on the AKC competition circuit after recognition: MACH One Night Stand UD NAP NJP DL72563301. One Night Stand was born 9/1997 after the split, and has an impressive list of Agility and Obedience accomplishments. Her other MACH dog is Oakdale Deacon UD DL81104901 and he was born in 1999. Jerusha also runs Capital Leashes, a custom leash and collar boutique in Maryland.

Margie Gibbs, Trainer

Marge Gibbs is a dog behavior columnist at the AKC Gazette and has been since the 1970s. Wrote, “Leader Dogs for the Blind” which is still available from the Working Dogs Book Store and Amazon. Ironically, she also owned a blind Border Collie whom she was the seeing eye person for.

In response to the question, “Which animal would make a better editor—a cat or a dog?” Gibbs doesn’t seem to think that the Border Collie has lost all that much steam since AKC recognition:

I don’t think I’d hire a cat—it would certainly be a finicky perfectionist, but it would never agree to stick to the house style rules, or work to anyone else’s deadline.

If I hired a dog, it would depend on the breed. A sheltie or German shepherd would be methodical, thorough, and prompt. A golden retriever would be good for a first-time author, offering encouragement, patience, and a sympathetic ear, as well as doing an intelligent job.

A border collie would speed-read the text, give it a withering look of scorn, and rewrite the book itself. The dog’s version would be better than the original, and wouldn’t need an editor.

Sally Glei, OTCH, Gaines Placements

Board member of the Piedmont Border Collie Association. The PBCA runs AKC Agility and Herding Trials. Sally teaches a course called “Dog Training with a Personal Touch in a Positive Way.” She also breeds border collies under the Tystar name and a google search will reveal that many of them have multiple titles before and after their names, including a conformation champion here and there. (e.g. OTCH MACH Tystar Meg UDX6 VCN2 HSAs, OTCH Tystar’s Third Edition HSAs HSBs AX AXJ, Ch OTCH Tystar Riot UDX TD AX)

She also happens to be running two of her dogs this year in USBCHA Sheep dog trials, most recently the trial at Seclusival Farm where she came in third in ProNovice 2 and fourth in Novice 2 with her other dog.

Bob Griner, #1 Obedience Border Collie in U.S.

Mr. Griner is a United Kennel Club Obedience Judge. He teaches the United Kennel Club Obedience Regulations Seminar.

Kay and Dick Guetzloff, Kennel Ration Dog of the Year, Gaines Winner

Although McCaig and the other BC crusaders used a letter of protest from Mrs. Guetzloff to convince the AKC to leave the Border Collie alone, it wasn’t long before the AKC welcomed Kay and her dog into their fold:

The handout [for the AKC board] contained… a protest from Kay Guetzloff whose obedience Border Collie Sweep was the highest ranking AKC obedience dog in history…
- The Border Wars p107

What McCaig forgot to tell you was:

In 2001 Heelalong was greatly honored when Sweep was inducted into the AKC Dog Museum “Hall of Fame” which is located in St. Louis, Mo. The Hall of fame is located in the lower level of museum. This museum is well worth a visit since it documents the history of the AKC and also honors dogs in other categories, like “media” dogs and search and rescue groups. The AKC started the Hall of Fame in the ‘70’s and had periodically inducted dogs every 5 or so years. Sweep is the first border collie to grace those hallowed walls. Along with this honor we received a commemorative bronze trophy depicting several breeds involved in different events.

Despite their protest being a key piece of the package of evidence delivered to the AKC by McCaig and company, it only took a gigantic bronze trophy, a painted mural in their dog’s likeness, and a glowing write up taking up space in prime New York real estate to bring the Guetzloff’s around. I wish the AKC was still as charitable to win BC owners’ favor.

As you might expect, the Guetzloffs bred many a BC and some of their dogs have gone on to win conformation champtionships, like Ch. OTCH, MACH-2 Heelalong Hi Flying Red Kite UDX, HSAs. Despite adding conformation to their bag of tricks, the Guetzloff’s explain their philosophy:

In 1980 we imported our first border collies from the British Isles. In that era the border collie was only eligible to compete in AKC obedience trials – dog agility had not been discovered, and the AKC did not offer herding titles. How times have changed! We, at Heelalong, feel great dedication to the border collie breed, and through the links on this page you will meet many of the fine dogs we have owned, bred or trained.

The most famous dog we bred is VX OTCH Heelalong Chimney Sweep UDX, AX, AXJ, ROMX, to whom our home page is dedicated. Although Sweep, herself, only whelped two litters of puppies (with Rock as the sire), in 2003 she lead the ROMX list proving that she was not only the top winning obedience border collie of all time, but she was also a top producer of performance dogs.

In 2002, the AKC honored Sweep by inducting her into the Dog Museum, Hall of Fame, the first border collie to be so honored. When the border collie became an AKC recognized breed in 1995, we were convinced that the breed would change substantially, and it has.

Many breeders are breeding for looks only, and the ROM statistics bear this out. Many of the leaders of the ROM list have mostly produced breed champions, with few puppies with titles at both ends.

At Heelalong™ we still breed border collies that look as they did before AKC recognition. The dogs we have bred, that are on the ROMX and ROM lists, are there mainly because of performance titles earned by their puppies, although some of these same dogs went on to earn breed championships, in addition to their performance titles.

Barbara Handler, OTCH, Obedience Judge
Deceased.

Barbara Handler was a force in the AKC Obedience world before and after the split. She published numerous articles on how to train and polish an Obedience dog (Say NO to “NO,” STAY as Sweet as You Are, Words Words Words, etc.), and several books and videos that have become cannon:
Best Foot Forward: The Complete Guide to Obedience Handling – 1984
Positively Obedient: Good Manners for the Family Dog – 1987
Successful Obedience Handling: The New Best Foot Forward – 1991
Successful Obedience Handling – 2000

Vicki Hearne, Trainer. Author of Adam’s Task
Deceased.

Vicki Hearne’s much too early death has left the dog world with a void that may never be filled. Vicki was an author, writer, poet, trainer, and defender of dogs everywhere, and sadly lost her battle with cancer this year at the age of 54.

Dog lovers know Vicki mainly from her books “Bandit: Dossier of a Dangerous Dog” and “Adams Task: Calling Animals By Name,” which are classics – but she has done so much more than we can ever imagine. A powerful writer Vicki had the ability to put her finger on the pulse of dogs and their relationship with people and to write and explain about it in a way which not only made fascinating reading but imparted a message to the heart. She made you think, she created understanding and more than that you fell in love with this lady without ever having to meet her. Vicki was a communications genius both with people and dogs.

The dog world owes a tremendous debt to Vicki Hearne. The International Association of Canine Professionals is Proud to honor Vicki Hearne as our second inductee into the IACP Hall of Fame.

Of note, Donald McCaig wrote the introduction to Adam’s Task.

Debbie Hotze, 2 OTCH, Gaines and World Series Placements

Debbie has put many titles on many dogs from numerous breeds. Her Border Collie resume is impressive: OTCH Jiff TDX, DOG WORLD, HIT 200 Score; U-UD OTCH Quickly TD Can. CDX, DOG WORLD, HIT; CH OTCH Silver UD, DOG WORLD, HIT; Roxie UDT, DOG WORLD, HIT; Bing TD at 7 mo.; Midgeon TD; Streak TD; and Skip TD.

She has also put conformation championships on Border Collies as well: CH Silver, CH Kit, CH Pearle, and CH Zeke.

From the looks of her Brighteye Kennels website, it seems her current taste in dogs has shifted to the larger breeds and away from the Dobermans, Border Collies, and Papillons of her past.

She now breeds and trains Bernese Mountain Dogs and Leonbergers. Her Bernese Mountain Dogs are all over the AKC agility advertising and in numerous other commercial venues like Purina, Sears, and People Magazine ads.

Pat Kaiser, 1st Border Collie OTCH in US, Gaines Winner

According to her posts on the BC Boards in 2004, Pat has 25 acres, 12 sheep, and is a “novice handler” learning the ropes of training her “wild Rob dog” to work sheep. I glean from the messages that she got Rob out of a popular working line and at first the Rob was “too much dog” for her. Her e-mails use “herdsheep” and “wovenwool” as the names, so it appears she’s adopted the herding lifestyle with gusto.

One site also lists Pat as the contact for the “Hoosier Dream Dog Training School” in Indiana, but they don’t have a website or show up on any other pages. Perhaps she sold the business to buy the farm.

It’s worth noting that Pat’s star Obedience dog, OTCH Scherry Star Spider, ROMF TD AIBC 22290/AKC-ILP 012059, was the sire of Kay and Dick Guetzloff’s Sweep, the Border Collie that was inducted into the AKC’s hall of fame for earning 7,981 OTCH points, making her the most winning obedience bitch of all time for lifetime points.

Star Spider was quite the stud dog and has been honored by the Border Collie Society of America (AKC BC Parent Group) for his contribution to the American Obedience and Agility lines:

OFFSPRING of: OTCH Scherry Star Spider ROMF ILP 012059

1. Breeding – Countryside’s Rona AIBC 36950
1. OTCH Brighteye Magic Merlin
2. Brighteye Spider’s Streak TD
3. Meadowstar Kern
4. Scot’s Pride Bracken UD
5. Scot’s Pride Spider Dan UD

2. Breeding – Heelalong Merrie Meg AIBC 35790 CDX
1. Heelalong Lucky Strike UD

3. Breeding – OTCH Shaffner’s Bonnie Lass (ND)
1. Highland’s Spider’s Sting CD

4. Breeding – Molly AIBC 43509
1. Rob AIBC 69829

5. Breeding – Wildfire Anne AIBC 51923
1. Spider’s Boomerang CD
2. Spider’s Kelly of Birdeye UDX NA
3. Spiders Toby
4. Wildfire Spiders Brice
5. Wildfire Spiders Fletcher
6. Wildfire Spiders Ginger
7. Wildfire Spiders Ramcharger
8. Wildfire Spiders Red
9. Wildfire Spiders Socrates AIBC 61628 CD
10. Wildfire Spiders Squeak CD
11. Wildfire Spiders Strike It Rich CD

6. Breeding – Carolina Magic AIBC 39713 UD ROMF
1. OTCH Starfire’s Jugs Johnson
2. Starfire’s Magic Jamie CDX
3. Starfire’s Piece of the Action CD
4. Starfire’s Star UD
5. OTCH Starfire’s Wizard AIBC 58715

7. Breeding 1/27/1985 – Heelalong Merrie Meg AIBC 35790 CDX
1. Heelalong Auburn Blaze AIBC 58845
2. OTCH Heelalong Pippin UDX TD ROM DL581156/01

8. Breeding 8/24/1985 – Heelalong Merrie Meg AIBC 35790 CDX
1. OTCH Heelalong Chimney Sweep UDX AX AXJ ROMX ILP 61861
2. OTCH Heelalong De-Cider UDX TD DL602984/01

9. Breeding 3/26/1986 – OTCH Heelalong Sand Pebble (ND) AIBC 52639
1. Heelalong Austin City Limits UD OA ILP 63134
2. Heelalong Gemini CD
3. OTCH Heelalong Sharp As A Tack UDX ILP 64488
4. Heelalong Slate ILP 64493

… and that’s only half of the list of signatories to the AKC petition. Check back for Part 2.