Champis, the Swedish herding rabbit.

Move over Barbie Collies, there’s a new herder in town that is adorably small, has perfect ear set and has a decidedly fluffy butt.  And he’s not a show Border Collie from Australia, he’s a rabbit from Sweden.

Nils-Eric and Greta employ their granddaughter Hanna’s rabbit named “Champis” on their farm in Käl, Sweden to help herd their sheep. It appears that Champis learned to herd sheep–complete with heading, heeling, eye, and clapping behaviors–from their Border Collie, but this video shows that Champis gets along just fine all by himself and the sheep respect his authority.

"With a rabbit like Champis, who needs a dog?"

Frankly, I’m amazed that the rabbit seems to know what the shepherd wants, just like the Border Collies do; for example, he runs to cut the sheep off from re-entering the barn and he even makes a valiant effort to bring back a sheep that has gone stray, and he’s perfectly willing to stare down a bull headed woolly.

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Read the continuing adventures of Champis the herding rabbit (named after a Swedish soft drink) and his Border Collie friends “Gimmie” and “Fame” on the Gårdsbackens blogg.

Patrick Shannahan and Riggs pen wild mountain sheep at the 2011 National Sheepdog Finals in Carbondale, Colorado

Today is the last day of the 2011 National Sheepdog Finals at the bucolic Strang Ranch in picturesque Carbondale, Colorado.  If all goes well the National Finals might return here every third year alternating between locations on the two cardinal coasts and the “middle” of the country.

You couldn’t ask for a more beautiful venue as the Strang Ranch is nestled in a saddle formation surrounded by high peaks that offer breathtaking views and challenging terrain.  The outrun on the Open Field is long, over 4oo yards, but not longer than the infamous Meeker Trial outrun which is several hundred yards longer.  Even at this distance, the dogs are a small speck on the horizon when they are at the greatest distance.

The sheep are the same though: the infamous mountain Rambouillet range ewes that are neither dog nor people broken unlike the overexposed Dorpers you’ll find at eastern venues.  These sheep are big and wild and have seen few humans at all, the only dog they’ve likely come across before being put out on the field is a Livestock Guardian Dog.

This results in very unpredictable behavior.  At the Nursery field, many of the sheep where dismissive of both dogs and people and seemed unduly enamored with the lush green sod.  They would drop their head at a moment’s notice to eat and the young dogs often had trouble keeping any sort of movement going for more than a few steps.

On the open field the sheep where very attuned to the topography of the field and would charge uphill, tiptoe downhill, and rush off into any gully available.  One such gully was just beyond one of the far panels and many competitors lost precious minutes getting the sheep to move once they settled in to eat.  No other dog sport demands that a handler successfully command a dog at such great distances to move a third party group of untrained and unwilling animals that don’t even realize this is a competition.

Fewer than five handlers managed to pull the gate closed on the pen at the end of the course during the entire 150 team preliminary round and when it happened it always drew echoing applause from the spectators.  Here I’ve captured last year’s champion Patrick Shannahan and his dog Riggs putting on a textbook pen and availing themselves to one seriously gorgeous photo opportunity.

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[video]

Right before I began capturing video, one veteran spectator said rather loudly “he’s doing this [taking a lot of time at the Pen] for the photographers,” but I don’t think this was the real motive for a slow and steady approach.  Few other handlers even made it to the pen that day and Patrick had the uncommon luxury of several minutes to finish.  The other close-calls often found out that some their sheep were terrified of the confined quarters of the pen and were willing to stomp and charge at the dog that they had previously ignored for most of the run.  Most of the handlers that even made it to the pen had less than a minute to accomplish the task and almost all of them ended with an explosive confrontation with the dog that resulted in either a grip or a sudden scattering of the sheep away from the entrance.

If you’d like to see more video of the 2011 National Finals, you can watch one free hour of the webcast, buy a larger package with more viewing time, or even get the DVD of the entire event.

Bored collie, rented sheep

Further evidence that my common refrain (sheep sport is growing, sheep work is dying) is true, the New York Times reports about “bored collies” getting just what they want for Christmas: to play with rented sheep.

In a Tale That Wags Dog Owners, They Rent Flocks for Bored Collies

Compulsive Sheep Herders Need a ‘Job’ to Entertain Them; ‘That’ll Do’

By MICHAEL M. PHILLIPS

BATTLE GROUND, Wash.—Sue Foster knew what she needed to do when her border collie, Taff, was expelled from puppy school for herding the black Labs into a corner.

She rented some sheep.

Then she bought another border collie and rented some grazing land. Then she bought some sheep of her own. And a third border collie. Now, like the old lady who swallowed the fly, Ms. Foster keeps a llama to chase off the coyotes that threaten the lambs that go to market to finance the sheep that entertain her dogs.

Once upon a time, Americans got dogs for their sheep. Now they get sheep for their dogs.

“I never dreamed it would go this far,” says Ms. Foster, 56 years old.

Border collies, first bred along the frontier between England and Scotland, are compulsive herders, with instincts so intense they sometimes search for livestock behind the television when sheep appear on screen, says Geri Byrne, owner of the Border Collie Training Center, in Tulelake, Calif. Left unoccupied, they’ll dig up the garden, chew up the doggie bed or persecute the cat.

Herding experts—yes, there is such a thing—say it’s increasingly common for people who get border collies as pets to wind up renting or buying sheep just to keep their dogs busy. “It’s something that’s snowballing all the time,” says Jack Knox, a Scottish-born shepherd who travels the U.S. giving herding clinics.

Of note: Jack Knox is one of several UK shepherds who, failing to make a good living working sheep in their native land have found a lucrative calling winning US Sheep Trials and teaching the bored collies and the bored people who handle them the basics of “herding.”

Read more and be sure not to miss the video.

I’ve talked before about NoMD, but the Uncanny Valley is probably new to most dog people who haven’t worked in either the video game industry or studied human computer interaction.  Take 3 minutes and watch the first part of this excellent video which explains it perfectly.  Trust me, I’ll tie it in to dogs when you get back:

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I think the concept of the Uncanny Valley is very much like the NoMD in that some things that are close to our ideal but not can be grossly more offensive than like objects which have more separation.  NoMD tells us that things that are close cause friction, and the UV tells us that close-but-no-cigar is more off putting than a clean miss.

Perhaps both of these phenomena combined explain why there’s such a contentious relationship between the first two estates of the Border Collie: the working dog and the show dog, especially in the direction of the former toward the latter.  I think there’s both plenty of friction and disgust felt by working folks against the show folks and their dogs.

If we play a little Madlibs and replace a few key words from the video above from the perspective of a working Border Collie sheeple:

If a dog is clearly not a working Border Collie then its working dog characteristics will stand out and appeal to us. [You really don't see sheeple mocking working Kelpies or working Aussies, even if "Barbie Collies" can outperform them.]  But if the dog is almost but not quite a working Border Collie then its non-working characteristics are all we’re going to see.  [The Sheeple save their most potent vitriol for the "Barbie Collies" who "herd" in AKC events, calling it "obedience on sheep" and nitpicking the differences from a USBCHA style event.] Sheeple know what a working Border Collie looks like, they see them every day.  So when something is off, they know it, and it’s unsettling.

Add in a huge helping of feelings of existential superiority, and I think we have a diagnosis for why sheeple hate showple who “herd” so much.  Barbie Collies that herd are “an imperfect simulation, which [sheeple] find kind of disquieting, or even revolting.”

I don’t think the NoMD and the UV are necessarily human failings, rather they are understandable responses, but once we identify their existence we can combat the negative effects of their expression.  Specifically, sheeple using the NoMD to “achieve a superficial sense of one’s own uniqueness, an ersatz sense of otherness which is only a mask for an underlying uniformity and sameness.”

This is my major complaint of the working community: that they believe so much in creating and sustaining trial dogs that can push sheep that they are willfully dismissive of the means in which they do so and how those means [inbreeding, line breeding, kennel blindness, popular sires, failure to publish stud books, failure to bring in new blood, placing winning trials above the breed, harboring sympathy for Lamark and Lysenko, installing institutional barriers to entry of new blood, enacting policies to create a fractured gene pool, etc.] don’t justify the ends.

• 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.

These Dogs Count Sheep!

Dewey Jontz’ piercing whistle drops Tess instantly no matter what she’s doing. He uses spoken commands, too, in ordering his canine “hired hand” to help with the chores.

During field test the dog must drive a flock of sheep through three “hurdles.” Above, Tess guides them quietly through the narrow opening. Here Jontz signals her around to the left to pick them up after a successful “drive”

Tess is one of Dewey Jontz’ Border Collies, a breed with a mission in life. These dogs from the hills of southern Scotland are hard-working farm hands that tend sheep, cattle and poultry.

With a spoken command or a flick of his hand Jontz can send Tess in a great circle, sweeping up a scattered flock of sheep. She’ll hold them together or guide them straight through the gate to Jontz. She’ll separate one sheep from the rest of the flock and bring it to him.

At the end of a day of hard work there’s still the evening chores, and she’ll start by driving poultry into the hen house. And regardless of where she is, Jontz’ whistle will drop her motionless to the ground.

Sheep men regard Border Collies as the finest working dogs in the world and their ability to handle livestock makes them as valuable as good hired men.

Jontz pays about $500 to import a prize dog such as Jess, breeds it on his farm near Altoona, Iowa, and sells the pups. After nine years of breeding he has developed a substantial business, as the pups bring about $50 apiece at weaning time and there are an average of six to a litter, with three litters every two years.

But Jontz has difficulty in buying excellent dogs as the Scottish hill shepherds would rather part with their flocks than sell their favorite Border Collies. A shepherd once turned down an offer of $1600 for a single pup. And 39-year-old Jontz declares that “$1000 wouldn’t even buy the hairs on Tess’ tail.”

For centuries the Scottish shepherds have been breeding dogs for only one quality–”workability.” The result is a highly specialized dog that instinctively loves commands and is eager to obey.

Most of the dogs you see streaking in great circles around livestock on the nation’s farms aren’t Border Collies. The breed is comparatively new to this country–the first dogs made their appearance here with shipments of livestock imported from Scotland about 1900. But it’s impossible to supply the demand for good Border Collie pups today and likely you’ll see a lot of the dogs within 10 years.

The first field trials to test workability were held in this country in the 1920s, although similar trials have been conducted in Scotland for almost a century.

Jontz’ dogs–the ones he retains for breeding and trains himself–have won several national field trials including those at Ohio and Rhode Island. His dog Wull won first place in the Virgina trials of 1944 and in 1946 Jontz took second place despite the fact that he was on crutches as a result of an auto accident and have very little opportunity to work with the dogs before the trials.

The feats that the dogs must perform to win a field trial are remarkable, although they are not designed as a set of tricks but as a test of the dog’s ability to handle livestock in routine farm work. Jontz runs his dogs through the “qualification course” in his frequent demonstrations before farm groups, fairs and livestock shows.

During such a demonstration Jontz remains in one spot while the dog handles the sheep alone. Upon a signal, five sheep are released 200 yards in front of the man. Jontz then sends his dog in the “outrun” and the dog streaks off in a great semicircle that will bring him up behind the sheep for the “lift.” As the dog approaches the flock, Jontz starts using whistle signals and spoken commands. One sharp whistle means “stop” and the dog immediately drops to the ground. “Come by” means to circle to the right, and “Come away” means to move to the left.

As Jontz says, “Even at 200 yards you can guide the dog as though he had a steering wheel.”

In fetching the sheep, the dog first moves in narrowing semicircles to bunch them. He then drives them straight toward Jontz. One hundred yards in front of the man are two 12-foot sections of fence with a narrow space between them representing a gate. The dog must drive all five sheep straight through the gate as part of his “gather.”

After negotiating the gate he drives them to Jontz’ feet, then guides them 100 yards to the left through another “gate,” 100 yards to the right through still another, and then back to Jontz.

After returning the sheep the dog must keep them within a ring 20 yards in diameter while he “sheds” one or two from the remainder of the flock. This is one of the most difficult tests. Jontz watches carefully until a slight opening appears between one of the sheep and the others. Upon this sudden command the dog dashes through the opening and the sheep is frightened away from the rest of the flock. The dog then “wears” this sheep–drives it back and forth until the judges are satisfied he has it under control.

Final requirement is the penning test. The dog reassembles all the sheep and must drive them into a pen only eight feet square, holding them there until Jontz locks the gate.

To pass the trial the dog must complete the entire course including fetching, driving and penning in 15 minutes.

This is only the qualification c
ourse and the championship course, used in Scotland, is much more difficult, involving an outrun of 800 yards to gather in two separate groups of 10 sheep which neither the dog nor his master can see at the beginning of the trial. The dog also must shed only marked sheep from the rest of the flock.

Such a test requires remarkable canine intelligence and Border Collies have been the only breed able to pass even the qualification course for a number of years. The dogs learn quickly–one of Jontz’ dogs won a trial when it was only 7 1/2 months old.

Jontz likes to tell a story about Shep as an example of the reasoning power of Border Collies. One day Jontz was walking across a farm when Shep grabbed a woodchuck by the scruff of the neck. Jontz waited to see what the dog would do with his prey. Shep trotted to a nearby stream with the animal and attempted to drown it by dunking his head under water. But every time the animal went under, so did Shep’s nose. Finally Shep trotted back to the bank, placed the animal on the ground between his paws, and surveyed first the water, then his prey. Suddenly he jumped to his feet and grabbed the animal by the tail. This time he dunked the woodchuck without even getting his nose wet.

Although Jontz directs the dogs by command during field trials and demonstrations, the dogs easily can be trained to do farm chores without help. For example, they can drive hundreds of sheep to particular pasture in the morning, fetch them at night, handle the cattle and drive poultry into a hen house. In one remarkable demonstration Jontz’ dog, Risp, stalks chickens quietly driving them through an opening a foot square.

Border Collies have an instinct to herd livestock and often untrained pups, released in front of a scattered flock, will start to round them up.

Not only can they handle livestock but they protect them as well. Jontz recently received a litter from the owner of one of the pups he sold without training. Topsy had learned to stay a half day in the pasture with the sheep. One day she came streaking toward the house, barking at the farmer’s son. The boy ran to the barn, grabbed his rifle, mounted a horse and followed Topsy. He arrived at the pasture just as a wolf was moving in on the flock. The boy’s shot missed but the wolf never showed up again.

Another dog, Ring, which Jontz sold to a farmer, was installed in a stable beside the owner’s prize horse. One night the farmer was awakened by Ring barking beneath his window. When he went to the stable he found the horse extremely sick. Only a quick visit by the veterinary saved the animal.

Although Border Collies are essentially working dogs, they make fine pets and are especially gentle with children. Wull, one of Jontz’ former pups, is the “best outfielder the neighborhood baseball team ever had.” Another owner reported that his dog watched the youngsters play football for several hours and then joined the game. To this day, he says, the dog will pick up the football by the laces, run with it a little way, place it on the ground, back off, and then kick it with his paw!

Ross, a Border Collie that Jontz imported from Scotland and then sold, was given a role in the movie “Bob, Son of Battle.” His dramatic ability was quickly recognized and he’s had parts in several movies since.

Jontz prefers to sell untrained pups, as Border Collies are easy to teach and will do better work when trained by their lifetime master from the start. However, he has trained his own dogs and often gives training advice to farmers who buy his pups.

Fifteen minutes a day usually is sufficient time to train the dog, especially in the first stages. Jontz puts a collar on the pup, calls him by name from the start and feeds the dog himself in order to gain his confidence. With a leash on the collar he teaches the pup to lead and heel, merely by giving the command and controlling the pup with the leash. By the same method the pup is taught to stop.

When the pup is six or eight months old, Jontz exposes him to a small flock of quiet sheep. With broad arm motions, the trainer indicates that he wants the pup to circle the sheep. After practice, the dog will learn to circle the flock on either side.

In all phases of training the “stop” command is most important. With it the trainer can immediately stop a dog when he makes a mistake. The average Border Collie can be a well-trained dog in one year and a completely finished worker in two.

With the shortage of farm help in this country, Jontz feels that dogs can do a man’s share of the work on the nation’s 3,000,000 livestock farms.

“After all, show me a man who can roundup and bring in 100 sheep from a large pasture in 15 minutes.” With a flick of his hand Jontz sends three dogs after his sheep and a moment later the flock is motionless in the middle of a canine triangle. “Best hired hands a farmer ever had.”

From Donald McCaig’s The Dog Wars, you’d swear that there were too few working dogs and too much work to do, thus the dire need to “save” the entire breed (all 35,000 new puppies per year) to preserve the working ability only.

But it’s not really so, McCaig admits. In fact, it’s the opposite.

Donald McCaig sings a different tune when he’s talking to fellow sheeple than when he’s pleading the case for his cadre’s supremacy. This is not a new tactic, one story to the ignorant public, another for the in-the-know hobbyists. Notice how his Dog Wars book talks all about the evils of conformation vs. sheep trials, since it’s easy to belittle the pageantry of conformation and it’s clearly not work. But he fails to demonize dog sport in the same manner (at least in the book). Dismiss, yes; belittle, certainly; demonize, no.

Why? Because it’s a hard case to make that Agility is not work. It requires smarts, training, and drive, the only thing missing is the sheep…. and that’s not a bad thing for 99% of us. But with fellow sheeple he talks all about dog sport being THE “Clear and Present” danger to the breed. It’s also hard to make the case that sheep trials are work, not sport. They are sport.

In this interesting passage, McCaig admits that he has too many dogs and too little real work for them. Well, why did he breed them then? Why did he go to Scotland to get a real working dog? That sounds like a waste of money if you’re always pleading poverty and only have a hundred and some sheep as McCaig does. Couldn’t he find a good enough dog here?

Posted: Sat Aug 25, 2007 1:02 pm

Dear Fellow Handlers,

I’ve had a sheep farm (100-150 ewes) for 30 years until three years ago when health made us sell all bhut (sic) twenty five. We had sheep before we had sheepdogs. Now, like many on this list, I rarely work dogs, often train. I do get my dogs out and about which helps a little but I’ve no doubt that John Helle’s dogs (5000 ewes/western Montana) get more experience than mine do. John has never trialed but buys his dogs from trial stock.

Even a farm flock, like ours was doesn’t provide the experience a big spread does. Except for accidents or sickness, 150 ewes only need one dog and excepting shearing, breeding and lambing, most days he could stay in the kennel.

So we must make do – as Beverly Lambert has, for one example – with training and shifting venues.

Yesterday I was driving home when I spotted a neighbor with four full grown rams in a fence corner, unable to bring them to the barn where one would go on the truck. Four people: no movement.

I stopped and jumped Luke out of my car. He wriggled through the wire and, a few minutes later, the rams were on their way to the barn.

No. It wasn’t pretty. The 300 + pound rams had never seen a sheepdog before and Luke only had a few feet to maneuver in that corner.

Wool flew. I rapped the most aggressive ram with the owner’s stock stick, Luke hated it. But he came at them until, finally, they turned and went to the barn.

Luke is a six year old trial dog. Most of his experience has been trials and unfamiliar venues and training.

I wish he’d had the opportunity to learn more on his own, but today, when I have a bit of farm work to do I take out one of my young dogs.

That’s the reality most of us are faced with: too many dogs/too little work.

They adapt, as we do.

Donald McCaig

You adapt? Not so, Donald, not so. You’re stuck in the past trying to hold back the winds of change. You’ve chosen to be an anachronism, giving up a big city job in marketing to go become a small time sheep farmer, and you’ve bought into the romantic history of border collies. That’s your right and it’s a swell thing to do. But when you start wagging your finger at those youngin’s who are supposedly messing it all up, you fail to realize that we moved out of the old neighborhood before you even moved in.

When you choose to be an anachronism, you just sound silly when you curse the change that is already here and was before you went retro.

Agility is an adaptation. Frisbee is an adaptation. Dog Dancing is an adaptation. The dogs do adapt, and so do the owners and trainers. We find new and fun things to do with them, to keep them active, healthy, and well adjusted. New things to test their merit and new things to determine which of them we want to breed.

You’re welcome to keep your platonic vision of the ideal rural life with the ideal rural dog, but don’t spit “you’re ruining the breed” at me when you’ve got more dogs than you need, less work than you claim, and a horrible case of mission creep. You want control of the entire breed when you can’t even find enough work for your own household of dogs?

It’s easy for a young man like myself to surmise that sheep trialers are on whole an aged, if not aging breed. Their ranks are filled with people my parent’s age and older, the best of the best collect more Social Security checks than they do over-sized prize money checks at trials (not that such photo-op prizes are all that common, most big trials have very nice prizes of polished silver trophy cups, plaques, and belt buckles), and the “Nursery” division is for young dogs, not young handlers.

Sheepdog trialing does not attract many young people, but handlers in their seventies are unexceptional.
- Donald McCaig, The Dog Wars p23

This isn’t too surprising given what it takes to be competitive in this endeavor. You need abundant time to train yourself and your dog. You need sheep and lots of land. You need trucks and trailers and barns and pens and troughs and water and feed. What you don’t own, you have to rent, be it in land or training skill, or sheep. All of these things require a lot of money, and if you aren’t a professional rancher or farmer, all of it comes out of your fun-money budget.

If you are a rancher or farmer, you have to make a living first before you can devote the extra time it takes to polish a trialing career. None of it is easy, convenient, or cheap. Nor is it suited to young folk who aren’t working on a ranch or in some way supported by their ranching parents.

But that’s nothing new. The pictures and stories from the good old days of sheep trials in England tell the same story. Older gentlemen in dapper suits making a game of it out on the fields. It’s always been an older breed, but a dying breed?

Apparently so. A recent New York Times article titled “An Industry Fades, but Its Dogs Carry On” lauds the perseverance of the Sheep Trial despite the marked decline in the US sheep ranching business.

Sheep were an important part of this rural Northern California region after it was settled in the 1850s. But in the last 30 years or so, most local sheep ranchers have been driven out of business by the rising cost of land, predators, the changing American palate and global competition.

Since 1945, the number of sheep in the United States has fallen to 7 million from 46 million, said Megan Wortman, marketing director of the American Lamb Board. With an influx of hobbyists, however, sheepdog trials are a popular vestige of ranching life, especially here at the Mendocino County Fair and Apple Show.

“In the 1980s, I would see one or two handlers out of 25 who weren’t ranchers,” said William Slaven, of Yolo County. At this year’s Mendocino fair finals, Mr. Slaven, 79, was one of only two ranchers competing. He and his hard-driving border collie, Roy, herd 500 sheep — down from 1,500 after a pasture fire last year.
- Carol Pogash, NYT, September 21, 2007

This trend hasn’t gone unappreciated by the American trialing community. Donald McCaig quotes almost the same statistics in his recent book:

Sheep numbers in the US have declined from 53 million in 1942 to seven million today. Much of the best western sheep range has been purchased by billionaires and turned into elk and buffalo preserves.

On the East Cost, sheep shearing is a dying profession, and the wool clip just covers shearing costs. Ordinary farmers are turning to hair sheep.
- The Dog Wars p154

For those of you not in the know, “hair” sheep are really “meat” sheep. Sheep that are raised strictly for slaughter as opposed to wool sheep that are sheared yearly for wool production. As most hair sheep don’t need to be sheared and most popular hair sheep breeds are more resistant to parasites than wool sheep, they make ideal “low maintenance” sheep for smaller lifestyle farms.

In the 1940s, there were 300,000 sheep in Mendocino County, said John Harper, a livestock and natural resources adviser at the University of California Cooperative Extension at Ukiah. Today, there are no more than 14,000.

Americans’ attitude toward lamb changed after 1945, when soldiers overseas, fed partly cooked mutton, became sick and returned home telling their wives, “ ‘Just don’t feed me lamb,’ ” Mr. Harper said.

The annual per-capita consumption of lamb has tumbled to one pound today from a high of six pounds in the late ’40s, said Ms. Wortman of the lamb board.

Since that era, higher and higher land prices in this region have persuaded many ranchers to sell their acreage, often to grape growers. Those who remain must be innovative to survive.
- NYT 9/21/2007

So if real sheep work is becoming harder and harder to find, and those still in the sheep business are downsizing their flocks and narrowing their focus to serve ethnic meat markets and the organic home grown movement, why are sheep trials as popular as ever?

Working dogs are still used to move flocks of sheep. But for the hobbyists, sheep serve a different purpose: “An awful lot of us now only have sheep to entertain our dogs,” said a finalist [in the Mendocino County Fair trial], Jack Mathieson, a systems analyst.
- NYT 9/21/2007

The hobbyist. The lifestyle farmer. The large and growing segment in the First Estate that thinks and acts like the Third Estate. They are the reason that sheep trials are still going strong, if not growing. The mindset of sheep trial as hobby or sport vs. sheep trial as platonic divination of the perfect border collie breeding stock.

In fact, McCaig points out that the AKC now hosts twice the number of herding events as the USBCHA hosts traditional sanctioned trials. Although comparing the two is an apple vs. orange debate, the AKC’s herding-with-training-wheels events are still venues that will allow city folk to cut their teeth on sheep and a few graduates of AKC trials are now making their way into the big leagues of the USBCHA trial circuit. McCaig calls the AKC herding events “insular and invisible,” because they don’t draw large crowds like the traditional sanctioned trials do, but his focus on the celebrity of trialing only supports my position that many trialers think and act like dog sport athletes rather than clerics of the sacred order of the traditional working sheepdog.

Sheepdog trials are not self-referential: they are designed to produce dogs useful in the practical world.
- Donald McCaig, The Dog Wars p23

I don’t think what McCaig says is true, and herein lies the great philosophical divide between the First Estate and the Third Estate. The First Estate holds on to the notion that what they are doing has a higher, almost religious purpose to produce the platonically ideal Border Collie that will serve the needs of the shepherd first and foremost. But existentially, breeding dogs that win sheep trials produces dogs likely to win sheep trials. And sheep trials are not the same as daily work, a topic I will cover in upcoming posts.

The growing or sustained interest in sheep trials does not come from people becoming more interested in becoming ideal shepherds with ideal dogs to preserve the history of rural Border Collies, but dog sport people interested in another venue to challenge themselves and their dogs. This doesn’t mean that the romantic notion of a shepherd out on an emerald field doesn’t add to the fun of the sport.

Grant Colfax…described the sheepdog trials as “a moment where everything seems to be in balance.” As he stood in front of football bleachers, where more than 1,000 fans cheered the dogs and their handlers at the center of a bowl of bucolic hills, Dr. Colfax said: “It’s what everyone wants America to look like. It’s an illusion we all collectively embrace.”
- NYT 9/21/2007

Although the glory days of the American sheep rancher have passed, by most accounts the working Border Collie community still has dogs as good as they ever were and venues to prove it. And everything old is new again, and perhaps the future will be kind to the sheep rancher. Donald McCaig sure thinks it will:

In the next twenty-five years, the Border Collie should be affected favorably by trends that will challenge most everything else.

American agribusiness famously requires more than one calorie of energy to produce on calorie of corn. Global warming, skyrocketing Chinese and Indian energy demands, declining oil reserves, and wild fisheries will bring severe droughts and the end of cheap energy, water, and protein.

Necessity has always been the Border Collie’s friend. Since sheep (and goats) are adapted to low energy rearing on marginal land, what is ruinous for agribiz and confinement rearing should serve sheep and sheepdogs–despite the likely demise of the goosedog industry. (When protein gets expensive enough, people won’t chase geese, they’ll eat them.)

When plastics cost more, wool might even be valuable again.

These same predictable conditions will affect our trials. As sheep and goat flocks increase in nubers there should be more trials, and “for-profit” trials may coexist with traditional hosted trials. The days of the behemoth RV are numbered. When gas hits $10 a gallon, we’ll be pulling dog trailers behind eentsy teensy little cars. We won’t be able to travel as far or campaign as hard as we do now. Regional finals will replace today’s national trailer race and who knows, maybe regional teams will share a bus to the Nationals.
- The Dog Wars p157

Donald notes happily that the last two years have shown a 10% increase in the number of breeding ewes in the United States. This is an early indicator that ranchers are looking to meet forecasts of increased demand with a greater supply of sheep.

Our breed’s strongest defense is the farmer and rancher’s need for useful–not AKC-titled–sheep and cattle dogs. Without sheep, the breeding, training, and keeping of sheep-dogs loses its rationale.
- Donald McCaig, The Dog Wars p.154

Lets hope that Donald is right about increased sheep production and wrong about the rationale for breeding, training, and keeping Border Collies. Because if he’s wrong about sheep and right about the rationale, then the Border Collie is going to die out along with the American sheep rancher.

McCaig is myopic and tunnel-visioned when looking at the rationale for the Border Collie. I firmly believe that the modern Border Collie has cut the umbilical cord with sheep, and although we may go back from time to time for guidance and motherly sustenance, the Third Estate of the Border Collie is poised and capable of producing quality dogs that are no less agile, intelligent, trainable, and keen as the dogs produced by the First Estate.

McCaig might be right that these dogs are no longer “sheep dogs,” but the docking of “sheep” doesn’t mean they are simply “dogs” and pale imitations of their ancestors any more than you can call a fighter jet a pale imitation of the Wright Flyer or an HDTV a pale imitation of shadow puppets made by candle light. The Third Estate has plenty of words that can be used to replace “sheep,” and it is in that diversity and specialization that the dogs and our interest in them will live on.

It’s been ten years since Dolly the Sheep was cloned and it amazes me that many a dog breeder believes in inbreeding (and line breeding, if you must differentiate, but realize that it’s still drunk driving with the gene pool, just at a slightly slower speed), but in general “cloning” in animals triggers all of the “ewww” factor that inbreeding in animals fails to do.

Besides the current imperfections in the cloning process that carries a residual “age” from the sample, cloning has none of the recessive disease expression that inbreeding causes, and in fact, cloning is exactly what many herding and show breeders want when they inbreed up the wazoo.

If cloning were as easy in dogs as inbreeding is, I imagine that several genetic benefits would arise. First, female dogs of quality would take steps to even up the score that popular male dogs have. Since a dog can stud many hundreds of puppies in a year where a bitch is limited to a handful, the genetic contributions of a single male dog exceed the single contributions of almost any female dogs.

It’d be interesting if there were a “popular dam” effect. It’d also be interesting to see if the ratio of male to female animal competitors at the top sheep trials (and in the breeding world in general) evens out without the pressure of producing a star male is lessened by the ability to have a fecund star female aided by cloning.

Second, the massive amounts of inbreeding to “recapture” the magic of some hot dog could be done away with and all the little wannabe’s could own one themselves! No more Wiston Cap effect. No more linebreeding on some dog you admire, you could just have to dog you admire.

Sure, most of the clones would have to be de-sexed to prevent even more rampant popular sire effect, but that’s a potentially better solution than producing thousands of inbred puppies trying to get close.

Heck, you might even get to a point where there are models of dogs within a breed like models of cars. This might sound ridiculous, but the specific applications are many.

I’m not suggesting that normal mating should be replaced with cloning, not at all. I’m suggesting that the few individuals who breed a lot (and inbreed a lot) should cease their ineffective and inefficient efforts that flood the market with their excess. The demand for pets and sport dogs and working dogs can thus be filled by breeders who don’t obsess over cloning.

The show people have a cancerous mentality when it comes to their breeds. They can’t stop building, they never progress into a maintenance phase. They feel that the breeds must be continually “improved” and that usually means massive amounts of inbreeding and whittling away at the biodiversity in the gene pool.

And “improved” from what I can see, means trying to get a very popular sire to breed with your bitch (since you can get four or five puppy prospects for the same price of buying one of the puppies from the dog’s owner) and then inbreeding the piss out of the result dogs so you can try and capture the popular brand of the successful kennel.

And what determines success and popularity? 80 year old women wearing slightly moth eaten plaid suits with white leggings and “sensible shoes.” Really, the LAST people on earth whom I’d trust to make informed decisions on health and genetics, let alone fashion and taste.

But that’s how it works. Some rich person (like Cosby or a Firestone heiress) buys into the world, the sycophants peer pressure each other into snowballing a few dogs each year that win show after show against any natural odds, and then rest of the breeders think that it all had to do with what was in the dog and in the ring, when it’s all about the people and out of the ring politic… so they chase the dog’s genes and the kennel name.

Many trialing obsessed breeders are no better. They have their own celebrity dog chasers who use the exact same methods to get their own taste of Border Collie fame and royalty.

The above chart shows how it’s been over 10 years since there has been even a single dog registered with the ISDS that is NOT related to Wiston Cap. And Wiston Cap was himself a product of line breeding, going back to Wilson’s Cap #3036 more than 30 times in his pedigree.

Wiston Cap provoked deep goofiness among breeders. The man who bred Cap repeated the exact mating over and over, hoping to get another Cap. (Geoff Billingham had one of these pups, a bonnie big thing named Wattie Cap, who died of pneumonia.) An English solicitor deliberately bred Wiston Cap’s sons to Cap’s daughters until he created a pup with “86% Wiston Cap Blood.” The pup did look like the old man, but, of course, he never amounted to much, and I shudder to think how many deformed pups were produced by those matings.

– Donald McCaig Eminent Dogs, Dangerous Men, 51-55

Cloning would give these people exactly what they want. They inbreed to “set type” meaning making a homozygous dog even MORE homozygous. And why would one do that? Because you can’t clone, of course! If an animal were 100% homozygous, it would always pass along the exact same genetic information. If a male and a female were both 100% homozygous then all of their offspring would be genetically identical.

Even if the purebred horse world has already banned clones, what’s to stop anyone from doing so anyway? Even if the kennel club banned clones, there is little to nothing that they could practically do to prevent clones being shown in conformation and especially all of the out of the ring applications like having cloned stud and dam dogs producing more litters per year than could be done naturally with just one dog.

It’s rather hilarious and hypocritical for the most notorious inbreeder (horses and dogs) communities to make a stand against cloning, since it’s the perfection of their practices, whose imperfections are horribly harmful. Truly, the only thing better than cloning would be gene manipulation (another future technology) where you could select which alleles you want for each gene from a library of options or you could leave most of the genes alone and swap out a single healthy gene for a known disease gene.

Deep in their hearts, what they really want are clones. And if we can satisfy the small % of the “fancy” with some clones so they can leave the rest of the breed healthy and diverse, I’m all for it. Let them have their clones and show them too.

When you map the genome you can start to measure the evolutionary distance between these genes just like you can measure the distance between cities on a map, and you can also view the paths between these genomic cities just like the interstate highway system.

By looking at specific sets of genes and individual traits you can compare how likely it is that an individual gene controls the expression of a trait by comparing the frequency the gene would appear in a random individual to how often it appears in individuals with the desired trait. Because correlation is necessary to prove causation, looking at highly correlated gene-trait pairs expedites the process of proving gene-trait causation.

One group of scientists is using this statistical inference method (often called Bayesian Analysis) to study and lure out the genes that are responsible for complex traits in dogs such as noise phobia. The central breed in this study is the humble Border Collie.

A tertiary goal in their study is to investigate “whether or not there is a “split” between dogs bred primarily for working, and dogs bred primarily for show.” And apparently there is.

To ferret out the genes responsible for specific traits found in the Border Collie and not in other breeds, the researchers need to construct a neighborhood map of dogs which places highly correlated dogs closer together and uncorrelated dogs further apart.

If you’ve ever seen a program on evolution, you’ll recognize these maps–called Phylogenetic trees–as they are often used to show the “tree of life” or the descent of man from primitive life down to our present state, with various branches separating us first from other human species, and earlier from the other forms of life present and past.

These graphs are rooted in an ancient common ancestor, branches often denote a separation of species or some predetermined degree of distinction, and they are directed. An undirected graph would be “is related to” such that A-B means that A is related to B and B is related to A. In a directed graph, A-B does not imply B-A, for example “is an ancestor of” would be a directed graph because if A is an ancestor of B, B is not and can not be an ancestor of A.

Since we know the causative method of correlation in dogs (familiar relation, i.e. breeding and inbreeding) the branches of this graph can make a good approximation for estimating common ancestry in rooted graphs. Unrooted graphs can provide a means of distinguishing relatedness without assumptions of common ancestry.

One such graph was created for the study of Border Collies and it includes a sampling of other herding breeds:

Unrooted phylogenetic network constructed by Bayesian analysis, based on 4200 SNPs spread evenly across the canine genome. Blue = German Shepherd Dogs, purple = Portuguese Water Dogs, green = Australian Shepherds, pink = show Border Collies, red = working Border Collies.

To conduct proper studies of association between genes and behavior, we must first check for “stratification” (population substructure) within our breed samples. This is a question of immediate concern in breeds that are “split,” or contain subpopulations that are bred for very different purposes. If we do not account for such structure before conducting association analyses, it is possible to obtain spurious associations between genotypes and behavior that reflect breed splits (such as show vs. working) rather than actual functional significance.

We included a small number of kennel club registered show Border Collies (primarily of Australasian breeding) in our Border Collie sample for genotyping, the remainder of which was made up of ISDS and ABCA (working registries) registered dogs. Our phylogenetic, clustering, and principal components analyses all suggest a genetic split within the breed between working and show Border Collies that is probably as large as the genetic distances between some breeds. We hope to collect samples from more geographical regions, and from different populations of Border Collies (working, show, and sport), to further explore these findings.

OMFG! Barbie Collies really are another breed! The Great Schism of Border Collies has happened. Sheeple everywhere are giddy with delight that the difference between their “coyotes” and the “barbie collies” isn’t just apparent visually, but you can even see it on the molecular level, too.

From reading the report, you’d suspect that there’s some problem or that this analysis proves something vital. There isn’t and it doesn’t. In the next part, I’ll get real and discuss what this chart is really telling us.