Cain said unto his brother, 'Come let us go out into the field' and when they were in the field , Cain set upon his brother Abel and killed him.

The Bible puts forth the killing of Abel by his brother Cain as the first murder in history, which foreshadows the eternal struggle between the farmer and the cowman.

Cain is the first man born of woman in the bible, and a second generation farmer–already lazy and living off the dole.  His goody-goody younger brother, Abel, was the first Sheeple in history and an insufferable brown noser.  Abel decided to one-up his older brother and gain favor with God by sacrificing one of his fat young lambs–mmmm baby lamb tastes good–making him the first enemy of PeTA.  Cain, not to be outdone had to make a sacrifice too, but since he was getting paid to not plant (as is the custom) he couldn’t really come up with a suitable sacrifice and he didn’t really want to burn those subsidy checks because all that fire would cause greenhouse gases to escape into the atmosphere.

Of course, God found favor in Abel’s sacrifice of a fat lamb and was unimpressed with Cain’s offering of a meager organic crop: eat that vegans, God eats baby lamb and thinks “organic” sucks.  Then God went all passive aggressive on Cain for not being more like his younger brother, so Cain kneed Able in the groin and beat his head in with the jawbone of that lamb Abel sacrificed: poetic justice for the evil baby lamb killer!  Thus, Cain is also the first eco-terrorist and murderer in history.

God, who totally fell for Abel’s ass kissing, was devastated and cursed Cain to never grow crops again (funny, we keep ‘cursing’ our farmers to do the same and they’re so pious they get all uppity when we even suggest that they can go back to doing their job and grow something) and like all trust fund kiddies, God suggested that Cain get a Europass and go backpacking in the East to find himselff.  But Cain wasn’t happy and told God that “they’ll totally hate me in the East” and God said “tell them you’re from Canada, they won’t know the difference.”

But since everyone likes the Canadians and since Cain was such a douchebag, God knew that the ruse wouldn’t cut it and so he placed upon Cain a mark such that anyone who saw it would know that they shouldn’t kick his ass. OR SO YOU WERE TOLD!

The truth is, if you look at the original Genesis passage, God didn’t place a mark upon Cain, he gave him a dog! At least according to one rabbinical scholar in the Midrash:

And the Lord set a sign for Cain.

R. Judah said: He caused the orb of the sun to shine on his account. Said R. Nehemiah to him: For that wretch He would cause the orb of the sun to shine! Rather, He caused leprosy to break out on him, as you read, And it shall come to pass, if they will not believe thee, neither hearken to the voice of the first sign, etc. (Ex. iv, 8). Rab said: He gave him a dog. Abba Jose said: He made a horn grow out of him. Rab said: He made him an example to murderers. R. Hanin said: He made him an example to penitents.

Rab’s interpretaion sounds sort of like Pit Bulls and Parolees, no?

See, taking that backpacking trip around the old country isn’t so entertaining when you’ve just killed the only other guy on the planet who isn’t your parents.  Without some young German chicks (since neither Germany nor chicks had been invented yet) staying in the same run down hostel to provide some companionship, Cain needed a good dog to keep him company in his forced solitude and to protect him.

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.

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.

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:

..

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.

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

And it’s no surprise. There are few things in life that look exactly the same today as they did sixty eight years ago, but I’m sure you could visit a little farm in Connecticut today and see gentlemen farmers and yeoman farmers alike reprising roles that were played out in the same manner fifty, one hundred, and even one hundred and fifty years ago in much the same way with much the same dogs.

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.

Our phylogenetic, clustering, and principal components analyses all suggest a genetic split within the breed between working and show Border Collies that is probably as large as the genetic distances between some breeds.

Is this true? Is this significant? Is this a problem?

(1) Is there a “genetic split” in Border Collies?

No. But there is most certainly clustering. The use of the word split is misleading (if not inappropriate) and certainly not supported by the data. Split implies a disconnect, a divide, a severance. Irreconcilable differences. Speciation, or perhaps in this case breed genesis. If you want to call the clustering a split, you must concede that there is nothing preventing that split from being filled.

Whereas speciation has a specific genetic mechanism (two different species can not mate with each other to produce fertile offspring), there is no such genetic condition to define breed. A breed is what WE make of it.

All Border Collies (working, trialing, show and sport) come from the same stock just one hundred years ago. Unlike English Shepherds or Australian Shepherds or McNab dogs, the clustering and refinement of the Border Collie factions has not included outcross breeding with other breeds. Barbie Collies and Coyote Collies have no genes that weren’t there in the original stock 100 years ago. They are both every bit as Border Collie as the foundational stock was and the odds that significant mutations have occured within remote clusters in 100 years is minute at best.

The driving force behind differences between the breed today and 100 years ago is not injection of DNA from other breeds.

The notion of a genetic split is thus laughable, since there’s nothing genetic preventing anyone from bridging those gaps. Unlike a real tree that is permanently severed when a branch splits off, no physical barrier prevents the un-clustering of the breed or the preservation of genetic diversity. The branches will only split when true speciation happens, and that’s unlikely. You can still breed a Chihuahua with a Mastiff if you want to, let alone a Barbie Collie and a Coyote Collie.

Working and Show Border Collies certainly aren’t a different species and they are hardly a different breed. I myself have bridged this “gap” by breeding a dam with Australian show lines and American sport lines with a stud who has strong US and UK working lines.

(2) If it’s not a split, what is it?

What we have here is evidence of clustering due to linebreeding, inbreeding, selection bias, a small sample size, and geographic isolation. The scientists have purposely sought out a very specific line of dogs (they attend Sheepdog trials in the US) to the exclusion of others. And they are comparing this group to a mere 5 Oz show dogs. If your sampling practices aren’t random and don’t include enough individuals, your data isn’t likely representative of the the breed as a whole.

Trying to measure this “split” is assinine given the reality of the data. Selecting the most linebred samples from the most distant continents is more likely to reveal the greatest genetic distance between lines in a diverse breed, not reveal an unfilled gap worthy of the label “genetic split.”

(3) Why does this clustering exist?

There are 3 main geographic areas for Border Collies and 4 main activities: {UK, USA, OZ} and {Working, Trialing, Show, and Sport}. I’ve made the case before that we shouldn’t confuse trailing with working, they are not the same. If we have 4 activities from 3 locations, we have 12 possible pairings and among those twelve, the two which anyone can tell you are the most distinct are US working lines and OZ show lines.

The researchers are cherry picking those two groups and are somehow surprised that there’s a difference. The US has the weakest and smallest pool of show lines and Australia has the weakest offering of working lines. Specifically the import/export of those two groups are low. Thus, the geographical separation means that those two groups aren’t likely to meet and breed. Popular dogs in each area after the initial exodus of dogs from the UK to OZ are less likely to drive the breed in the remote location.

As breeding fads pare down the genetic diversity in both of those groups, it’s not surprising to see that they appear to be split. But they did not grow apart, the branches between them have simply been trimmed by obsessive inbreeding. Those two groups are not any farther apart now than 100 years ago, the diversity of dogs between them has simply been pruned.

A century ago, you wouldn’t say we have a breed spit, you’d say we have a genetically diverse breed. Now, the trimming of the Border Collie family tree has left us with a less diverse breed in both the number of alleles and in the enforcement of homozygosity. The diversity of genes is less on both a breed wide basis and in individual dogs.

The best way to combat the problems of inbreeding and isolation is to not inbreed and overcome isolation.

(4) What does the chart tell you about Border Collies?

When I look at this tree, I notice a limited diversity of lines branching off to the right, a horribly clustered group of clonelike dogs fighting for the same spot on the center top, and a hand full of show dogs down the trunk that are no further from the major cluster than many dogs along the branch to the right.

The heavy clustering at the top is much more detrimental to the health and diversity of the gene pool than any distance between clusters. Great distance between clusters is a wonderful thing. It allows for outcrossing to dogs that are still under the Border Collie umbrella, keeping healthy hybrid qualities alive within a breed that is still a single breed. Free from constraints of political organizations that say you can’t outcross with other breeds and your gene pool can only shrink and not grow.

There will come a day when we miss what genetic diversity remains in our dogs and wish for the day when they all weren’t so homozygous and inbred. One mans of slowing our approach to that day is to allow greater and greater outcrossing and by maintaining the diversity you already have.

(5) Is clustering/splitting a problem?

Australian Sheperds are a younger and still more diverse breed than Border Collies. You can see it in their tree and you’ll see it evidinced in other genetic studies of the dog where the only errors in identifying a dog’s breed by its DNA came from the Aussies. They’re harder to pin down because they are not as homogenous as older and more inbred bre
eds.

Despite having smaller numbers sampled, we can clearly appreciate that the Aussie tree is has more diversity and branches in the Noise Phobia study than the other breeds in the chart:

We can see several clusters located at the extreemes of this tree and the distance between the cluster at the bottom left and the top right is pretty large. Do we see the researchers aghast at a rift in the Aussies? No.

All these dogs are Aussies, and we’d look at this tree and say that they are a diverse breed. But what if we simply trim some branches. What would we say about this new tree?

This scenario could happen if we didn’t sample dogs from the missing branches or perhaps if we exported only dogs from this smaller tree to another continent and thus limited the gene pool. Would we now say that the cluster at the bottom right is an less of an Aussie than the branches at the top left? Is there now a breed split simply because we have a smaller cherry picked sample? Should we revoke our naming of some of these dogs as Aussies? Should we prevent the cluster at the bottom right from breeding with the top branches?

Clustering becomes a problem when you lose diversity and increase homozygosity. Inbreeding creates clustering.

Splitting only becomes a problem when humans decide that they want to accentuate the differences and throw away diversity by trimming distant branches and preventing or discouraging those diverse animals from being bred. Exacerbating these slits creates bureaucratic rifts, not genetic rifts in breeds.

(4) Why should we emphasize splits if they’re not that important?
Sadly, the sheeple want to exacerbate and create splits in the breed and to use rules and institutions to enforce a physical divide that nature can not. They want to use the ABCA registry as a pruning device to keep the show dogs out and kick out any sport dogs that are dual registered with the AKC. They want to use the Registry as their tool to prevent others who do not abide by their philosophy, it is not enough for them to live their philosophy, they must force it on others as well.

They do this in the name of the breed, but it’s essentially fascism. There’s nothing preventing sheeple from breeding and buying the dogs they want within the an open registry. They are hacks and fools if they are unable to research their breeding and buying choices any more deeply than looking at the three letters infront of a dog’s registration number. In their own bigotry, they want their rivals out of the gene pool and they want what should be an information keeping service to be a defacto segregation service.

One such sheeple is Dr. Melanie Lee Chang. She’s essentially a dog sport person who sides with the sheeple camp. Her oldest Border Collie is a red (gasp!) rescue dog whom she has trained to a CGC (gasp! title chaser!) and a Novice Agility Tunnelers title (gasp! dog sport!), but her newest Border Collie is a trained imported trialing dog from the UK.

This is an excellent example of why trialing and the trialer jock sniffers are a sport and not work, as I doubt Melanie owns a farm or sheep or owns Border Collies for a higher purpose than playing at herding. It is clearly a hobby and she’s clearly bought into the elitist notion that putting up the big bucks for a European model is the way to go.

I’ve run into Dr. Chang on the BC Boards and besides being hostile to logic and debate, she also displayed many of the misandrist qualities so common to other women on those boards. She was particularly off put by my stature as a large built man.

Now it shouldn’t surprise you to find out that the hyping of the “genetic split” notions in the Noise Phobia study was done by none other than Dr. Chang!

Dr. Melanie Lee Chang: Dr. Chang is a postdoctoral scholar in Dr. Hamilton’s laboratory at UCSF. She holds PhDs in physical anthropology and ecology/evolutionary biology from the University of Pennsylvania, with primary research interests in systematics and phylogenetically-informed reconstructions of character evolution and population history. At this time, Dr. Chang’s primary canine project is investigating the genetic background of noise phobia in Border Collies. She has three Border Collies of her own, Solo, Fly, and Jett, with whom she has trained and competed in agility, flyball, and sheepdog trialing.

You don’t suppose that Dr. Chang’s own Border Collie politics have influenced her interpretation of the data and the selection bias present in the method for her experiment, do you?

And while we’re on the topic of Dr. Chang, I have to wonder what’s up with the name of her blog, CAVEDOG Canis Soloensis. While I know that intellectuals just love using Latin to make themselves sound erudite and thus smarter than you, it helps if you get the Latin right. Canis does mean dog, but Soloensis does not mean cave. Not even close.

Dr. Chang obviously got the name from Homo Erectus Soloensis, commonly known as Javaman, trying to equate Cavemen — most often referring to european Neanderthals or Cro-Magnon man — with Javaman. But Javaman wasn’t really a cave man, and Soloensis isn’t descriptive of a cave or of cavemen. You might mistake the Latin for “solitary,” but just as Neanderthalensis means “from the Neander Valley,” Soloensis means “from Solo.” And Solo is a city on the island of Java in Indonesia.

So for someone who has a PhD in physical anthropology and evolutionary biology and is all up tight about not calling barbie collies border collies, you’d think she’d get the name right. I had to dig deeper.

It turns out that the good doctor rescued a reboud dog named Franklin and renamed him Solo.

“I named the dog a name I didn’t even particularly like. It was just the first one that came to me and it didn’t matter”

Like many incongruous retcons, the name came first and the logic came later. In true showple fashion, which is strange for a sheeple, Franklin became Ashfall Solo River.

Solo is named for Ashfall Fossil Beds, Nebraska, a remarkable lagerstätten preserving loads of three-toed horsies, and Indonesia’s Solo River, where fossils of Homo erectus were first found.

Well, let’s giver her credit for a clever retcon that links her passion for anthropology and Border Collies, but question why someone who knows so much about evolutionary bottlenecks would want to create one in her own b
reed of choice and force her politics on others.