• 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.

Scheduled Air Times

If you miss the full program, Purina as some select videos of the event on their website.

Be sure to tune in for Frisbee, Agility, Dock Diving, and more. The best canine athletes in the country go head to head, the pride of the third estate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The link above has a page with “Remind Me” buttons so you won’t forget. First show is tomorrow, Sunday, at 10 AM on Animal Planet.

Nov 18, 10:00 am 8:00am Mountain (60 minutes)

Ultimate Dog Championships Flyball Las Vegas TV-G, CC Straight from Las Vegas this lightning-fast competition features dogs of various breeds and sizes as they team up in a race unlike any other. Flyball is the fastest paced and fastest growing canine sports today.

Dec 02, 10:00 am 8:00am Mountain (60 minutes)

Ultimate Dog Championships Disc Dogs Southern Nationals TV-G, CC Gravity defying canines bring action, excitement, and big air to Atlanta in this elite level disc competition. Working as a team with their handlers, the dogs sprint, vault, flip, and of course, catch–as they vie for a spot in the winner’s circle.

Dec 09, 10:00 am 8:00am Mountain (60 minutes)

Ultimate Dog Championships Lure Coursing TV-G, CC This action-packed, high-speed sport showcases some of the fastest dogs on the planet. Developed specifically for sight-hound breeds, these amazing athletes navigate an 800-yard course of pure adrenalin.

Dec 16, 10:00 am 8:00am Mountain (60 minutes)

Ultimate Dog Championships Agility Specials and Veterans TV-G, CC The Canadian Agility National Championships features dogs of various breeds overcoming obstacles such as hurdles, tunnels, chutes and weave poles. Handlers will be on the course coaching and guiding the canines at every step.

]]> http://www.astraean.com/borderwars/2007/11/dog-sports-on-tv.html/feed 1 http://www.astraean.com/borderwars/2007/10/siding-with-akc.html http://www.astraean.com/borderwars/2007/10/siding-with-akc.html#comments Mon, 08 Oct 2007 20:51:00 +0000 Christopher http://astraean.com/borderwars/2007/10/siding-with-the-akc.html Faced with the undeniable history of ruining numerous other purebred dog breeds by facilitating and encouraging countless breeders to breed stupidly, why would any circumspect Border Collie owner or breeder side with the AKC over a registry that is 100% Border Collie focused, that owns 90% of the gene pool, and speaks passionately about owning the moral high ground of Border Collie breeding by sticking to a purely herding based standard?

Well, because words, be they in pedigrees or mottoes or breed standards, are cheap. The lofty (Platonic) goals of the AKC and ABCA are well and good, but they have little to do with what the registries offer the WIDE middle ground of owners who are interested enough to care about registered dogs and who are active in at least one dog activity, but who are not frequent fliers or VIPs like show breeders or trialers.

“Merit” is a term that is not universal to any of the four Estates of the Border Collie. The Third and Fourth Estates (Dog Sport and Pet) would consider an AKC “Canine Good Citizen” certificate to be a somewhat valuable accomplishment, as the CGC promotes good manners that are essential to pets and dogs active in dog sports who are likely to be in urban environments and around many other animals and people. The first two estates (Herding and Conformation) don’t really need to care so much about dogs that are well adjusted in the same manner as the CGC. Herding dogs need to be farm savvy and Conformation dogs need to tolerate excessive amounts of grooming, but neither –as an intrinsic quality of their performance and thus breed-worthy status– needs to be friendly or socially adjusted in the way a CGC tests dogs.

But the CGC is hardly a lofty accomplishment, the AKC doesn’t even consider it a real title. So what about other performance events and titles? Well, that’s the rub.

What titles have meaning and which don’t? What accomplishments are necessary and sufficient to demonstrate that an animal is worthy of passing along its genetic code? And, gasp, what are puppy buyers looking for?

The First Estate says that only sheep trial success is sufficient and certainly necessary to establish breed-worthiness. In practice, I imagine many of these people also consider daily work on the farm a suitable proving ground as well. Trials might advertise your dog’s breed-worthiness to the whole community, but sometimes you’re not breeding for the entire community, you’re breeding for yourself, and I’d venture that in such cases their assessment of how the animal works for them day in and day out is all that is needed.

The Second Estate will claim that fitting the breed standard and the concomitant success in the breed ring is necessary and sufficient to breed a dog. And perhaps some genetic screenings too, since those appear to be more popular in the Second estate than the first, whether that’s due to a genuine interest or a greater need to test is a debate for another day.

The Third Estate, in its most active and successful form would probably use the word “versatility” to describe the quality that is essential for proving breed-worthiness. Many of the most well known breeders use that word at least once in describing their dogs.

But just saying “versatile” doesn’t make it true. At least one of the quotes you see in the image above comes from a breeder who has been kicked out of the ABCA for falsifying pedigree information and not cooperating with an ABCA investigation of their breeding practices.

But just as the word “Versatile” is the most popular advertising slogan of BC breeders on the Internet, it’s also the one quality that will get you on the enemy list of the ABCA. As I discussed in my last article, versatility breeders are a “clear and present danger” to the ABCA according to their committee charged with assessing the dual registration threat.

The dual registration threat stems from the Obedience (and now Agility) contingent that was popular in the ABCA but had “one foot in the AKC camp” because the AKC runs the Obedience and Agility competitions. These are the people who despite signing the AKC: Hands Off the Border Collie! petition to prevent full recognition for the Border Collie by the AKC now find themselves in the AKC camp.

Janice DeMello is mentioned in Donald McCaig’s new book, The Dog Wars, as one of the big wig Border Collie people who signed the “AKC: Hands Off the Border Collie” petition:

AKC: Hands Off the Borer Collie!

We own Border Collies. Our dogs are companion dogs, obedience dogs, and livestock herding dogs. For hundreds of years, Border Collies have been bred to a strict performance standard and today they’re the soundest, most trainable dogs in the world.

The AKC wants to push them out of the Miscellaneous Class and into the show ring. They seek a conformation standard (appearance standard) for the breed.

We, and the officers of every single legitimate national, regional, and state Border Collie association reject conformation breeding. Too often, the show ring fattens the puppy mills and creates unsound dogs.

We Will not permit the AKC to ruin our dogs.

…
Janice DeMello, 3 OTCH, Gaines Wins
…

Now, some sheeple might get all huffy and want to call people like Janice DeMello a traitor or a hypocrite or a border collie butcher. Those would be lies. And to call her a victim of the AKC is a half truth. She’s as much a victim of the ABCA’s policy to ban AKC pedigrees regardless of working ability as she is of the AKC pushing Border Collies into the show ring. Whereas the ABCA has banned 4 breeders and their dogs for pedigree fakery and suspect breeding conditions, 27 dogs have been delisted from the ABCA due to becoming AKC conformation champions, including one of Janice’s dogs. And she’s not alone or rare in signing that petition and eventually becoming an AKC breeder. Why?

Border Collie obedience handlers faced (AKC reps whispered) an unhappy choice. Either (a) help get the Border Collie fully recognized, or (b) the AKC would kick the Border Collie out of the Miscellaneous Class so that the dogs would no longer be able to compete in obedience. To people whose lives revolved around these competitions (and Border Collies are wonderful obedience dogs) it was an excruciating dilemma. Obedience people weren’t interested in dog shows, and most know that full AKC recognition would damage their breed, but not being able to compete any more was unthinkable.
- Donald McCaig. The Dog Wars p.96

Janice DeMello made her name in Border Collies and Obedience. She is a first class trainer and competitor. She has published training videos like, “Around the Clock Method of Scent Discrimination” and “Cruise Control for Power Heeling,” which are holy canon for competitors in Obedience and Freestyle, based on the experience she gained training her own dogs to numerous championships and competition firsts. Her success has become a brand and Janice graduated from competitor to trainer to breeder. Her “Hob Nob” puppies are in such demand, there’s a waiting list, a premium price tag, a comprehensive and tailored contract, and Janice gets to select which puppy is the right one for you.

You’ll also notice that many of her dogs are gorgeous, her “inventory” is expanding to include rare coat color variants like blue-eyed blue merles, and that some of her litters each year cater to a conformation buyer. She has certainly adopted elements of the show culture, but even more interesting, she’s also taken up serious sheep herding as well. Perhaps out of interest, perhaps out of guilt (that’s why I do it), and perhaps to preserve that element of the border collie within the AKC bloodlines and assuage the risk that such talents will disappear.

Although they and their sport were ugly stepchildren at dog shows, obedience people and their skills weren’t overvalued by sheepdog people either. A few obedience handlers had moved into sheepdog trials, but these excepted, I don’t know any sheepdog trialist who has ever bothered to attend an obedience competition.

Obedience competitors weren’t numerous – probably fewer than 200 of a Border Collie community of 10,000 – but they were educated, had one foot in the AKC camp already, and most were scared enough to cooperate. Some believed recognition was inevitable, and if they were the AKC breed club, they could emphasize the Border Collie’s working abilities and minimize the damage the AKC would do to the breed.
- Donald McCaig, The Dog Wars p.97

As Donald points out, the large and growing third estate of border collie enthusiasts–dog sport hobbyists and breeders–was essentially blackmailed by the AKC and dismissed by the ABCA. At least you can bargain with or ignore blackmailers, you can’t do much with a group of elitists who don’t care and don’t want to care about your needs at all.

It’s ironic that despite the sheeple’s view that conformation poisons all of the AKC dogs, conformation of Border Collies isn’t an issue anywhere except in the breed ring at dog shows. It plays no part officially, socially, or practically in any other AKC activity with Border Collies. A Border Collie will never be disallowed from competing in Obedience, Agility, Tracking, or Herding because of conformation. Nor will they face any difference in cost or reward or requirements at any of those activities.

Not true with the ABCA. The USBCHA allows any dog at all to compete in their trials, but the ABCA’s award money can only be awarded to an ABCA registered dog. And the only dogs to be expelled and not allowed to Register On Merit are conformation dogs. On a practical level, the only policy that is actively hurting the competition of herding dogs is the ABCA’s policy against conformation, not the AKC’s policies for conformation. Disallowing even the most glamorous Barbie Collie from R.O.M.ing is a policy that makes the ABCA look overly protective to the point of hypocrisy and fascist prejudice. But they can afford to be prejudiced, they have 90% of the breed and this policy is wise on their part to keep it that way.

This is why, despite the AKC’s fundamental lack of appreciation for the Border Collie, the ABCA is not always the most attractive choice for the growing border collie dog sport hobbyist. They aren’t getting “everything they want” from the ABCA. The ABCA doesn’t understand this, or they don’t appreciate the significance:

But, as the AKC is dominated by a small cadre of dog show people, stockdog culture is dominated by a small number of trial handlers. There’s no way agility people will “take over” a registry that is already providing everything they want from it: sound working pups. Take us over? Why should they? They’ve already got everything they want.
- Donald McCaig, The Dog Wars p158

Dog sport people don’t have everything they want. No one wants to depend on other people for their livelihood or their passion and McCaig says as much in his book. Except his passion is herding sheep with his dogs, others have a passion for throwing plastic discs, running through obstacles, or retrieving a tennis ball as fast as possible. The very same reason the sheeple don’t want the showple to damage the breed, the sportple don’t want to leave their dogs entirely in the hands of sheeple. Not that sheeple are evil, but sheeple aren’t sportple and sportple are perfectly capable to breed our own dogs with our particular desires paramount.

Even more significant is branding. In any activity, enthusiastic newcomers will want the best equipment. When they see a successful agility person winning all the time, they will try to get their instruction secrets and they will also try and get the winning person’s dog, or at least a puppy from it. Compare this to the severe overuse of Wiston Cap in the herding community. Not only was Cap a good dog, his handler was just as magnificent. Together they made a great team. So, Jock Richardson wannabes emulated Richardson and paid to have their bitches bred to Cap.

Since the Obedience and Agility community is now in the AKC camp, and a “Clear and Present Danger” to the ABCA, how long do you think active sport breeders in the ABCA can maintain their AKC independence if AKC dogs are banned from ABCA registration?

If a sport dog, say “Spike,” made a big splash in that community, the best odds of capturing his genetics isn’t going to happen by calling up Spike’s herding breeder (who knows nothing of Spike’s success and doesn’t really do repeat matings) and trying to get another puppy with the same genetics as Spike, it’s going to be breeding Spike. The herding community thinks that sportple should just get their dogs from herding focused breeders and simply be happy with that. I don’t think that’s realistic.

That’s why it’s no surprise that Janice DeMello (and others like her in the other two estates of BC-dom herding and showing) has a demanded and successful breeding business. People want her talent and they want her dogs. They will buy both in any form they can get. Even if they implicitly understand that the true success of Janice comes from hard work and that it’s impossible to breed her expertise into her puppies, and even if they understand that her dogs probably aren’t that genetically special and they’re paying a premium for the DeMello name, it’s worth it to them, just like it was worth it to the thousands of buyers and subsequent breeders of “celebrity” trialing dogs. Janice doesn’t make any qualms that it takes successful breeding, training, and a good dog and handler to be the best:

It’s a big versatile world for those who own and train border collies. The talents of the trainer are as important as the talents of the dog to make a succesful team regardless of the activity.

Her dogs are not be genetic anomalies, but they have been thoroughly vetted for ability. They will not succeed in the hands of a novice like they have succeeded in Janice’s hands, but her celebrity attracts plenty of people of like mind and interest who are putting in the hard work. Her web page might be kitsch (at least she has one) and her choice of theme music arrogant (Tina belting “simply the best, better than all the rest), but it’s not bragging if you can prove it and the list of her clients’ accomplishments is encouraging and exhaustive.

If only there were herding and trialing breeders as enthusiastic, encouraging, and inviting to the dog sport community.

Success begets success and good dogs beget good dogs. The dog sport community might have started out as a leech on the herding dogs, just like the US herding community was a leech on the British herding dogs. Both groups siphoned off a few good dogs at a time until they got enough to work with on their own and knew what they wanted done differently.

Sheeple have a common and arrogant attitude that since breeding for sheep is (in their bible) the highest and best purpose for a Border Collie, it must follow that any other activity should be fine with herding cast offs and no dogs should be bred specifically for those activities. Get your dogs from us, don’t make them yourselves, you’re not qualified. They will admit that Border Collies make bad pets, but they won’t accept that hobbyists take pet temperament into consideration while breeding as well as employ more pet oriented socialization, resulting in Border Collies that are easier to live with by removing a bit of the compulsive obsession from their natural drive. The fact that Donald McCaig mercilessly scoffs at dog toys on several occasions in “Dog Wars” is just one indication of a larger ethic of condescension and vainglorious dismissal that sheeple feel towards non-sheeple. We’re seen as silly and frivolous.

When the task is different, the best tool for the job will be different. The herding border collie is not the ultimate tool for all jobs. Nor, as the recent success of several of Janice’s dogs demonstrates, is it impossible for an AKC breeder to create a fantastic herding dog that is highly competitive in the real sheep trials in the USBCHA. Donald McCaig might deny this dog’s existence:

Then, as now, the dog fancy preferred roundabout rebuttals.
Roundabout rebuttal #1: The show dog that outworks all the best working dogs is still with us. (Dog fanciers tell me about him all the time. It is regrettable this paragon is never seen at a trial or anywhere else he might be tested.)
- Donald McCaig, The Dog Wars p58

But this dog does exist and Janice DeMello was the breeder. Now this dog in question might not meet the impossible standard of outworking all the best working dogs, but this dog is a real talent and is the product of two show champions and is a show champion itself. Donald McCaig has seen this dog (at the USBCHA National Finals last year) although he chose not to mention such in his book.

I’ll leave this issue for now with another quote from McCaig:

Like the AKC, we are indifferent to everything but one preoccupation: we would glorify stockwork; and scorn the beautiful and useless, the lapdog, the untrainable, the barking watchdog, the dumb but lovable family pet.
- Donald McCaig, The Dog Wars p143

I have a feeling that McCaig is speaking directly to the Versatility breeder or buyer when he describes “the beautiful and useless” and the “dumb but lovable family pet.” These are a nice reflection of the same dismissive attitude he describes earlier in the book:

If I were to include a pet trick in my trial — like fetching a frisbee or rolling over and playing dead — my peers would be appalled.

I can’t remember when I last petted someone else’s dog at a sheepdog trial.
- Donald McCaig, The Dog Wars p23

Regarding the AKC Herding Program:

It was (and is) a Mickey Mouse program and we didn’t want Border Collies competing (few parents deliberately send their children to the worst schools), but we thought that anything that involves people with their dogs is good for the dogs, and if people want to try their Shelties and Beardies and Lassie collies on sheep, have at it and God Bless.
- Donald McCaig, The Dog Wars p33

Sympathizers warned us that dog shows had ruined the German shepherd, Bedlington terrier, rough collie (the Lassie collie), the cocker spaniel, Doberman pinscher, Rottweiler, and Akita. To this oft-heard criticism, the AKC replies, “Registries don’t ruin breeds, breeders ruin breeds.”
p38

I hadn’t planned to mention that AKC show ring practices had reduced the rough collie, Old English sheepdog, Shetland sheepdog and bearded collie to uselessness.
p55

Notice the consistent use of the same few breeds. Dog sport is fine, as long as it’s not with the Border Collie. Look at all the “ruined” herding breeds that can now “play” at herding in the AKC’s joke program. Don’t let Border Collies who are not (yet) ruined play, just keep out of it altogether and certainly don’t breed for dog sport, since dog sport is tainted by conformation.

Many in the Third Estate don’t want a dog to work work work!, they want a very special pet. They like dog toys and dogs that are spoiled and well rounded and versatile. That doesn’t mean they want the dreaded “Jack of All Trades” that the ABCA warns of in their 2002 memorandum, it means that if you have to sacrifice a degree of herding performance to gain a dog that doesn’t make a “terrible” pet, many people are willing to make that sacrifice.

Beverly Lambert, an expert trialer with one of the best dogs trialing today, makes a similar argument about how her dogs are nurtured. Let me clarify that this has nothing to do with breeding dogs (nature) for better “pet” qualities, but simply how one treats (nurture) their dog:

I snuggle with all of my dogs. I like them. I like dogs I enjoy being
around them and I don’t want to sacrifice my enjoyment of their
company for success on the trial field. I like petting my dogs. I
like giving them a hug when I want and I like that they return this
desire for closeness and affection. On a cold day I like a warm dog
in the lap while I watch the trial. I like sitting with a pup asleep
in my arms in the evening while I watch TV.

Thus far I have not found that I need to give up cuddling to achieve
success on the trial field. I have not had a dog that couldn’t be
loved and cuddled and treated like a pet and not expected to perform
well on the trial field.

I suppose its possible they would do better if we had a more
disciplined relationship. But I’ll never know. Its not a sacrifice I
have ever been willing to make for success.

The position stems from a debate on whether some trialers treat their dogs too sternly or have a business only relationship and that this is an advantage on the trial field. I can’t help but feel that the nature vs. nurture argument debated here is a reflection of the greater attitude of what makes the ideal Border Collie and how should those dogs be bred (nature) and trained (nurture).

McCaig critiques both the nature and nurture practices of the “fancy” (petting dogs, grooming, dog toys, barking, leashes and breeding for looks, inbreeding, etc), and I wonder if the repeated disdain for benign things like pet toys doesn’t stem from a greater aversion to all things Third and Fourth Estate or at least aversion to Border Collies of the Third and Fourth Estate and indifference to the other breeds that are already ruined for work.

That definition of what is acceptable culture is just one more wedge that drives people from neutral ground into the AKC camp. If you bathe your dog, you’re a fancy. If you use a leash, you’re fancy. If you have dog toys, fancy. If you cuddle your dogs or pet other people’s dogs, fancy behavior. And if your dog barks (I hope McCaig gets to see a Flyball tournament one day, he’d freak out), undignified fancy behavior.

The unhappy world of the Third Estate, “ugly stepchildren” no matter which registry we turn towards.

A Clear and Present Danger

With the AKC’s increased presence in the explosively growing sport of agility, its reputation with uninformed pet buyers who see “AKC reg” as a guarantee of quality, its enormous budget and sophisticated PR staff, and its intent to increase registration of Border Collies, the AKC is a formidable rival. If it keeps its studbooks open and entices Border Collie owners to first dual register their dogs, then register AKC only, it may very well marginalize the ABCA to the point where the ABCA is no longer viable. Obviously, the working Border Collie as we know it cannot survive without a registry dedicated to its preservation.

But even if the ABCA were to survive as a registry, the working Border Collie as a breed will be endangered by a growing acceptance of dual registration. Dual registration creates a single breeding pool of AKC dogs and ABCA dogs. Because the AKC advocates and rewards conformation breeding, the number of show-bred dogs—which are useless as stock dogs according to many who’ve tried to train them—will steadily increase in this pool. Moreover, the BCSA’s ideal, and the secondary ideal of the AKC world (its primary ideal being conformation) is the versatile dog—the dog who can excel at every title-winning activity including conformation and herding.

This means that working breeders who wish to sell excess pups to the AKC market will be influenced to breed dogs who meet show ring fashions. While there are such dogs among good working dogs, selecting them for breeding in favor of others who don’t meet current show ring tastes distorts the working gene pool. It also means that AKC owners will be motivated to breed their show and sport dogs to real ABCA working dogs to get the “herding credential.” This co-mingling can only lead to the lowest-common-denominator dogs being marketed by AKC people as “ABCA working dogs.” And it means that the AKC becomes the definer not just of their dogs but of ours, increasing public confusion about what a real Border Collie is and dragging down our dogs with each future generation of AKC-inspired breeding.
- “The ABCA Needs Your Thoughts on ABCA/AKC Dual Registration” 2002

This is fascinating. Despite the normal sheeple rhetoric that revolves solely around conformation being evil beauty pageants, this diatribe goes after the growing and merit based dog sport world with a vengeance. The First Estate declared open war on the Third Estate.

Although you might get the impression from Donald McCaig’s new book, “The Dog Wars, How the Border Collie Battled the American Kennel Club,” that the “War” was between the trialists and the conformationists, that’s only the philosophy. There were no Border Collies being shown in conformation in the USA before the War and no sizable demand for them. When the ABCA lost the fight to prevent the AKC from giving the Border Collie full treatment, the only people to suffer were the Obedience and Agility people within the ABCA.

B) Future Ban

Under this proposal, anyone who, after a specified future date, registered a dog, bitch or pup with the AKC would have his ABCA papers for that dog canceled. The ABCA registration application would require a statement that the dog is not registered with AKC, and a statement that the dog’s sire and dam either are not registered with the AKC or were registered before the cutoff date, and the applicant would be informed that if the dog should later be registered with the AKC, its ABCA registration will become void.

Grandfathering: Owners of presently dual-registered dogs would retain ABCA registration privileges so long as none of these dual-registered dogs’ future offspring was knowingly registered with the AKC.

Advantages:

• Makes the statement that AKC registration is inconsistent with preserving the working Border Collie.
• Ensures an eventual separation between ABCA and AKC Border Collies.
• Clarity and ease of execution. A simple statement on the website and a change in wording of registration and transfer applications would be all the extra work the registry office must do. The committee did not feel that policing this would be much of a problem. High profile ABCA working dogs -the key breeders – would likely be exposed should they attempt dual registration with AKC.

Disadvantages:

• Would completely cut off those who wish to compete with intact ABCA Border Collies in AKC agility, obedience, etc. Many dog sport competitors prefer pups from working lines and although they AKC register in order to compete in these events, they still support the ABCA.
• The libertarian Border Collie community might protest, arguing that breeders should be free to do what they like with their dogs even if the end results are bad.
• If the owner chooses to go ahead and register with the AKC anyway, the AKC gains a breeding prospect and the ABCA effectively loses a dog.

When the Nazis at the AKC came for the Border Collie, the Sophies in the ABCA said, “you can’t take my children.” But when push came to shove, the ABCA relented with “take the agile and obedient child, and leave me with my shepherd.” As Donald McCaig said, the ABCA didn’t want to compete with the AKC for the Third Estate. So, when the AKC assimilated the Obedience and Agility crowd instead of torturing them to death, the Sophies in the ABCA got to see their childen again, albeit in a grown up and more powerful form. This letter is evidence that they didn’t like what they saw and instead of a heartfelt welcome home hug, the Third Estate are now seen as the Hitler Youth of the Border Collie War: young and less culpable in the evil being perpetrated by the Nazi AKC, but still a clear and present threat.

The ABCA has never really been at war with the show people, just their registry. There really aren’t (and never have been) any show people in the ABCA and no matter how prevalent showing Border Collies becomes, there aren’t going to be many (or any) in the future, especially because the ABCA doesn’t accept AKC pedigrees for transfers and will kick out any ABCA dog that is dual registered and is shown in conformation.

Before the Dog Wars, ABCA didn’t have show style dogs nor show breeders, and they don’t now. The second the AKC opened the doors to the Border Collie, the only source of show style dogs was overseas. UK and especially Austrialian and New Zealand show-bred Border Collies. Since the ABCA has never accepted AKC registrations, those dogs would never enter the ABCA breeding pool, so really, the ABCA already had a policy to protect against show dogs that can’t work.

So what’s the problem? Show dogs are out. The working end of the breed is saved. Why the need to form a new battle plan and fight Dog Wars II? Well, because the spoils of the war are still up for grabs:

Right now, ABCA-registered Border Collies greatly outnumber AKC-registered border collies. ABCA dogs are the “normal” Border Collie; AKC dogs are the exception. Only a small minority (possibly 5%?) of Border Collie people currently dual register with the AKC, generally because they hope to sell pups to AKC obedience and agility competitors, or as a marketing tool to pet buyers. But if dual registration continues, the balance will gradually shift the other way, as it has with other breeds. The committee believes that the number of working Border Collie owners who dual register has increased in the last couple of years, and will continue to increase unless attention is focused on the threat this presents to our breed. The committee further believes that without a large pool of dogs bred for work, the few that are kept and worked by top trial handlers and commercial livestock raisers will not be sufficient to keep the working breed viable.
- “The ABCA Needs Your Thoughts on ABCA/AKC Dual Registration” 2002

That’s worth repeating, “the few that are kept and worked [and bred] by top trial handlers…will not be sufficient to keep the working breed viable.” How will they not be sufficient? Are they not sufficient today? Trialers of the past had no qualms about breeding the piss out of the top dogs (see Wiston Cap and Cap) so why can’t today’s trialers do the same?

It’s not in the breeding of the good dogs, it’s in the selling of the culls. Money money money money money. McCaig et al thought that money was all that was on the mind of the AKC, but their offers to help fill the AKC coffers if they’d just leave the Border Collie alone were rejected. That doesn’t mean that the AKC doesn’t want money (those parties cost a fortune, you know, and they lose it by the bucket fulls at each and every dog show they put on). But it might mean that the ABCA wants money, or at least needs as much as it makes now with 90% of the market share that it can’t afford to give up any more.

See, the conformation breeding might be a threat to the genetics of the breed, but the threat to the bottom line is the Third Estate because they more than the First and Second Estates have easier access to the desired pet market, the Fourth Estate. The people who are your neighbors and friends and whose Border Collies you are much more likely to witness catching a frisbee or tennis ball than a dog in a conformation show or in a trial. The Third Estate is rural and urban and since they actually vet their dogs abilities, the cries that Versatility breeding will bring ruin to the breed are only credible insofar as the sheeple can paint Versatility breeders with the Conformation (stupid Barbie) brush and point out that versatile dogs that don’t herd are going to lose that ability forever to the ruination of the breed.

Let me make this clear, no conformationist has ever been hurt by any policy of the ABCA against the AKC. There is not now, and never has there been a reason for a conformation show person to register a dog with the ABCA. Any ABCA dog that makes for a quality show dog can be registered with the AKC, and has to be registered with the AKC to show and to sire puppies that show. The ABCA has not published their stud books for this reason, preventing the AKC from pulling the old Mormon trick of baptizing the dead into their faith.

The only victims of the Dog Wars are in the Third Estate. The First Estate can and has carried on business as usual, raising working dogs and importing some from the UK. The AKC conformation people have done just fine without ABCA support, importing show dogs from overseas, and finding as many showple coming from more competitive breeds into the fresh fertile ground of Border Collies as they have attracted current Border Collie (only) people into the ring. Neither group seems any worse off after the war than before.

But that is not true with the Third Estate. The AKC Obedience and Agility lines are locked forever in that registry and any breeding to those dogs results in AKC only offspring. Given the fact that dog sport is openly the enemy of the ABCA, why should working dog sympathizers who come to trialing as a sport and not a divine calling put up with the ridicule and condescension because they also run Agility or Obedience? What about the sympathizers who don’t trial, they surely aren’t going to stick around long enough to give it a shot.

The combined breeding pool that the above letter sees as a threat to them is an asset to the Third Estate. The sports are young but growing and the few Obedience lines are virtual monopolies given the high price tag, lengthy puppy contracts that often include spay/neuter or co-ownership, and the fact that even with the hand full of those breeders who turn out as many puppies as they can, there is more demand for Third Estate dogs than they can provide.

At the end of the day, nothing the AKC or the ABCA does will prevent anyone from breeding to suit their needs. There will be dogs bred specifically for Agility and specifically for Flyball, and specifically for Trialing as a sport. It’s already done today. There will be new breeds born out of this, such as the BorderJack, and perhaps the Agility and Flyball molded dogs that are all Border Collie will lose herding skill while they gain specific skills that are advantageous in their specialty.

The degree to which that might be true will be sorted out by the free market, the sum total of the pet buyers, the sport buyers, the conformation buyers, and the herding buyers. What makes the other breeds ruined by the AKC and show breeding less applicable to this situation is the observation that the growing interest is in merit based venues, not conformation. That is not a small difference. Sure, the “breed” will be changed by those specific needs, but the breed has been changed before. The dogs bred in the USA are different than the dogs bred in the UK, and the popular morphologies on the East Coast differ from those on the West Coast. You might even call the McNab herding dog the BorderJack of the herding world.

I don’t have any easy answers about who is going to ruin the breed or not, but I don’t believe that versatility breeding will result in the “lowest-common-denominator.” I, and a think a lot of buyers, see value in a “Border Collie” (the herding elite will insist that the name stay with them and that versatile dogs should not be called Border Collies) that isn’t a terrible pet, has enough drive to win on the weekends but not so much that they spiral into neurosis, has herding ability in the herding lines and agility ability in the agility lines and flyball ability in the flyball lines, and where those lines intersect, people whose interests intersect will find their ideal dog.

The reason versatility breeding is dangerous to the ABCA is because the ABCA has no means of cleaning house. They don’t have a herding standard and while they will ROM dogs that aren’t pedigreed that demonstrate adept ability with sheep, they do not in any way delist dogs already on the books that don’t have that ability. Versatile breeders are likely to have dogs (at least now) that can win a trial and win a conformation show, and it is the versatile breeders who might be interested in both. When such dogs and their breeders establish a base in the ABCA and then turn their sites on conformation, the ABCA would have no ability to kick those dogs out any more than they can kick out the plethora of untested and perhaps incapable dogs they currently have on the books. And there are dogs that aren’t in the ABCA, that are AKC only that could pass the ROM requirement. They too have been prevented from entry with a rule change. This prevents the same problem, versatile dogs that excel in herding but are also platonically gifted in the eyes of the show ring judges from being able to have the best of both worlds as far as the registries are concerned.

The show dog that outworks all the best working dogs is still with us. (Dog fanciers tell me about him all the time. It is regrettable this paragon is never seen at a trial or anywhere else he might be tested.)
- Donald McCaig, The Dog Wars p58

What Donald McCaig says is a lie. He himself (along with two-thirds of the field) was beaten by a full fledged AKC conformation dog who is the product of two AKC conformation champions at the USBCHA National Finals last year. Before his book was published.

Perhaps this doesn’t qualify for the impossible standard of outworking ALL of the best working dogs, but this dog and its handler did beat out several of the top handlers and their dogs (albeit some of them qualified multiple dogs and the “barbie collie” in question beat only one of the two). This same dog is now in the Top 150 and thus qualified for entry into this year’s National Finals, although 150 dogs ran in the Open, I don’t see this dog there, and I don’t know why.

Donald McCaig did qualify two of his dogs and even made the top 35 on the first run, an impressive feat for sure. Regardless, this “barbie collie” dog easily qualifies to be ROM’d but will never be a part of the ABCA gene pool nor will any of this dogs descendants. To add insult to injury, this dog was withheld prize money it earned at the Finals last year since only ABCA registered dogs are allowed to win their prize money.

In case you’re wondering if this trialer is a sheeple gone mad that switched to the darkside and brought their trialing experience with them to tip the scales, no, this person is not. This person bought a dog from a versatility breeder (who is even mentioned in McCaig’s book as someone who signed the anti-AKC petition) who required that the puppy be taken to sheep. The dog was meant for the child of this trialer and was to be shown in conformation as the primary first interest.

A conformation dog, from conformation stock, with a novice handler doing extremely well on the national level against the Big Hats. That is no small feat and is evidence that breeding for versatility is not breeding “jack of all trade” dogs. Few dogs and few people are masters of anything, but the Border Collie stands alone as fertile ground to be shaped to master most any task, especially if they are bred and refined for it.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I am in no way saying that this dog is doing well because it fits some conformation standard nor that conformation is improving the breed or played any part in helping this dog and its trainer on the trial field. I am simply showing that merit should be rewarded on merit and this dog and this person have enough in both fields to be at the top of the heap in both.

Call it the exception and not the rule and I’ll call any top trialing dog the exception and not the rule. Any top anything is the exception and not the rule. If you could win all the time by simply following the rules, then there’d be a lot more winners and a lot fewer losers.

Patrick Burns on the Terrierman blog called me out for suggesting that the Third Estate was THE new paradigm for Border Collies. I never stated such, although I would agree fully that dog sport is A new paradigm by extant fact and by moral right. The subtle difference is meaningful, as unlike the first two estates who would suggest that they should be the ONLY paradigm of the Border Collie, the Third Estate has never, and will never claim total ownership of any breed, nor do any of its tenets suggest that the other Estates should not be allowed to breed their own dogs.

The First Estate demands breeding for herding ability to the exclusion of all other causes. Attacking the exclusion part of that logic in no way suggests that Border Collies should not be bred for herding. That logic comes from a limited and extremist point of view. The same kind of myopia that would suggest that Fascism is the opposite of Communism and there is no third (or fourth) way. Any Libertarian will tell you that when you think in two dimensions, you exclude all possible alternate paths that are tangential to both Communism and Fascism.

The Third Estate is a third path. It is a valid path, and it is a path that more and more people are taking. The distinct possibility that the Third Estate will, if it is not already, out breed the Second and the First Estate is a scenario that needs to be addressed and analysised and critiqued. McCaig doesn’t think that they’ll take over the registries, but they very well might take over the breed.

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 lifstyle 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.

Like training guides on the weave polls, the Marshalls’ books encourage readers to navigate the obstacle of self-journalism by staying on point, and making it from start to finish without going too far afield while not missing any of the important bits.

It’s no wonder then that the Marshalls are dog sport people (a very do-it-yourself crowd): Kate and her dog Bo run Agility (Bo got his MACH title this year) and are keen observers of dog-people culture. In her recent blog post titled “Dog Sports: A Truly Cultural Divide,” Kate makes some keen observations about the different priorities of the Second and Third Estates of the Border Collie:

The difference between Obedience and Agility cultures pales in comparison to the divide between Conformation and Herding worlds, especially with border collie lovers. Here the split goes beyond style, with passionate debate over whether breeding towards a physical standard rather than herding talent is good for the breed or bad. Confessing a preference for a certain ear carriage or coat at a working border collie herding trial is a serious faux pas.

I decide to test the mood at the AKC National Championships, where my daughter and herding-reject turned agility-star border collie are entered in Agility. There is no Herding event there, but many Agility people I know who have border collies dream of living on a farm with sheep some day, so I use them as a proxy.

A 50-foot high metal curtain strategically divides the Long Beach Convention Center into Agility and Conformation worlds. I venture over to the Conformation side in time for the border collie gathering. I don’t need a passport to cross the border, but I immediately feel underdressed in my cargo pants and “In Dog We Trust” t-shirt. I am glad I left my un-bathed dog on the other side.

“Gosh, I’m surprised by how different the show collies look from the ones over in Agility,” I say, testing the waters with a spectator whose allegiance I have not yet determined.

“Oh, you mean the Coyotes?” I can’t tell if she is joking so I hastily retreat.

“Did you know that show people call these border collies coyotes?” I ask on the other side of the iron curtain.

“Oh, you mean the Barbie Collie people?” This time I stay long enough to see the smile.

Some of you might think my War rhetoric is over the top or at least unnecessarily dramatic, but there are a few other Border Collie people out there who appreciate the virtual yet palpable “iron curtain” in the “dog wars” of the Border Collie.