From Donald McCaig’s The Dog Wars, you’d swear that there were too few working dogs and too much work to do, thus the dire need to “save” the entire breed (all 35,000 new puppies per year) to preserve the working ability only.
But it’s not really so, McCaig admits. In fact, it’s the opposite.
Donald McCaig sings a different tune when he’s talking to fellow sheeple than when he’s pleading the case for his cadre’s supremacy. This is not a new tactic, one story to the ignorant public, another for the in-the-know hobbyists. Notice how his Dog Wars book talks all about the evils of conformation vs. sheep trials, since it’s easy to belittle the pageantry of conformation and it’s clearly not work. But he fails to demonize dog sport in the same manner (at least in the book). Dismiss, yes; belittle, certainly; demonize, no.
Why? Because it’s a hard case to make that Agility is not work. It requires smarts, training, and drive, the only thing missing is the sheep…. and that’s not a bad thing for 99% of us. But with fellow sheeple he talks all about dog sport being THE “Clear and Present” danger to the breed. It’s also hard to make the case that sheep trials are work, not sport. They are sport.
In this interesting passage, McCaig admits that he has too many dogs and too little real work for them. Well, why did he breed them then? Why did he go to Scotland to get a real working dog? That sounds like a waste of money if you’re always pleading poverty and only have a hundred and some sheep as McCaig does. Couldn’t he find a good enough dog here?
Dear Fellow Handlers,
I’ve had a sheep farm (100-150 ewes) for 30 years until three years ago when health made us sell all bhut (sic) twenty five. We had sheep before we had sheepdogs. Now, like many on this list, I rarely work dogs, often train. I do get my dogs out and about which helps a little but I’ve no doubt that John Helle’s dogs (5000 ewes/western Montana) get more experience than mine do. John has never trialed but buys his dogs from trial stock.
Even a farm flock, like ours was doesn’t provide the experience a big spread does. Except for accidents or sickness, 150 ewes only need one dog and excepting shearing, breeding and lambing, most days he could stay in the kennel.
So we must make do – as Beverly Lambert has, for one example – with training and shifting venues.
Yesterday I was driving home when I spotted a neighbor with four full grown rams in a fence corner, unable to bring them to the barn where one would go on the truck. Four people: no movement.
I stopped and jumped Luke out of my car. He wriggled through the wire and, a few minutes later, the rams were on their way to the barn.
No. It wasn’t pretty. The 300 + pound rams had never seen a sheepdog before and Luke only had a few feet to maneuver in that corner.
Wool flew. I rapped the most aggressive ram with the owner’s stock stick, Luke hated it. But he came at them until, finally, they turned and went to the barn.
Luke is a six year old trial dog. Most of his experience has been trials and unfamiliar venues and training.
I wish he’d had the opportunity to learn more on his own, but today, when I have a bit of farm work to do I take out one of my young dogs.
That’s the reality most of us are faced with: too many dogs/too little work.
They adapt, as we do.
Donald McCaig
You adapt? Not so, Donald, not so. You’re stuck in the past trying to hold back the winds of change. You’ve chosen to be an anachronism, giving up a big city job in marketing to go become a small time sheep farmer, and you’ve bought into the romantic history of border collies. That’s your right and it’s a swell thing to do. But when you start wagging your finger at those youngin’s who are supposedly messing it all up, you fail to realize that we moved out of the old neighborhood before you even moved in.
When you choose to be an anachronism, you just sound silly when you curse the change that is already here and was before you went retro.
Agility is an adaptation. Frisbee is an adaptation. Dog Dancing is an adaptation. The dogs do adapt, and so do the owners and trainers. We find new and fun things to do with them, to keep them active, healthy, and well adjusted. New things to test their merit and new things to determine which of them we want to breed.
You’re welcome to keep your platonic vision of the ideal rural life with the ideal rural dog, but don’t spit “you’re ruining the breed” at me when you’ve got more dogs than you need, less work than you claim, and a horrible case of mission creep. You want control of the entire breed when you can’t even find enough work for your own household of dogs?
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Anton
Christopher
Lawrence Dillard
Lech
Stephanie
Essere
Interesting post. I’m not a Border collie person but I do know people in Agility and we usually have fundraising booths at Agility trials.
Those are the closest thing to working dogs most people will ever see. I’ve said many times that what makes Agility such a pleasant venue for us is that the people know dogs, breed dogs for working ability not looks (although looks are nice) and aren’t at all snobbish about the dogs.
If you’re a sheep rancher, obviously you need dogs – again, purpose bred and conditioned for that job.
Everybody should just cut the act and get together or there won’t be any dogs left to argue about.
I agree, it’d be nice if the level of snobbery was lowered and people could “get together.”
But just look at this post right above Mr. McCaig’s… it’s from a lady who has her own blog.
“Eliminating the continuing erosion of the breed into ‘sport dogs'” makes it pretty clear that despite being anachronisms, these people are too caught up in their own self importance to get together with anyone.
And do remember that trialing is not working. It’s close, but seriously not the same thing. It is, IMO, a sport.
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Candy, Karen’s point, and I think Hub’s too, is that we should focus on promoting/producing working dogs to eliminate the continuing erosion of the breed into “sport dogs.” I agree and I don’t have any real work for them even though I do know what a day’s work with livestock looks like up close and personal.
so what to do? personally, i only keep dogs that can do a day’s work even though i only trial them. maybe I do that because i do know what a day’s work looks like and have great respect for the stock and stockmen.
imo, the HA must do what it can to prevent the decline of “working” dogs by the masses that are coming into herding, trialing and dog sports without any idea from where they came. again, imo, we do that by continually raising the bar and by being exclusionary to a degree that people really have to “want” it to get in. i think we are, and i think that it’s very important that we continue to be the “gold standard.”
when i was over for the world trial in 05, i was graciously hosted by a hill shepard. The way we “practiced” for the trial was by checking for mastitis every day and dipping 1200 hd. he told me that the way he had “practiced” for the previous international was by gathering cattle the day before he left for it. i think that’s what karen and hub are referring to.
having said that though, i have a very talented young dog for sale. he would make a very useful farm dog. here’s the number of producers who have contacted me about him: One
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Amelia Smith
http://www.BorderSmith.com
Don’t forget Flyball Christopher! There are a lot of good working stock Border Collies playing flyball and I have a couple. The breeder who I got mine from is an old farmer that breeds some of the best working Border collies in the southeast and most of his dogs go to farms. However, he knows that there is not enough work for all of them and does allow some to be placed in flyball and agility homes. He likes me to keep him updated on what his dogs are doing and I send him photos and updates all the time.
Of course, no disrespect to flyball. We do that one too!
Flyball is unique in the sport realm in that it has the clearest example of a new breed/hybrid in the BorderJack.
For some reason I see a lot of antipathy toward the Borderjack like it’s an abomination, but it clearly is a purpose bred dog that has a clear job and function, it has a large enough “working” base to eventually formulate a new breed, and given the wide appeal of the JRT (and other small terriers) and the BC as pets, I don’t find much credibility in the arguments that borderjacks are horrible pets.
In a time when most breeds have no working community and no connection to any purpose breeding other than beauty shows and pets, borderjacks are a standout example of new blood and a new land race being formed.
Jack Russells and the crossbred Border x Jack are cute and usually intelligent, but they’re little “terrors” as are most terriers. Hard-headed, and with a single focus.
I feel bad for Donald McCraig in that he cannot have a thousand sheep for his dogs to herd. But it is at least something that he has 25. And I think it is nice that his dogs get to herd. If I was a rancher I am sure I would enjoy using my border collies to herd as much as anyone else but I live in the city.
Edward,
The take away isn’t that Donald McCaig can’t afford enough sheep, it’s that he’s adamant about shaping the breed to an ideal that he himself can’t even maintain, and against any number of ideals that numerous other people are perfectly willing and able to maintain.
It’s not hypocrisy so much as idiocy.
I think I understood the perspective of the article. I really find it interesting. But I was just posting a reaction. And it is not as though he is choosing to not have sheep as much as his health is deteriorating, which is even sadder.
But your point about him trying to control the border collie breed is certainly the focus of the article but the sad and angry perspectives don’t mesh well.
Since this is a separate post from the first I will call forth my anger: How could Donald McCaig dare to demand that all border collies be breed for the purposes of herding? Who does he think he is to control how I breed my dogs?
In reality I am not upset at him too much since he isn’t king. If he could turn his ideas into law with the stroke of a pen then his “barbie” collie ideas would upset me more; and regardless of how offensive his ideas become I can still care about Donald McCaig as a person. His humanity doesn’t go away just because he is my enemy.
And I would prefer not to call his ideas idiotic. I just don’t understand how so many people can feel the same way that Donald McCaig does. It seems like they want to uphold a breed tradition just for the sake of identity. They don’t want their dogs identified with anything but herding and how can they do that but by preventing border collies from engaging in any other activity? That would be my best guess as to their line of reasoning (if it can be called reason at all).
In contrast to them I don’t have any problem with border collies being bred for purposes that I would not use them for. I would agree with you Chris (in your other writings) that we should be grateful for genetic diversity that is provided by people breeding many different lines of border collies.
So often you hear Sheeple say that they need the highly specialized dogs to maintain their lifestyle. What McCaig’s admission shows is that they need their lifestyle to maintain the specialized dog.
It’s part of how they want to frame the debate. Show people are using the dogs as playthings for their ego. Working folks are running an industry, putting food on the table and money in the bank with their dogs. This is crucial life and death stuff, not barbie pageant stuff.
They keep saying that dogs not bred to their small gene pool, not to their small standards, will ruin the breed, and ruin the dogs they use along with them! Sport and Show and Pet people and their dogs must be kept away. They are the erosion.
BUT, we see here, that the erosion is not what they say it is. McCaig isn’t giving up his sheep because the dogs have gone to crap. He’s giving them up because he can’t subsidize the hobby anymore.
The main culprit here is age, but he also reveals that even before he had to downsize, the demand for his dogs was lower than what he’s proclaiming to the world that it is.
And McCaig is the spokesman for the anti-AKC cause and an uppity-up with the ABCA. And like it or not, they own 90% of the breed and their stance against registering AKC dogs hurts those of us who want to take advantage of genetic diversity. It means a lot of one-way streets.
We can take blood out of the ABCA, but if it mixes with anything that isn’t ISDS or ABCA, then it’s out for good, really. Should the AKC close the stud books, we’ll be left looking for one of the other registries with fewer rules and less dogma (also the registries that are abused by people looking for the same freedom but for much worse reasons).
It didn’t occur to me that part of Donald McCaig’s distaste of other types of border collies is that they would pollute the pure herding bloodlines.
My experience is that a few generations can make a huge difference in genetics and I think that herding lines can be converted into conformation lines very quickly. Therefore, if a few non herding dogs sneaked from conformation gene pool into the herding population, I think selective breeding would bring them up to the herding standard very quickly. After all, if herding was breed into border collies then it should not be too hard to put it back in once the herding instinct has been taken out.
My bottom line is that the herding people might misunderstand the nature of genetics.
I think we need a new perspective on dogs.
The Pedigree Dogs Exposed thing was nice.
But it was just one aspect.
It should be something more or less like “The Dog Culture Exposed: How Pettiness, Romantic Illusions and Delusions, and Outright Greed Ruined the World’s Most Successful Carnivore.” It would have a section on the Kennel Club distortions, but it was also go after the world of working dogs and how all of these have acted together to turn dogs into a genetic basket case. It would also include how so many of these organizations that claim to look out for the best interests of bloodlines are really nothing more than fiefdoms of insignificance– but fiefdoms that will be fought over as if they were worth something.
The dog culture is so bad it makes the former Yugoslavia look good.
I think most show dogs (perhaps agility and many others too) are great house dogs and are great with children. It may well be that the dogs they are descended from were not good house dogs and bit kids.
I see it as very likely that breeders have caused dogs as we know them to be calmer and better with children.
And just because a breeder is primarily breeding for agility or something doesn’t mean temperament is ignored.