The prevailing creation myth among show Collie enthusiasts is that Queen Victoria’s infatuation with the breed set the ball in motion, elevating the humble farm dog to aristocratic splendor.
Queen Victoria saw her first Collies in the 1860’s, and she enthusiastically began to sponsor them, causing a marked surge in the breed’s popularity. It was at this point that Collies split from other sheepherding breeds, like Border Collies.– AKC.org “Did You Know“
– The Collieby O.P. Bennett, 1924
The above analysis is bullshit. Complete fabrication. Utterly untrue.
1. Queen Victoria’s first exposure to the Collie came at least twenty years before the fraudulent breed history suggests.
2. The 1860s marked a low point in the Queen’s popularity and trend setting influence, an entirely un-conducive condition to spur wide adoption of the Collie and the myriad other breeds she is credited with obsessing over.
3. No marked surge even occurred in Collie popularity as a result of the Queen’s supposed patronage.
4. The Queen’s kennels seemed to have played no part in the British show collie world, rather a few collie breeders were in on the ground floor of the newly formed kennel and breed clubs which were founded around the birth of the dog show.
5. The Monarchy did play a tangential role in encouraging dog shows (along with numerous other venues of agricultural and technological comparison and improvement), but it was Prince Albert–not the Queen–who sponsored the foundational event of the era: The Great Exhibition of 1851.
And while impossible to prove to any satisfaction, Queen Victoria is credited with the popularization of keeping pets, especially dogs among the English commoners and elite alike.
6. The split between the Lassie/show collie and the Border Collie was in the works long before Queen Victoria or any show or trial judge ever laid eyes on a dog. Placing the date at the 1860s is a matter of conjecture, not of reality. Attributing the split specifically to the Queen or even to dog shows is a case of the post hoc ergo propter hoc logical fallacy.
7. The “favorite” collies owned by Queen Victoria were not show Collies, or even Lassie collies. It’s doubtful Queen Victoria even owned a show collie as a personal pet. The collies she loved and was infatuated with were most certainly not show collies, and all the evidence I’ve found suggests that they were, in fact, Border Collies. The lasting legacy of the Queen’s Collie breeding program is very hard to flush out.
This week, I’ll delve into each of these issues to show how the Collie’s creation myth is utterly void of truth. Not a single element of the story is accurate.
* * *
Comments and disagreements are welcome, but be sure to read the Comment Policy. If this post made you think and you'd like to read more like it, consider a donation to my 4 Border Collies' Treat and Toy Fund. They'll be glad you did. You can subscribe to the feed or enter your e-mail in the field on the left to receive notice of new content. You can also like BorderWars on Facebook for more frequent musings and curiosities.
* * *
I stumbled across this photo of one of Victoria’s collies today (‘Squire’). I figured you might be interested in it (if you haven’t already seen it): http://www.maryevans.com/images/10/02/02/10020232a.jpg
I find it amazing that the white collie variety was bred out and didn’t survive. There are people today who have extreme white factored collies that call them white, but good luck finding one that doesn’t have a colored head and face.
This must have been a recent purging though, because President Johnson had an all white collie.
White collies seem to have been big in the 20s. I saw many advertisements for them in kennel ads when I was looking through issues of old show magazines like this one online: http://books.google.com/books?id=aHcCAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA572&dq=dogdom+monthy&lr=&cd=1#v=onepage&q&f=false
My understanding is that Border Collies as we identify them today were a pretty late 19th century development. What Queen V had were probably simply farm collies, the progenitors of both the BC and the show collie–the BC rumored to be bred with setters or spaniels to get the hypnotic gaze — lacking in the general-purpose farm collie — and the show collie rumored to be bred with borzois to get the anteater nose etc.
Lots of people think the BC is the original farm collie, but that is not strictly true, it was a specific development from this general-purpose type, which still exists in the Welsh Sheepdog in Britain and in the various British-colonized areas of the world (Koolie in Australia, Aussie & English Shepherd in North America, and variants in South America as well, believe it or not).
The canard about Queen Victoria, of course, is rightly to be condemned.
It’s true that there is no stronger force involved in the creation of the modern Border Collie than organized competition in the form of trials. And it’s true this defining heuristic was a late 19th century development.
I’d say that Trials were easily more important than informal *work* on farms given just how many and how often the winner of the “International” became a popular sire and how very few “worked great, never trialed” dogs have made an impact on the breed. As noted before, there’s not a single Border Collie registered with the ISDS that is not a direct descendant of Wiston Cap. And he didn’t make his mark until the late 1960s.
Whereas the shepherd’s dog and the work it did most certainly predates written history–let alone the last century–and the defining heuristic of sheep trials are a late 19th century development, the dog wasn’t created ex nihilo, nor was it manufactured according to recipe on a single estate like numerous other breeds. Even the stud book which lists dogs going back to ~1900 wasn’t written down and compiled from memory until the 1940s.
By their nature, few historical written records of the farmer’s dog exist and few of those are detailed enough for modern scholarship to clarify the divisions which today are so marked. We only get clues regarding appearance and behaviors, and as you point out, it is simply speculation as to the formulation used in the early days of breed formation. Perhaps genetic analysis will one day shed some more light on the lost history of our breeds, but that’s not something I can research on my own.
But lack of perfect clarity doesn’t preclude an educated guess. If you read my other posts on Queen Victoria and her dogs, you’ll see that there’s a rather direct link between her pets and the early Border Collie gene pool. Besides the other speculative observations like form, color, temperament or even the description of Noble as a “Collie of the Cheviot Breed” we have contemporaneous sources which document an established Border Collie breeder providing Noble to the Queen.
While certainly a close cousin, the English Shepherd is an American Breed and fundamentally so. Same with the Australian Shepherd. Their names do them an injustice. The Welsh Shepherd, while not poorly named like the ES and AS, is also precluded from strong contention not only by form (the size and coat color would be the exception for a WS or even ES, not the rule), but also by culture. The Scots and the Welsh are eternal rivals when it comes to their dogs and the sheep competitions, and despite many successful Welsh dogs and handlers, the name Border Collie and the lion-share of the credit for the amazing quality of the BC is awarded to the Scots. My opinion is that the naming of the Welsh Shepherd is in response to this injustice and a point of national pride and separatism.
All of the information I’ve uncovered points to Border Collie and none of it points more strongly elsewhere.
It is my opinion that the mistake most often made when discussing this point (origins of different British herding breeds) is assuming that all shepherd’s dogs of Great Britain were roughly equivalent. Great Britain is a large island and the home of at least three distinct people with unique languages and culture, how could a land so large and varied as to contain three nations develop only one type of shepherd’s dog? Before the mid-nineteenth century it was common for a person to be born live and die without ever leaving his home county, in such a climate distinct regional animal varieties developed and thrived. One needs merely to read the various descriptions of these breeds from the period to realize there are distinct differences between them and that these differences were carried on to the modern breeds they founded. English Shepherd’s Dogs largely became today English Shepherd while the Scotch Shepherd’s Dog has become the Rough and Smooth Collies, it is my considered opinion that the Border Collie is likewise a product of the border region and has existed in that area for much longer than anyone now assumes.
I meant the above as a reply to Kay Spencer, not sure how I did this.
At any rate to lump all pre-twentieth century British herders together as “farm collies” is a bit naive.
I agree with Andy. The herding dogs of the border counties and highlands had a number of variations based on locale. Those dogs that brought stock to market may have spread based on their utility. The working collie of Northumberland existed before the late 1800’s as can be seen in the written history of the Australian Cattle Dog and the dogs imported by Thomas Simpson Hall from his family in Northumberland. These dogs were already fair cattle dogs and when crossed onto the Dingo retained their native ability while contributing to the physical hardness required in much hotter and drier conditions. I will agree strongly with Christopher about dog histories in general. These fantasies have been kept and manufactured by breed fanciers for decades or longer and many of the assertions are based on total nonsense, especially for working dogs. This is mainly because these fanciers want to glorify their breed while attempting to justify the decisions made by conformation fanciers in corrupting perfectly good working dogs into rather worthless show specimens. These fantasies and manufactured justifications continue to this day.