Dog World Feature

Driven, intuitive, highly intelligent, and eager to please. 

The Border Collie is so aware, it’s not like living with a pet, it’s like living with a precocious teenager. They are adept at reading your emotions, anticipating what you want from them, and carrying through until they get it right.

Newcomers to the breed are often overcome by the obligation to keep their minds active. It’s not just that they need daily exercise, it’s that they need mental stimulation. If that means eating your leather couch or raiding your refrigerator (and closing the door after) instead of playing with a ball or chasing some sheep around, they’ll find a way to entertain themselves.

A Border Collie can finish a 4 mile walk and still want more, but a 15 minute training session on sheep is enough to knock them out for hours. It’s really about keeping their brains active.

At the dog park, most other breeds don’t understand the Border Collies. They look at them running around intently “working” to bring back the ball and wonder what the big deal is. In the same light, the Border Collies often look at the lower energy dogs meandering around as wayward sheep that need to be told what to do.

They make great companion animals for children, several of the top Disc Dog teams in the country are Border Collie x Preteen kids. 

I don’t have experience with the breed and toddlers.

The greatest threat to the breed today is the declining diversity in the gene pool as the most active breeders in the trialing world and show world select only a few male dogs each generation to sire the majority of new puppies. The next big champion is almost guaranteed to be related to the current champions as the top breeders/competitors typically select only the progeny of the last champion to compete at the top levels. 

Cutting off the working gene pool from the show gene pool is a moot point if the majority of genetic influence in each pool comes from only a handful of dogs each generation anyway.

~14 years 

It’s no secret that Border Collies are widely considered the smartest breed, and second place isn’t close. They learn faster, retain more, and apply logical reasoning better than any other breed. Studies involving Border Collies are rewriting the book on what scientists think dogs as a whole are capable of. 

The amazing thing is that they are also the most athletic breed. They consistently top the winner’s podium in Agility, Flyball, and Frisbee competitions. 

Like many purebred dogs, the breed is susceptible to shrinking genetic diversity due to the popular sire effect. Because sheep dog trials in the UK and America have been the predominant proving ground for this breed for over 135 years, a handful top trialing dogs have had a major influence on the gene pool.  This has created the preeminent herding dog, but it has also resulted in a gene pool that is “effectively the genomes of 8 dogs.”

http://www.bcdb.info/article1/WSN1c4.htm

http://www.bcdb.info/article1/WSN1c2.htm

The most significant diseases are hip dysplasia, epilepsy, and eye conditions common the the collie breeds.

Of the articles I’ve written, this one is the best place to start:

http://borderwars.blogspot.com/2008/12/border-collie-war-abca-vs-akc.html

It explains the registry situation and goes on to show what problems the entire debate is missing. Here are the bullet points:

Concerning the ABCA vs. AKC:

* Neither registry requires any sort of health testing to register dogs from current stock.

* Neither registry requires reporting or publication of any health test results.

* Neither registry prevents in-breeding or line breeding to any degree.

* Neither registry keeps any sort of health information database.

* Neither registry has any criteria for membership other than payment.

* Neither registry requires registered dogs to meet any performance standard or physical standard or any standard at all, written or implied.

* Neither registry offers much protection against puppy millers.

Interesting History:

Queen Victoria’s Border Collies (then called “Collies of the Cheviot Breed”

1872 – “Noble” – http://tinyurl.com/7vxgj7

1866 – “Sharp” – memorial to “Sharp, the favorite and faithful Collie of Queen Victoria from 1866 to 1879. died now 1879 aged 15 years” at Windsor. 

http://www.gis.net/~shepdog/BC_Museum/Changing/QueenVictoria.html

http://tinyurl.com/9eywae

Aficionados of the “Lassie” collie often trace their dogs back to Queen Victoria, but as you can see from the pictures on the websites above, Queen Victoria’s favorite dog was a Border Collie, not a Lassie Collie. It’s true that in her old age her young cousin the Czar of Russia sent her some Borzois and the Royal Kennels eventually bred these dogs with the sable colored progenitors to the Lassie collie, but we have very little evidence of the Queens involvement in that branch of the collie family. 

From her writings, pictures, and the memorial to Sharp, we can see that the “Cheviot breed” of collie, later to be called the Border Collie, was the dog closest to the Queen’s heart. The Cheviot Hills are the pasture land between England and Scotland, specifically the border region from which the dogs would take their name.