Bored collie, rented sheep
Further evidence that my common refrain (sheep sport is growing, sheep work is dying) is true, the New York Times reports about “bored collies” getting just what they want for Christmas: to play with rented sheep.
In a Tale That Wags Dog Owners, They Rent Flocks for Bored ColliesCompulsive Sheep Herders Need a ‘Job’ to Entertain Them; ‘That’ll Do’By MICHAEL M. PHILLIPSBATTLE GROUND, Wash.—Sue Foster knew what she needed to do when her border collie, Taff, was expelled from puppy school for herding the black Labs into a corner.She rented some sheep.Then she bought another border collie and rented some grazing land. Then she bought some sheep of her own. And a third border collie. Now, like the old lady who swallowed the fly, Ms. Foster keeps a llama to chase off the coyotes that threaten the lambs that go to market to finance the sheep that entertain her dogs.Once upon a time, Americans got dogs for their sheep. Now they get sheep for their dogs.“I never dreamed it would go this far,” says Ms. Foster, 56 years old.Border collies, first bred along the frontier between England and Scotland, are compulsive herders, with instincts so intense they sometimes search for livestock behind the television when sheep appear on screen, says Geri Byrne, owner of the Border Collie Training Center, in Tulelake, Calif. Left unoccupied, they’ll dig up the garden, chew up the doggie bed or persecute the cat.Herding experts—yes, there is such a thing—say it’s increasingly common for people who get border collies as pets to wind up renting or buying sheep just to keep their dogs busy. “It’s something that’s snowballing all the time,” says Jack Knox, a Scottish-born shepherd who travels the U.S. giving herding clinics.
Of note: Jack Knox is one of several UK shepherds who, failing to make a good living working sheep in their native land have found a lucrative calling winning US Sheep Trials and teaching the bored collies and the bored people who handle them the basics of “herding.”
Read more and be sure not to miss the video.
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why do you insist on being an asshole even on an interesting topic? “bored housewives”?
The only time I’ve ever had an agility class with another man was when a young couple both came for the first class. The husband never returned. The entire rest of the people were stay at home moms, work at home moms, retired women, or single unemployed/student ladies.
I don’t recall ever seeing another male handler coming or going from herding lessons either.
In flyball, women outnumber the men. Perhaps it’s only in disc dog where the numbers are more balanced. When long distance throwing is required, the men have more numbers, but I think women have the edge when it comes to teams participating in freestyle.
And, if the gender of dog bloggers is any indication of dog sport culture, I’d say that it’s clearly a woman’s world.
In the agility classes I teach, I have about 25% men, the rest …bloggers 🙂
I think this is an issue with the word “house wife” which I don’t in any way consider a pejorative. I don’t think the Feminist movement did any favors to women by demonizing that word/calling. I wouldn’t have traded having my mother at home for what benefits we could have had with a second income over those years and I don’t think she would trade the experience either. I don’t think I would use stay-at-home-mom either if that term is more PC, as I’ve noticed that most people in dog sport who then have children disappear (either for good or until the children are old enough to train/play too).
During one new agility class I was taking [first outdoors class in CO in the spring, so during the day was the best chance of not freezing or getting snowed out] (not working a 9-5 at the time, thus my ability to take this class) we had to introduce ourselves and our dogs. I talked all about my dogs and didn’t say much about myself and one of the women boldly asked “and how can you take off so much time to be here?”
I don’t think it’s a mystery, I think people who participate in dog sport do so because they can. This means they are not burdened with other obligations. They are more likely to have flexible work schedules but still have access to money (these sports aren’t cheap), less likely to have children, and be at a point in life where they can invest so much time and love into an active pet. I had to stop training on sheep for exactly those two reasons, not enough time nor money.
The feminist movement has never demonized the term “house wife”.
The feminist movement criticized the way women were denied opportunities beyond being house wives, and the way in which managing a household and child rearing was (and continues to be) devalued as “not real work”.
The phrase “bored housewives” is almost always used in a pejorative sense. People use it to subtly suggest that the women in question take up a hobby or activity rather flippantly, and for ultimately vapid reasons.
Funny. As a young woman when the feminist movement had strong influence I sure ‘felt’ like they demonized the term ‘housewife’. Many of us that CHOSE to stay home and chose to be housewives and continue using that title were scorned and told directly we were undermining the efforts of those that knew better than we did.
I noticed that too. A lot of dog bloggers tend to be females, retired men, students or people living out on a farm. Problem is I don’t know what are the normal occupations of the bloggers to make a clear statement.
Sort of like how most of the foodies, to keep it distinct from the recipe blogs, are bored white-collared men who are looking for something to write about in their cubicles after their lunch breaks.
Dave recently posted..When Raw Emotions Take Over in Politics
Hahaah, now that you mention it Dave, the people I went to college with who ended up going corporate/wallstreet do tweet/FB/blog about cigars, gourmet food, Scandinavian cars, and Guy Kawasaki.
The wonders of being able to tell how much time people have in their life based on the things they write about.
Honestly, if I didn’t have the flexibility of being a computer programmer, I wouldn’t started a dog blog.
Dave recently posted..When Raw Emotions Take Over in Politics
Every agility class I’ve taken or trial i have seen is virtually all female. Disc seems a 50/50 split. Ring sport and schutzhund, far more male though many women are in there. S&R, tracking, either 50/50 or slightly more male. Flyball, overwhelmingly female. Is it self-depricating to my gender, to feel embarrassed to be in a sport that has all those women? NO one thinks of men in Schutzhund as the “bored husbands” club.
And I get the impression that yard trials on sheep and cattle is more male. However I went to an HGH trial in NJ two years ago and there were several female participants and slightly fewer men. NOt a lot of participantsin total anyway, as this revival movement of the GSD herding style isn’t all tha told yet, or so I was told.
In a group of GSDs, the top contender of 2010, and I think maybe 2011, was a Beauceron with a male handler; the only Beauce entered.
Actually, participants in those sports get the stereotype of being murderous gangsters.
Dave recently posted..Retrieving Laika
Where I come from the image of murderous gang-STAHS conjures up a slightly different image than the images collected for Schutzhund. Most of those guys aren’t what you see around East New York or the South Bronx.
Maybe they’re more like the guys who say “We don’tz take KINDLY to you NYers….” and spit tobacco on their lawn-carburetor. Ah, stereotypes.
“Now, like the old lady who swallowed the fly, Ms. Foster keeps a llama to chase off the coyotes that threaten the lambs that go to market to finance the sheep that entertain her dogs.
Once upon a time, Americans got dogs for their sheep. Now they get sheep for their dogs.”
For some reason, this statement greatly amused me.
That’s a great last line. I would even say that I’ve used it before, but I can’t find exactly where at the moment. I wonder if McCaig or someone else has written something very similar before too.
Wasn’t it a Scottish judge in one of McCaig’s articles in a magazine? Think it was the same magazine that went into the history of water spaniels after Obama’s family got a Portugese.
Dave recently posted..When Raw Emotions Take Over in Politics
I read the WSJ article and I’ve love to know where I can rent sheep in the Chicago area.
In regard to why women seem to be some common in dog-type hobbies; it’s because they generally have more time to do so. This has never bothered me since I’m more interested in the dogs (specifically my own) than the women.
Hey! Just wanted to drop by and say thanks for visiting our site during “herding week.” Clearly, you have way better programming than we do. :o)
Roxanne @ Champion of My Heart recently posted..Lilly’s Herding Instinct Test- Part 3
I am surprised and distinctly puzzled by the idea of agricultural obsolescence. I’m not a collie breeder or anything like that, but I do live in a hill sheep farming area of Scotland. Here the border collie is still an indispensable tool for shepherds and farmers and never a day goes by, but I see Collies working sheep. This is not for fun but rather because a dog is a necessary tool. They simply couldn’t do their work without them.
The situation may well be different in the US, but when my father was shepherding on the English-Scottish border (not as a hobby but for a living) he would never have even thought about not having dogs. His work would have been impossible. In the UK the working collie is far from obsolescent.
Interestingly I occasionally hear farmers decrying trial dogs as pampered and over trained.
Not trying to start a fight just making an observation.
Matt
Agricultural obsolescence is a process, not a done deal. That’s why I didn’t call it agricultural extinction. If you look at the actual markets in the USA and even the UK, there is a long term trend which jeopardizes the viability of these industries. You’ve since found my post “The U.S. Sheep Industry is Belly-Up” and if you continue to research there is reason to believe that hard times are here for the sheep industry in the UK as well.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/feb/03/fears-future-lamb-farming
The Border Collie absolutely still is an indispensable tool, there’s no denying that. The question remains just how successful that lifestyle will continue to be. In Donald McCaig’s book The Dog Wars he outlines how UK shepherds are increasingly turning to putting on events for tourists and converting their lands to Bed and Breakfast outfits commercializing the image of the hill shepherd to compensate for the decreasing profitability of raising the stock.
The issue is not so much that there will not be shepherds and their dogs in the future, the issue is if there are enough people and dogs doing that to sustain a healthy breed. Other breeds have gone extinct for less and the BC itself was greatly harmed by the damage done by two successive World Wars. The recent foot/hoof and mouth disease didn’t help either.
Some people believe that only working shepherds have any business breeding Border Collies. Well, if we could make that happen would it even be wise? Are there enough of these people to even meet the demand for these dogs off the farm and is it healthy to put all your eggs in one basket that is in demonstrable peril?
In the US we used to have the working farm dog and modernization here lead to a widespread crash in their popularity. What we are left with is a few breeds and breeders who bicker bitterly over whose flavor of farm dog captures the “Old Shep” of the American farm but even if they could patch up their differences and join forces the bottleneck caused by urbanization and decline in popularity of the farm collie is evident and is an issue that has impacted the health and longevity of the dogs.
This really is most interesting. I hope we are exchanging perspectives here, not having an argument. I really have no desire to squabble. If you are finding me argumentative please do say and I will desist. I’m sure you’d agree that the internet has more than enough squabbling and abuse trading!
However I still respectfully disagree. I am well aware of the difficulties of the Scottish sheep industry.
As I say my Father was a shepherd until the farm he worked on decided it would be more profitable to go over to all arable at which point he had to sell such dogs as he could and kill those who would only work for him. Moving Collies that had spent their lives on farms into a town was not an option.
I have friends and neighbours who farm sheep commercially and indeed I rent this house from a sheep famer. I have been hearing tales of how the sheep industry is going to go bust for decades. “one more year like this one and we’ll all be packing it in…”
Yet the economics, in my view, compel the continued existence of sheep farming. Huge tracts of Scotland, Northern England and Wales are economically useless for anything other than sheep farming. Its too high, wet, rocky, cold and windy to do anything but run sheep. As long as people own land they will make it economically productive and the only way to do that on hill land is sheep.
This still of farming is truly extensive. As I’m sure you know the sheep are run on the hill ground for long periods before being ‘gathered’ for clipping, worming, dipping, lambing and sale. No-one has yet invented anything to replace the Border Collie to gather sheep on the hill and the necessity of doing so will continue.
Sheep farming has and will continue to decline. Any land that sheep are run on that could be turned over to cattle or arable, has been or will be. But it will only decline to a point, there is a huge area of hill land that will always be sheep country and therefore collie country.
Yes there are many people who are running, novelty tourist attraction hill farms, with practically no stock and lots of dogs so they can do sheep dog training courses or whatever. But the market for this will soon saturate and there are many more hardy souls who are still commercially farming sheep.
Will there be enough dogs working the hills to maintain a viable Gene pool? Yes I think so. There’s a hell of a lot of working dogs out there. Within 10 miles of my house there must be a couple of hundred. Scotland wide, thousands. As for demand for pups, I think most farmers and shepherds are pretty responsible in their breeding, they don’t breed pups for which there is no market. (personally I wouldn’t touch a farm bred collie pup – tetchy, neurotic critters with an untameable desire to herd)
I’m sorry to hear people are squabbling about who has the colliest collie! That’s silly and how can anybody say who has the right to breed pups. If you want to breed pups and you can breed them well, go for it. What business is it of anyone else’s? If it brings you joy to breed collies to catch Frisbees or sing Karaoke, then go for it and if you ever want a proper collie let me know, I can get you one real cheap (joking, joking, joking)!
Peace and joy to you my trans-Atlantic friend!
Matt
P.S I’m a spaniel fan, don’t start me on what show breeding has done to them…uuuugh!
Matt, I hope we’re having an argument and not merely exchanging opinions!
And I don’t mean argument as a pejorative, as outlined in my Comment Policy here:
http://www.border-wars.com/comment-policy
Not a squabble, but the presentation of an argument that is supported by observations and facts. Which I think we’re doing just fine at right now.
I’m not really sure what you disagree with, I certainly agree with your observations and consider them fully in line with my take on the matter.
Ah this is very jolly! What a fine, spirited chap you are.
I suppose I was disagreeing with the obsolescence, Collies will never be obsolescent.
Or maybe I was just rambling a mix of views and anecdotes.
I do like your comments policy, particularly that pyramid, I’m going to use that to teach children!
I am pleased to have come by this blog (do you see what I did there).
Matt
I call this a stimulating culture exchange. I enjoy reading and learning wish the dog world had more men with flexible schedules. Being a business owner we know an educated gentleman’s presence keeps the catting women under control.
Not a bored housewife