Everyone tends to think of the collie family as being the ultimate herding dogs. This is how they are popularly known and how they are classified with breed clubs.
However, the American experience with the collie family is that these dogs are more or less generalist in usage, and they were commonly used for hunting and improving hunting stock. My grandpa had a hunting dog that was half foxhound and half collie that could track a deer like no other, and my memories of my dad’s wild farm collie would rather tree cats or raccoons than waste his time chasing cows.
That’s really because Americans began turning the collie to their own purposes almost as soon as they arrived on these shores.
Oliver Hartley describes the collie’s use in the US in his Hunting Dogs (1909):
The Scotch collie dog will make the best friend of all the dogs in the canine race, writes a collie admirer. Of all useful animals God gave to man what can excel the dog, at least with the stockmen; in affection no other dog can compare with him, he is a dog that every farmer needs. He has almost human intelligence, a pure bred collie can always be depended upon in sunshine or adversity. He can do his work in a manner that should put the average boy to shame. The pure bred Scotch Collies are of a kind and affectionate disposition and they become strongly attached to their master. There can be no friend more honest and enduring than the noble, willing and obedient thoroughbred Scotch Collie. As a devoted friend and faithful companion he has no equal in the canine race, he will guard the household and property day and night. The Scotch Collies are very watchful and always on the alert, while their intelligence is really marvelous.
At one year old they are able to perform full duty herding sheep, cattle and other stock, attending them all day when necessary, keeping them together and where they belong and driving off all strange intruders. They learn to know their master’s animals from others in a very short time, and a well-trained dog will gather them home and put each into its right stall. They have a dainty carriage and fine style, profuse silky hair of various colors.
Others incline to the conviction that practical purposes have been lost sight of in breeding, and that appearances have been sought to such an extent that the present day pure bred collies lack some of the attributes of intelligence and hardihood that made the collie famous. In view of this fact it is quite likely that for general purposes and certainly for hunting purposes, a dash of alien blood is advantageous.
The crossed collie, or the well-known shepherd dog, so common to the farm, are very often used with success in all forms of night hunting. There are some who go so far as to maintain that the shepherd or a cross of shepherd and fox hound are ideal for coon, rabbit and squirrel hunting.
The use of these dogs as sheep herders has deteriorated in this country, although they are still bred for practical purposes with marked success in parts of England (pg 222-223).
So Hartley was pointing out that Americans were more than willing to turn the specialized herding dogs of the British Isles into dogs that both hunted and herded, and some areas their primary utility was that of the hunting dog.
In another part of the text, Hartley discusses the best way to get a cheap coonhound:
I have learned at considerable expense that the best at most any price is the cheapest. If you want a good, cheap ‘coon dog, get a half pup collie and half fox hound. Never give him a taste of nor let him see a rabbit, teach him a few tricks (to make him pay for his meals), such as jumping over a stick, then a pole, then a fence. This is to teach him to obey every word (pg. 101-102).
Hartley also talks about his two favorite coondogs, one of which was a collie/foxhound cross:
The best pair of ‘coon dogs I ever owned was Sport, a fox hound and collie, half and half, a slow semi-mute trailer, and Simon, a full blood fox terrier, a fast mute trailer. I used a bell on Sport. This and his occasional barks on the trail kept the attention of the ‘coon while Simon cut across lots and invariably took him unawares (pg. 101).
I grew up where most collie-type dogs were used primarily for hunting. People didn’t keep big flocks of sheep, and even the beef cattle were so tame that the farm kids could move them from pasture to pasture.
The idea that someone would encourage a dog to chase stock would be an anathema to most of the people where I grew up. There were always stories of collies that chased cows and wound up shot, so most people trained their dogs to hunt squirrels, rabbits, and raccoons and to leave the hoofed mammals alone.
And these collie-types were maintained without any fancy trials imported from Scotland or England. A border collie was a novelty, and I didn’t even see my first dog of that breed until I was about 12 or 13.
But I knew what a farm collie or an English shepherd was.
Those were the native working dogs for the northern tier of West Virginia.
This is actually my big beef with the Donald McCaig set. McCaig et al, which some wag called “the sheeple,” obsess over “working dogs” in America without actually knowing the history of working farm dogs in this country.
McCaig is a border collie novelist and dog trialer. His border collies are treated as working dogs, but they are nothing like the real farm dogs of the Appalachian Mountains he calls home.
No one trialed a farm collie or an English shepherd, but they were useful dogs.
And as I recall them, they weren’t as hyped up as border collies are. They were just good, ol’ dogs with plenty of brains and sense.
McCaig is really a carpetbagger. Born and raised in Montana, McCaig honed his craft in advertising in New York, and then he came to Alleghenies of Highland County, Virginia. It’s a rather desolate area of Virginia, located on the old road that goes from Elkins to Staunton. I don’t recall seeing any sheep when I went through there, but I recall it being full of rhododendrons and mountain laurel.
And lots of nothing.
Old Stonewall Jackson, the traitor to West Virginia, beat up on the union army at the hamlet of McDowell, but there is no mention of a great history of border collie trials in that part of Virginia.
A border collie, like McCaig, is something brought in from outside and then grafted onto the mountainsides as if they have always belonged there.
But they haven’t
Before McCaig and border collies, there were old shepherds and Scotch collies. These were the old farm dogs, not the trial dogs that McCaig has popularized.
The simple fact is Americans are not British, and even if we and our dogs are of Albion’s stock, we have both adapted to this continent and its peculiarities.
To say that the trial border collie is the historic working dog of the Virginia mountains is simply to engage in romantic folly.
It is a folly that no one says anything about. Most of the people who know better aren’t reading McCaig books or this blog, and none of them of them have the audience of a McCaig.
But because McCaig and the trialists have capture the imaginations of too many people, they get to describe for themselves some moral superiority, even though breeding for trials has done exactly the same thing to border collie bloodlines that dog shows have done to AKC dogs.
I write these words for Old Shep, the generalist collie-type hunting dog, lost in the sea of show and trial faddism.
I fully intend to own a working English Shepherd in the future. I have one in class right now & he’s delightful.
Some of the oldest writings on the Rough Collie I have found corroborate this, that they are lamented as once more useful and the fancy breeding has made them dumb. And this is only a few years after fancy shows.
And this country has never been a big sheep producer. We have fewer sheep today than we did 200 years ago. Think about that. We’ve lost 90% since the 1940s when the Government really put their money behind the market trying to create a taste for lamb and mutton which never materialized, nor an American desire for wool garments.
Technology and agriculture has left this paradigm behind. The best wool and lamb meat comes from New Zealand and they are ideal for its production. NO BIG PREDATORS! Bountiful grass. Wide open spaces and little competition from other industry or humans or anything else.
I know I’m not supposed to criticize the sheep people who try and make a go of it here in America, using foreign bred dogs and foreign bred sheep and allotments of government land …. and then it all goes wrong because the cards are simply stacked against that industry here and I’m supposed to feel sorry. But I don’t. I don’t think it’s a benefit to all the sheep that get killed, nor the dogs that get killed, nor the coyotes and wolves that get killed, all for an industry that can’t even break even.
America has many great beef breeds and ranches and dogs that are bred to American standards for American needs and we are good and efficient at this.
It’s just not true with sheep. So who are we fooling? And for what benefit? So some “back to nature” and “homesteaders” can go play at farmer because they hate capitalism and are pissed off they were born too late to be real hippies?
It’s destructive indulgence for a hobby whose acolytes think it’s industry. The industry left people. All that’s left is your fantasy.
Hence I have goats. ;-)
People with cattle appropriate dogs are shunned and ostracised in a lot of herding trial circles because their dogs are too tough or close for sheep, and a lot of people don’t understand that the vast majority of dogs can’t easily work all types of stock. Quite a few have gotten into the sport and not done their due diligence listening to the ranch dog people and working under them, so they have a poor understanding of how herding works.
This is why I don’t work with a lot of the sheeple anymore. It’s not even worth my time.
About 30 years ago, one of the first buyers of my West Siberian Laika puppies visited me in Oklahoma. He was from Missouri. He told me that he wanted to try a Laika at squirrel hunting. He bought a puppy and told me that he had a Collie (possibly Border Collie), which was treeing squirrels well; his Collie became too old to hunt and he decided to buy a Laika puppy, because of some similarities in the appearance. This story tells us that a small game treeing ability is also occurring among Collies.
I think the hype around border collies distorts the image of that type of collie and the landrace in general. The image of a hard eyed black and white dog, tongue lolling, single mindedly slinking after sheep round a field as a bloke in a flat cap and wax cotton jacket wields a staff and whistles instructions is now synonymous with the world collie. Just as the almost humanly intelligent sable and white “Lassie” collie once was. Of course, neither image is the whole truth or more than a few decades old. It just pays financially and/or stokes the ego of some people to perpetuate the myths.
Historically, the supposed ideal lurcher was a greyhound cross collie and I’m thinking that wasn’t the only outcrossing that went on both ways with other breeds. Livestock farming is often a hard life and it makes no sense at all to have a sheepdog that can do nothing else but move sheep when you need a flock guard, a property guard, vermin controller and a hunter of small game to put extra food on the table. The specialism of the border collie as we know it is a construct of the Industrial Revolution.
We still have generalist “collies” in the US, which often are crossed with hounds to make better hunting dogs.
One of your best articles ever Scottie–bravo! The dogs you speak of remind me of the farm dogs I encountered in S. WI. They were predominately GSDxCollie but served the same purposes. One place they weren’t used was for upland birding–specialty breeds–GSPs, Vizslas, et al–were almost always used for that.
I recall some of the cougar-hunters regurgitating tales about how life was on Vancouver Island before the advent of imported retrievers from Britain and coonhounds from eastern United States which occurred during the 1930s. At the time, people only could afford one or two dogs per farm.
They often used farm collies to chase cougars and retrieving, and for awhile they were better at it. They were the true multi-purpose universal dog. However, people saw owning specialized dogs as a status-raising object. If you could afford to buy a Labrador or Golden and attend the imported British retrieval trial; or if you could afford to keep a large pack of Coonhounds, then you were wealthy.
Here is one of the images from Mary Schaffer’s collection from the 1910s, which is now on display at Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies in Banff, Alberta. The dog belonged to one of the guides who used it for chasing big-game animals like bears and cougars.
This dog looks like an Australian shepherd (which is an American breed developed from various “collie type” working breeds
“Scotch Collie”, “Farm Shepherd” or “Farm Collie” are generic terms used to refer to all the collie-types found in United States before English and Australian Shepherds became their own breed.
Andy Ward of Old-Time Farm Shepherd has some really nice essays on the vague usage of these terms.
In an e-mail exchange, when I forwarded him a black and white copy of the photograph from the Calgary Archives, he mentioned all the herding dogs in the United States were simply called Scotch Collie, but during the 1940s to 1970s, the dogs of the West were called Australian Shepherds and the dogs in the East were called English Shepherd.
Andy tends to shade things to support his POV and ignre a lot of documented historical fact. English Shepherd was a term for American farm collies back to the turn of the last century on both coasts and the lands inbetween. Scotch Collie from that time on increasingly got applied to the show type collie. He wants to believe the original “Scotch Collie” was distinct in pedigree from the rest of the farm collies but in this country and the UK they were one giant land race before the show folks (and then the trial folks) took an interest. Many of the dogs used to create the early modern show collie were from Ireland not Scotland. And the early ones were Black and Tan not the sable preferred now.
What historical facts? History is never factual. It’s always up to interpretation and the documents must be able to back up the interpretation. It’s the same thing with science. Anyone who has an academic training as a historian or scientist would know this.
The reason why Andy Ward’s interpretation exists was because of the catalogues and newspaper ads which advertised using those terms to sell hunting dogs and farm-dogs which continued until 1940s. And a lot of time these terms were used quite nebulously. Far as I am concerned, the names of breeds should never be used to determine a dog’s ancestry or its phenotypes until after the establishment of a registry.
Even then, you will find a lot of old-time cougar and bear hunters (age range of 50s to 90s) in Washington and Oregon states who refer to any Australian or Border Collie as a “Scotch Collie”, “Farm Collie” or “Farm Shepherd”, depending on who you talk to. Does that mean they are wrong and breed historians are right? No. It just means those breed historians either unknowingly or intentionally left out those details.
That’s the problem with vernacular. No one gets to determine what a group of people use the terminology for or how they define them.
Much to the dismay of absolutists, an Albertan is never going to stop calling a Richardson’s Ground Squirrel a gopher; even though Ground Squirrels and Pocket Gophers are not from the same family. And the same is true for many vocabulary in this world. And the same should apply to these dogs.
I noticed that with buhunds (also thought of as herding dogs) I’ve never heard of anyone using them to herd anything, either currently or when they were kids. But when I asked around if buhunds are used for hunting, apparently people do hunt with them.
Not wishing to seem pedantic, but ‘Scotch’ is the name of a drink, the second part of which is ‘whiskey’. I believe that the (English/Scottish) border collies are all descended from one truly incredible dog which had a remarkable aptitude for controlling sheep by ‘fixing his eye’ on them, an ability which has passed on to his descendants.
The border collie, as we know, is generally acknowledged to be just about the brightest dog breed ever evolved and it takes a fit and intelligent owner to respond adequately to their activity needs. Most of us are not quite up to the challenge this breed presents. I stand in awe and admiration just watching them being worked.
Scotch is also an archaic American term for Scottish.
As I understand it it came from German usages.
I’m jumping on the pedantic bus. Whiskey is from Ireland. Whisky is from Scotland. Scotch is a colloquial term for basically anything produced or to do with Scotland, i.e. Scotch whisky, Scotch broth and thus Scotch collie is technically correct. Even a person occasionally, though it’s about as polite as calling them a Jock. People hailing from Scotland are Scottish, or Glaswegian etc…
And about border collies being bright. People often state they are the most intelligent dog breed, but in reality this just means they are highly responsive to people’s commands and eager to please, thus more useful and easier to mould to our needs. Not that I’m knocking their amazing abilities in and out of the field or competitive sports. Dogs like Chaser are amazing. But it’s a typical human assumption to point out a breed that’s easy to train as more intelligent than one that is an independent thinker. Chow Chows are often ranked right down the bottom of the intelligence chart. But having owned one alongside a collie cross, he was anything but stupid and often his powers of abstract thought would leave my amazing, trick performing, “almost human” collie cross in the dust. Hell, he’d outfox me sometimes, never mind another dog! The difference is, you ask a collie to jump and they say “how high?” but ask a chow and they want to know why first before they decide if it’s a reasonable request. I’m not knocking either breed as they are both highly intelligent in their own ways, wonderful companions in the right situation and conversely have the ability to drive you insane if you pick them for the wrong reasons.
The word “Scotch” for Scottish is an archaic American term.
You do realize we have a somewhat different version of English?
Also, if you’ve read Jack London’s Call of the Wild, Buck, the canine protagonist, is half St. Bernard/half “Scotch shepherd.”
Of course I’m aware of the old “separated by a common language” business. I don’t think the term Scotch evolved independently, seeing as they still mean the same up to the present day. Though Jock means something completely different in America than it does in the UK.
The Scotch shepherd was interchangeable with the Scotch collie as a name for the same dog. I believe both names were in common use on both sides of the Atlantic. Of course, the words collie, shepherd and sheepdog are an international minefield of semantics worse than the term mastiff.
Yes. That. If you drill down, even most of the “Border Collies are the smartest dogs” articles admit that we are conflating biddability with brains.
It also really annoys me when I see bumper stickers that say “my Border Collie is smarter than your honor student.” Really? When your Border Collie can do calculus, get back to me.
IME, most dogs are about as trainable AS YOU EXPECT THEM TO BE, with adjustments for learning style and physical limitations. In other words, people expect Border Collies to be highly trainable and work with them accordingly. They don’t expect sighthounds, or toy breeds, or whatever to be highly trainable, and therefore DON’T work with them (I actually had a highly respected Agility trainer–who has Border Collies–basically dismiss me when I asked a question about teaching my Italian Greyhound to down on command with “well, she’s an Italian Greyhound.” The IG does down on command now–I just had to catch her lying down to make it happen!
Great piece. It’s amazing how prey drive can be modified and the various forms of collie prove that immensely well. English sheps have a motley assortment of intensities, BC style is just a highly form of modified prey drive, and show collies, well, they’re generally happy with a TV dinner.
I’ve been quite enamored of Kelpies these days, many of which in America are being modified to be a bit harder and barkier, because here cattle rules. But having a nice English Shepherd/Old Scotch collie or some blend, is on my bucket list.
I’m not sure I can post this whole excerpt but I’ll try…
“All Purpose Dogs” by B. B. Titus
Field & Stream, Jan. 1957
“. . . I was reared in what is now an all-but-abandoned section of
Vermont, the town of Vershire . . . there wasn’t a lot of wealth in
Vershire, and we had to make do with as few dogs as possible. So nearly
everbody kept dual-purpose canines. I learned from their dogs, as well as
from many of my own, how versatile such animals can be.
“Of course, we had those wonderful old-fashioned shepherd dogs, which
besides doing the farm chores (even to taking down the bars and fetching home
the cattle), accompanied the children — sometimes two or three miles — to
school. And they were there on the minute to take them home again. At my
school I’d often look out at 3 o’clock and see a pack of shepherds pacing
peacefully around, waiting for the door to open.
“At night, in autumn, many of those same dogs would hunt coons, and in
the daytime squirrels. They were silent trailers, to be sure, and their
noses weren’t as keen as those of hounds I’ve owned, but their engergy made
up for the lack. I remember them bouncing rapidly through the woods,
surprising coons that we’d often find on cornstalks or up small saplings.
They really got ’em. I’ve been a coon hunter all my life, and for real
coon-getting dogs I can count several farm shepherds among my best. True, we
missed the music that, in later years, I have hunted to hear. But in my
early days the money we got from coon hides loomed large.
“There was Tige. I never knew why we called him Tige; he wasn’t striped
and he was the mildest dog — a shepherd — a person could ask for. But no
dog we ever owned saved us as much walking or gave us more fun than old Tige.
I was about 12, I’d guess, when he was in his prime. Anyone in our family
could say to him, “Tige, go up on the hill and get the oxen,’ and he’d go.
He’d come back behind the yoke, which was what we called a pair then,
whether they were yoked or not. Or we’d tell him to get the cows, and he
would, leaving the oxen.
“At night Tige was a coon dog — a still trailer — and one of the best.
All we had to do was go out into the woods and sit down around the lantern.
He’d go off an hour at a time, if necessary, and we might hear him half a
mile away. If he had a fault, it was ranging too far. We learned to sit on
the top of hills; if we didn’t, as like as not he’d be in the valley on the
other side — and there he’d stay until we found him. Neighbors sometimes
brought Tige back the next day, along with a coon (or as many as four) they
had shot out for him. Everybody knew Tige, and I gues just about every
able-bodied man had been hunting with us at least once.
” . . . In those days a dog was one of the family. He wandered in and
out of the home, usually slept in the stable and acted as watchdog and alarm
dog — waking the family when anything was amiss in the barn. Sheep dog,
too. I think the power those Vermont shepherds had over sheep was uncanny.
Nearly every farm had a fairly large flock, and the dog was as good as a
man. It always filled me with awe to see old Shep force a ewe to adopt an
orphan lamb — a task we couldn’t accomplish.
“One ewe might lamb triplets, another have one and lose it. Most
farmers skinned the dead lamb and sewed the skin onto the one to be adopted,
and a ewe would generally adopt it. My father never had to bother; he’d just
set the lamb in the pen with the foster mother-to-be and call Shep. In he’d
jump, then simply stand and sort of hypnotize that ewe, which, for some
reason, dared not disobey him. She’d let down her milk, and the lamb was
hers.
“This same Shep was a many-purpose dog. Up on the hill behind our home
we had an excellent apple orchard. Porcupines got to coming in from the
hedges and eating applies, shaking them from the trees by their clumsy
climbing. Shep, who had been quilled, never barked at a porky when he hunted
for us at night. But now he seemed to sense that the hedgehogs were
troubling us, and he took it on himself to drive them out. So he spent nights
in the orchard, and when they climbed apple trees he’d bark until my father
or I went out with a lantern and shot them. We got thirty-one in all.
“During the day Shep completely rid our farm of woodhcucks. He’d lie
still as death beside a burrow and just wouldn’t miss a chuck. And we boys
could hunt rabbits with him. He was a retriever, too — always carrying the
dead rabbit back to us. If my mother wanted a certain hen for the table,
she’d say to Shep, “Hold that one,” pointing out the bird. Shep would pin
down the hen in an instant, never biting her, until mother grabbed the
squawking creature. Actually, we never kept a single-purpose dog on the farm
during my life there.”
“Once in a while the neighbors hunted dogs in pairs. There was one
pair, used only for hunting rabbits, that was mighty cute. Our neighbor
never bothered to carry a gun with him, just took this pair of
shepherd-beagle dogs and went rabbiting. Together they would get a rabbit
started. They might run it together for a circle, but then one dog would
simply lie flat and stay motionless, the other driving with a high-yipping
voice. When the rabbit compled the second cirlce, the first dog would rush
it and crush its head, then carry it to his owner.”
Even in its home, the collie was originally a general-purpose dog, not a sheep specialist. The dog’s natural habitat was the small farm, with a variety of livestock, as well as home protection, killing vermin, and hunting.
The Highland clearances caused the farmers (and their dogs) to disperse, and led to the huge flocks of sheep that made a supreme herding dog necessary. This in turn led to the sheepdog trials to showcase the dogs’ talents.
The first sheepdog trial and the first dog show were only held a couple of decades apart.
From James Hogg (~1807):
“An exceedingly good sheep dog attends to nothing else but that particular branch of business to which he is bred. His whole capacity is exerted and exhausted on it, and he is of little value in miscellaneous matters, wheras a very different cur, bred about the house and accustomed to assist in everything will often put the noble breed to disgrace in the paltry services.”
He goes on to describe a hungry sheepdog upsetting pans of milk in search of a shack, but a “noble” farm dog not only refusing to do so, but guarding the milk from rats, cats, and anyone else.
Following WWII, English Shepherds were also the first-choice breed when the Seeing Eye program was being established. Clarence Pfaffenberger’s “A New Knowledge of Dog Behavior” describes the farm shepherd as “America’s greatest contribution to the canine breeds” and “a wonderful all-purpose dog” that was unfortunately displaced by the “glamour” of imported breeds, as well as the urbanization of society.
This is pretty common in all the older herding type dogs. Von Stephanitz includes photos of GSDs being used to hunt boar. Piccard d’Uccle, one of the foundation Belgian Shepherds, was shot by a game warden. The “farm collie” survives in various forms — most ranchers don’t care where their dog comes from nor if it is/ isn’t registered, as long as it can do the job required. The reason for this is simple — in most cases, owning truly specialist breeds was the luxury of a rich person. The original “peasant’s dog” was one dog that had to do whatever role needed — be they cart dog, cow herd, sheep herd, defender of home and humans, and poaching dog. They are still out there, because there is still a reason to have such dogs.
Great article and I really enjoyed the comments as well. What I found most interesting was the graphic of the collie, and how little it has changed from today’s showier version. Admittedly, they have a very bountiful coat now, but the body structure does not appear to have changed much at all. Which is something you cannot say about the German Shepherd breed today, that roached back – uugghh, they always seem to be cringing. If you look at a pic of Adolf Hitler and his GSD, you’ll see a totally different dog to what is out there now. Apart from the working Czech lines, it seems that the breed has lost all it’s prey drive which is why even the German police force mostly use the Belgian Malinois. In fact, there are some breeders who are trying to inject some of the Mals prey drive into the GSD to improve the breed.
With regard to intelligence; trainability and intelligence are totally different things. Intelligence is ‘problem solving’ and seeing how long the dog takes to work out the problem, without any pre-training or help from the owner. So I really hate hearing how certain breeds are the most intelligent, quite often ‘intelligence testing’ in dogs is based on the number of repetitions it takes to teach a dog something. In my opinion you cannot go past a Dingo for intelligence, but as for training one, it’s difficult, but I’ve seen them do some amazing things which can only be based on ‘problem solving’.
I am lucky to be the owner of an Old Time Scotch Collie with all her instincts intact. She herds and is an all around farm hand, but she also excels at varmint control and loves to hunt. I don’t hunt but she wishes I would. She trees squirrels and coons and won’t leave her post under the tree until she gets my attention and I tell her she’s done. She strongly resembles the dog in your post.
I grew up in WV also, and had a farm collie. He would run 10 miles with my brother training for cross country and never wander off! He also was an incredible judge of character and you knew if you weren’t welcome. I wanted another like him so I got an English Shepherd a couple months ago. He is just like my old collie dog. At 4 months old he was killing moles and lining them up on the hill. He also will tree squirrels. He is still young yet but I am not disappointed.