Eileen Stein

Cool-looking dog. Did anyone else notice that more than half of the ad was warnings, side-effects and contraindications? <_>

I think the point of including the border collie was to distract you from noticing that.

Bob, Son of Battle (great old book!) is one of the books that Project Gutenburg makes available online for free -- see

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2795

I'm so old-fashioned I prefer "real" books, and I love the idea of Boards members sharing books, but PG's is worth knowing about if you like ebooks or if you'd like to read a few chapters online to get a feel for it.

I should mention that our current expert, Amanda Milliken, is putting on two major trials within the next two weeks and is probably not in a position to check the Boards right now. I too suggest that you post this in the Training Discussion forum, just above this one. You will certainly get more responses there.

I don't think you'd have had that reaction to the segment itself. The phrase "hot new sport of sheep dogging" was certainly never used, and it was portrayed as being closely connected to livestock ranching and somewhat obscure. Nothing about the show would lead an ordinary person to believe it was something they could "get into," IMO. That's why I said it was well done.

So it turns out that there's a TV program called 60 Minutes Sports (CBS). And last week it featured a segment on the Sheepdog Finals in Colorado last year. A friend told me about it, and I just watched it on Showtime Anytime (it's also available via On Demand, I think). It's quite well done -- features Alasdair and Norm & Vicki Close. It's Season 3, Episode 6.

If I'm the last person to hear about this, please break it to me gently.

The difference between barred and expelled: If you are currently a member in good standing, you are expelled from membership. If not -- if for example you are in arrears in your membership fees -- you are barred from membership. The result is the same.

Julie is right about the process. It is complaint-driven, and the ABCA president makes an assessment of whether the complaint is credible or not before initiating an investigation. You can find the rules governing disciplinary actions here.

I give 3 mg two hours or so ahead of a storm if I have sufficient warning. I will give another 3 mg when the storm hits if the dog is showing anxiety (trembling, panting). I've never seen any bad effects in the dog, not even sedation. It works pretty well, where I could see no effects at all from the heavy duty stuff like Xanax.

As a person, I am the opposite of Ruth -- it takes an awful lot to knock me out, I envy her -- so that may make me more cavalier. But none of the people I know who give their dogs melatonin have run into any bad effects either.

FWIW, melatonin helped my dog more than Xanax. What works for some doesn't work for others, but it's worth a try.

This is not a book, but it's right here on these Boards and it shows a good trainer bringing her dog along from the beginning and will also show you how she assesses the dog and what thoughts are in her mind as she decides what approaches to use -- how trainers think about what the dog is showing and what the dog needs:

Denise Wall training May

It's also a good way of seeing that this is not like most kinds of training, where you teach the dog step by step exactly what you want it to do. With this kind of training you're working to shape what is already in the dog, and to do that you have to be able to create a situation where you can see what's in the dog and use the sheep to bring out the reactions you want. That is so easy to lose sight of when you're first starting out.

(I accidentally clicked 'report' instead of 'quote'. I hope I managed to cancel the process )

You did.

Can a trial be too hard? Can a trial be too easy? Should we grade them?

Dear Doggers,

 

In practice, no, no and why? For a couple years, no sheepdog finished the championship course at the Sturgis Finals. The winner was the dog that did the best work. I've run at timed fair trials with fifty yard outruns. The dog doing the best work wins.

 

Donald McCaig

I disagree with my learned friend Donald. He is right that a trial will not be too hard for the best dog to win, and a trial will not be too easy for the best dog to win, but the point of a trial isn't just for somebody to win. If trials are going to be used as a way of testing quality, they must not be too hard or too easy. You would not gain much information by giving an advanced math test to second graders, or by giving a second-grade-level math test to college students. If all of the dogs score very high (or if all you need do is "command your dog like a robot"), the trial (test) is too easy, and if all of the dogs score very low (or if artificial elements are added for difficulty that depart from what's useful for practical livestock work), the trial is too hard. Much better that the trial be too hard than too easy, but ideally it should be set at a level that effectively distinguishes the wheat from the chaff. That's why it takes a person with a certain degree of knowledge about dogs, sheep and how the former can and should manage the latter to set a good trial course. The Sturgis Finals to which Donald refers had sheep that were so large and aggressive and unused to being worked that the international shed simply could not be accomplished the first year or two, and therefore no one completed the course on the final day. Over the course of those years the best dogs and handlers figured out how to do it, which was a fantastic experience and illustration of what dogs are capable of. And in the meantime the gather and drive provided a good fair test of the dogs' abilities, so I would not say that the trial was too hard. That's why bordering on too hard is better than too easy -- there are challenges that a dog and handler can meet that at one time might have seemed impossible, but too easy is just pointless.

As for grading, I don't know if you meant to grade the trial or grade the dogs. The dog's score is its grade, I suppose, but I think the trials are grade-able too, and they ARE graded if only in people's minds. Most people have a mental ranking of existing trials from the most challenging and fairest (in the sense of calling for and rewarding the best work) down to the least challenging/fair. Every now and then people call for the USBCHA to rank them more formally, and limit sanctioning and/or number of points awarded to trials of a certain level of difficulty, but that's unlikely ever to happen, because sheepdog trial hosting -- like sheepdog trialing -- is made up of independent cusses who don't like to be told what to do.

The Border Collie is referred to by the average person as a breed because 1, having seen mostly AKC Barbie Collies they believe that the primary proof of “purebred-ness” is uniformity of appearance, and/or 2, because they lack the knowledge of other words which differentiate one sort of dog from another. I personally see the Border Collie as a type, and believe that it is most often referred to as a breed for the reasons given by me above." (Wikipedia)

Geonni, I assume these are your words, not Wikipedia's?

Reading your overall post and the sources you quote, it sounds as if you conclude that the border collie was not a breed until a kennel club recognized it and wrote an appearance standard, and then it was a breed? Before that, it was a type? Now it's a type if it's not registered by the AKC, but once someone sends their dog's ABCA or ISDS papers to the AKC and obtains registration, it becomes a member of a breed? Even though AKC registration is open to all ABCA, ISDS, CBCA, AIBC and NASDA border collies, and they have considerable variation in appearance? Or are Barbie Collies a breed, but working-bred border collies not a breed, regardless of who they're registered with or whether they're registered at all?

I think Wikipedia is a good source for factual, non-controversial information, but when it comes to anything that's not clearcut, I would need to consider the source, and in Wikipedia the source can be whatever anonymous person last edited the article.

It's common in the livestock world to have criteria other than appearance as the goal in breeding, e.g., milk production, multiple births, etc. The breeds that are bred to such a "standard" end up having a somewhat similar physical appearance (as do border collies), but that physical appearance is not what the breed was developed for or how it is defined. Yet they are considered a breed, and not just by those ignorant of other names by which to classify them. To me, the traditional border collie, bred for work, is definitely a breed, and I have always preferred the breed definition used in this article: To a geneticist, a breed is simply this: a population of animals whose breeding is controlled and outcrossing limited, so that genetic selection can be exercised on it. I don't think that "breeding true" to a physical appearance standard is a necessary part of the definition.

ETA: However, on further reflection, I think our negotiators may have used the "type" argument back when we were trying to fight off AKC recognition. Didn't do us any good, though.

 

Just curious... if the border collie standard is its work style and not all border collies pups in a litter will have it. By your standards is the border collie a breed? Since you can breed border collies for their working ability and end up with non herding pup aka not breeding true.

If you're breeding labs to a conformation standard and one of your pups is born with a sizable white spot on its chest, does that mean the labrador retriever is not a breed? Just because some of your pups don't meet the breed standard doesn't mean there's no breed.

And yes -- good work, Alligande. It's nice to have a success now and then.

So I guess if I had an national/international trial-winning sheepdog (ABCA- or ISDS-registered), and for some unfathomable reason I wished to participate in AKC agility trials with it, I would have to desex it before getting an ILP registration and then competing?

 

Or I could register it with AKC because they still have an open register WRT border collies?

Theoretically, you could register it based on its ABCA or ISDS registration. But the end result might well depend on its looks --as you can see from this old thread.

Chene, I liked what you wrote. The only thing it occurs to me to add is something about why you have to keep breeding for working ability if you want to keep working ability -- it's not enough that prior generations were bred for it. But I don't think I would add that after all -- you have enough new thoughts for readers to deal with for the moment.

If the AKC ceased to exist, would the working dog community be (willing and) able to meet the demand (working dogs, pet, sport, etc) for Border Collies?

Who knows? The demand would certainly decrease. I would guess that the working dog community would be able to meet the demand for border collies from people who really had good reasons for wanting a border collie (i.e., those who will use them for work or who know the breed well enough to actually have a reality-based preference for them as a companion). And it would reduce their visibility to those who don't, who would then be more likely to choose a more readily available dog, one that would be more likely to suit them better. It would also remove a competing standard of excellence, which is systematically destroying the coherence and integrity of the breed.

The real question is, if the goal is to protect the working breed does the downfall of the AKC achieve this? The problem for me is that even if the AKC is a contributing factor, I don’t see it as the principle cause. If I was to look at the decline of a working breed like a disease, I would call the AKC a symptom, not the cause. Treating the symptom will make you feel better but it doesn’t solve the problem. The AKC just capitalizes on a movement that is already taking place.

I'm sure we're reaching the point of diminishing returns, but I just don't understand your reasoning here. You seem to be saying that X cannot be the principal cause of something if that something would continue even if X was removed. But that makes no sense. The fact that X may have set in motion a chain of events that could persist even if X now were to disappear does not make X a symptom rather than a cause. X is still the cause.

The AKC is the remote cause, because the AKC popularized the idea of breeds, the importance of "pure" breeding, and the definition of a breed by its appearance. The AKC is also the immediate cause, because when AKC recognized the border collie over the objection of the overwhelming majority of border collie owners, it popularized the Border Collie breed while changing its definition and setting up a competing standard of excellence, sowing confusion that has damaged and continues to damage the integrity of the breed. So AKC made breed names important while changing and obfuscating their meaning. You say the AKC "just capitalizes on a movement that was already taking place." But no, it wasn't already taking place. There were no more than a handful of breeders who were breeding border collies for obedience competition before AKC recognition, and I doubt very much that there are more than that today. They were not being bred for any other purpose. Yes, there were dogs sold for pets, which is fine, and dogs who were bred without any systematic concern for working ability. But we're talking about a steady trickle, not a flood or a cataract. A trickle is not a threat to the breed, but a flood is. It's the AKC that caused and is continuing to accelerate the flood.

Funny thing is, the Border Collie pups I see coming from these places run $2000 or more, the parents are not health tested, the pups are not health tested prior to sale and the bloodlines are worthless. You can get a much better pup for much less money. Or, you can get a pup of the same "quality" for next to nothing.

It's worth pondering that the AKC market, and the pet market influenced by AKC, are able and willing to spend much more for a border collie puppy than the average farmer can. At the time of AKC recognition the average pet buyer had never heard of a border collie. But once they became "an AKC breed" they were included in AKC books and other books aimed at the general public that are meant to help people decide what kind of puppy to get. It is much easier to breed a dog that "looks like a border collie" than to breed a dog that has the working ability of a good border collie. So if you can breed with much less knowledge and effort, and reap a much higher puppy price for doing so, what effect do you think this has on the supply side?

I agree that it cannot be conclusively proven that "more AKC dogs means less working dogs," (or even dogs less capable of working, which is what matters), and I agree that there is a difference between cause and correlation, in that the second does not conclusively prove the first. But rather than re-hash all the factors that I think make it highly likely that AKC is a major causal factor here, and that the inevitable result is harm to the border collie breed as a working dog breed and harm to the people that depend on it (just as it is highly likely that AKC was a major causal factor in the diminution/demise of working dogs in other breeds), I will just say that the standard of proof you are requiring here is highly unrealistic and inappropriate to the subject. There are many species and even civilizations whose decline and/or disappearance we cannot conclusively prove were caused by this or that. We can point to actions and conditions that would likely lead to this result, and that are good reasons to accept that those actions and conditions were indeed the cause, but we cannot prove it conclusively. That doesn't mean we should refrain from advancing the arguments or trying to counteract the actions and conditions (where that's possible).

In your first post, you said that, instead of focusing on the working dog, we should be making the argument that "The AKC's lack of oversight in its registered breeders has led to poor breeding practices." But can you conclusively prove that? How do you know that just as many people outside the AKC don't breed just as poorly? How do you know that breeding practices were not equally bad before there was an AKC? How do you know that any action the AKC might take would improve breeding practices? You don't. You actually have less concrete evidence to eliminate these competing possibilities than we do. But even so, you can make a reasonable and credible argument that it is likely the case. Similarly, one can't conclusively prove that the disappearance of the Cocker Spaniel as a useful and used hunter was caused by AKC's impact on how they are bred, rather than by people no longer wanting to hunt with them or finding a breed they liked better. But which is more likely? And if people came to no longer want to hunt with them, or to like another breed better, might that not be because the Cocker Spaniel, thanks to the AKC's influence, was being bred in a way that made it less suitable for its job than it was before? You can't know -- we don't have a way of accessing all of the facts. But we have good reason to believe that the AKC was the principal cause.

Even when it comes to strict science, the people who concluded that cigarettes were harmful back when there was no more than a correlation between cigarette smoking and cancer, heart disease and other maladies were sensible to alter their behavior accordingly and to encourage others to do the same. There were enough good reasons to think they were right, and that waiting for conclusive proof (which was eventually possible in that setting, though not in ours) was not a good idea.

As for the flaw in the argument that I am referring to, I am talking about the leap that is made from the supporting information to the conclusion. The supporting info is good: selecting for different qualities will lead to different offspring. The argument then defines a dominate authority and tries to link the dominate authority with the extinction of the original group. I will agree that the dominate authority can and does add to the confusion, and they use the name of a superior product to sell their own. This does not provide any support for the conclusion that this leads to the demise of the original. Sure, the original is less known then the new one, but that does not mean it no longer exist. So this is the point that I am trying to make: there is no direct support linking the AKC to the demise of a working breed (at least none has been presented so far and I have yet to find any).

I'm glad we agree that selecting for different qualities will lead to different offspring. So the AKC, which encourages and rewards selection for different qualities, is a threat to the merit of the dogs of every breeder who succumbs to their lure to select for different qualities. Because of AKC's prestige, awards and influence, they are causing the progeny of many border collies to become something that is called a border collie but we both agree is not truly a border collie.

If that only happened to a very small percentage of the gene pool, it would be questionable whether that constituted damage to the breed. But what if, over time, it came to amount to 70%, 80%, 90% of the breed? It came to be the recognized norm (as it is fast becoming)? Could you say then that the breed had not been seriously damaged? The fact is that there's a tipping point, even if we don't know exactly where it is. There comes a point where you don't have enough dogs who still have the qualities that define a border collie to maintain a healthy, viable breed. Working traits cannot be "fixed" the way color and ear set and tail carriage can be "fixed." You need enough dogs in the gene pool to be able to choose mates that will keep these traits in balance in the next generation and the next, as well as avoid the health problems of inbreeding. The ones who have lost the traits cannot contribute. If they become a big enough proportion of the breed, we will see the quality of working dogs diminish even if it is not recognized as happening, because the pool of dogs who still have all the traits has become so small. And if it IS recognized as happening, livestock people will probably turn to other breeds, or at least an infusion of other breeds, and that will be the demise of the working border collie breed in the sense in which the AKC (and you, I think) are using the word "breed."

The AKC has done this. They didn't have to, they could have left the border collie alone, as the vast majority of border collie owners and 100% of border collie registries and 99% of border collie organizations wanted them to do. But they wanted the breed and they took it. Suppose some rich whacko offered to pay $100,000 to anyone who bred a line of prick-eared, short-coated solid-brown-except-for-one-white-circle-on-the-top-of-the-head border collies that breeds true for three generations. Doesn't that person bear some responsibility for the harm s/he causes to the breed as breeders go all out to win the prize, even if no one was forced to seek the prize? In the same way, AKC bears the responsibility for setting appearance standards as the measure of excellence for border collies, offering incentives to breeders to breed to those standards, and legitimizing dogs so bred as authentic border collies, and even Champion border collies.

Now I can find examples of working breeds that have not been driven to extinction by the AKC. The BC being one. There are still working BCs out there. Unless you have numbers showing that the numbers of working BCs or the demand for working BCs is being directly reduced by the AKC, then you can't say that the AKC is leading to their demise. Also, those numbers will require that your rule out other causes, such as are there fewer jobs for working dogs? The other example is labs. There are two lines of labs now. Yep, it can be confusing and not everyone that knows about labs will know that there are two separate lines, but the point is that the AKC has not led to the demise of the working line.

The factor that everyone seems to lose sight of in these arguments is TIME. It's natural to think that how it is now is how it will always be. But that's not true -- acts can set in motion processes that take a fairly long time to play out. Often their effects are barely noticeable at first, but gather speed over time and then snowball. The border collie was recognized by the AKC in 1995. The fact that there are still working border collies in the US twenty years later does not mean the AKC is not a serious threat to the breed. Nor does the AKC have to be the one single cause of harm to the border collie. Most complex events have more than one cause -- some major, some minor. Climate change has not had a single cause, but there are entities that still played an outsized part in causing it. Throwing sandwich wrappers overboard may contribute to pollution of a river, but that does not minimize or excuse the role of the chemical company that pipes its waste into the river. If the AKC has done the things you acknowledge they've done, they deserve blame for the harm those things predictably have caused and will cause. There are many breeds that have totally lost their function after being taken in by the AKC. I'm not aware that working Cocker Spaniels exist in any number. How hard does it have to be to find a dog from a surviving working strain for you to acknowledge AKC recognition has caused harm to that breed? Even what has happened to the lab and the GSD and the Aussie looks like harm to me.

So yes, argue that the AKC standard leads to the breeding of dogs using a different selection criteria then that of a functional dog, which leads to a very different dog. This is why we have different dog breeds after all; we selected dogs for traits that we desired. Explain to them what makes a working line BC unique. Tell them that if a BC became the amazing dog that they heard about by breeding for the herding ability, then the AKC standard cannot produce the same BC because it no longer selects for those traits that make a BC a BC. Ask them this: how does breeding for a certain coat style, ear position, tail position, etc. lead to a smart, intelligent, and devoted dog? The answer is that it doesn't guarantee these traits, so why not support breeders that are selecting for those traits.

Sounds good to me.

What it comes down to is that your initial argument is flawed. There is a connection in the argument with no supporting premise. Basically, it is the link between the AKC dogs and the working dogs. Sure, the name of the dog links them, but the argument being made is about the breeding of the dogs. Your argument is missing the link of how the AKC breeding affects the working dog breeding. . . .

 

I don't believe that there is a fundamental link between KC and working lines. There may be some effect, but unless you can say that workers are being forced to buy and breed AKC dogs, then this argument is impossible to make.

I don't think chene's argument is flawed at all. I have bolded the part of your quote that I think is most significant, and which you seem to glide over without giving it any consideration. The names we use to designate objects or beings are designed to convey information about them. If an entity changes the nature of something -- be it animal, vegetable or mineral -- but continues using the same name to denote the thing, and claims that the thing is the same as the original, that leads at best to incoherence and confusion. If the entity doing it is powerful and respected by most, that can indeed lead to changes over time in how the thing is bred or made.

Let's go back to Tea's tomato. Suppose Burpee decided to develop a 'Beefsteak' tomato that had a spectacular flower. Over the tomato generations it took to develop the spectacular flower, no attention was paid to the fruit -- its taste, the thickness of its skin, etc., so the fruit deteriorated in the qualities we currently value in a tomato. They brought it on the market, advertising it as a new and improved 'Beefsteak' tomato that gave gorgeous blooms as well as fruit. Now Burpee is not as dominant in the flower and vegetable business as AKC is in the dog business, but still this would lead to problems. A lot of people, home growers as well as seed companies and nurseries, would buy those 'tomato' seeds and plants. Many would be disappointed, but many would not be -- they'd be entranced by the flowers, or they didn't have much of a sense of taste, or they're easily influenced (think "The Emperor's New Clothes"), or they never ate tomatoes often or at all, etc. If that was your first tomato, you might well think it was fine. Those who were disappointed might not buy again (or would try not to, because how can you be sure when they're both called 'Beefsteak' tomatoes?) and would only be out the money they spent for their first plants. But there would be enough demand from those who weren't disappointed to cause market share to grow. Over time, more and more people would buy that tomato, and produce that tomato, and fewer and fewer people would remember what a "real" 'Beefsteak' tomato was like. They would think that the new model was quite a good tomato. They would think they "had it all." (Have you ever tasted beef raised on pasture on a farm? I was amazed when I first tasted it, it was so much better tasting than supermarket beef. But how many people know that? How many have had that experience?

Everybody once did, but over time less and less do.)

There is not the rigid line you seem to think between breeders of working border collies and breeders of others. Many good breeders of border collies were able to breed more working dogs than they otherwise would have because there was demand for their pups from non-livestock folks who nevertheless appreciated border collies' attributes. Those folks may be misled into buying the "new and improved" border collie, because after all it's a border collie, and AKC besides, and probably easier to come by. There are many livestock producers who do not currently use dogs, but who would certainly be better off if they did. If they decide to give a dog a try, they may well choose an AKC border collie, because after all it's a border collie, and as a result decide that border collies are not that much use. Not only are they worse off as a result, but the breed is worse off.

You cannot keep a breed alive without a fairly broad and deep gene pool. And you cannot have large numbers of the breeders of that breed working at cross purposes, breeding for different and mutually inconsistent things, without serious damage if not destruction of the breed.

So, I would stop using the working dog argument against the AKC. There is so much more that you can fault them for and that people will actually care about. You can tell them what those AKC papers actually represent. Explain to them what they are actually spending their money on. Lots of people still see the AKC as the gold standard for dogs. Explain to them how meaningless an AKC registration actually is. Inform them about the flawed organization that they are supporting by buying an AKC dog or registering with the AKC.

Yes, those are the easy arguments to make. AKC rewards the production of deformed dogs. AKC supports puppy mills. But I think it's important to make the argument that's harder to grasp, because it goes to the very foundation of how people think about dogs (thanks to the AKC and other KCs). Who says a breed is what it looks like? The AKC. And that thinking has permeated the larger society. It's important to fight that. To explain that there's a different way of defining a breed than by its appearance. That a breed can be defined by what it can do, not by how it looks, and that besides being the original way breeds were defined, it's a more useful way, because breeds have been developed to be of service to us in different ways, and to disregard the importance of what the dog was developed (painstakingly and over many generations) to do is to undermine that breed. That's what the AKC does.

ETA: I was writing this response to an earlier post of yours, Chanse, while you were posting the one immediately above. I do think you are still minimizing the significance of using a single name for what are in essence two different breeds, though. And I would not know where to begin to find a working lab, even though I'm sure that some (but not many) people would.

I know all this. But I've found that telling people that they're making a breed that looks the same but isn't the same just doesn't...people don't care about that. They say it's not really a big deal. It's too abstract.

 

Ah, yes . . . how do you get people to care about something they don't care about? I'm surprised it can ever be done, but sometimes it can. The people you succeed with are the ones who are open-minded enough to entertain a new thought, smart enough to reason it through, and have enough empathy to imagine themselves in the shoes of someone who needs working dogs. Such people will always be a minority, but once they're convinced, they make the best advocates.

I'm moving this topic to General Border Collie Discussion. I'm sure you'll get more responses there, since this forum is for questions about training dogs for livestock management and stockdog trials.

Ik the dog has to be ABCA reg to get the money at national. If the dog that win isnt registered what happens to the money? Does it just go to the next available registered dog? Held to next year where the prize will be xtra big? Or just put to a different use?

It goes to the next available registered dog.

I believe the best current thinking on EOD is that it is autosomal recessive rather than dominant, and that the family trees used in this article do not rule out a recessive pattern of inheritance.

Of course, there's always this.