Show bred border collies

[Flamincomet]

A long time ago I swear I read about a study that a fellow board member did that showed that show bred border collies were genetically different from working bred border collies. Am I imagining this? I can't seem to find the information anywhere.

 

Autumn

[Sue R]

If I remember correctly, it was research that Melanie Chang was involved with. A graph showed that the show-bred Border Collie was as distinctly different from the working-bred Border Collie as another breed would be. I think it was based on the dog genome project, perhaps.

[juliepoudrier]

It was work from the behavioral genetics study, but I think there are some problems with concluding that the two are different breeds, just don't remember what the dissenting opinions were anymore.

 

J.

[gcv-border]

If I remember correctly, it was research that Melanie Chang was involved with. A graph showed that the show-bred Border Collie was as distinctly different from the working-bred Border Collie as another breed would be. I think it was based on the dog genome project, perhaps.

 

If anyone can find this research, I would love to read it. Show-bred BCs certainly look different from working-bred BCs, but I wonder how long people have been breeding for the show look. (Sorry, I haven't read "Dog Wars" yet. It is on my "to read" list.) Were they being bred for the show phenotype before the AKC admitted them to the show ring, in this country or others?

 

Jovi

[Eileen Stein]

Border Collies were being bred to a show standard in Australia and New Zealand for 40 or 50 years before AKC recognition. The Australian Kennel Club considers the Border Collie breed to have been developed in Australia (by which they mean the show breed, of course). Many AKC folks anxious to triumph in conformation showing in the US after recognition imported Oz/NZ dogs for that purpose.

 

You can find a reference to the study Melanie posted about here. Scroll down to the heading "Understanding population structure (intra-breed "stratification") within Border Collies" and the multi-colored fan. The red branch of that fan depicts working border collies, the pink depicts show Border Collies. The relevant text:

 

We included a small number of kennel club registered show Border Collies (primarily of Australasian breeding) in our Border Collie sample for genotyping, the remainder of which was made up of ISDS and ABCA (working registries) registered dogs. Our phylogenetic, clustering, and principal components analyses all suggest a genetic split within the breed between working and show Border Collies that is probably as large as the genetic distances between some breeds.

 

The questions still to be answered is how much of the genetic differential can be attributed to changes caused by breeding for show, and how much to the fact that most of the ancestors of the show dogs were bred in a different and to some extent isolated locale (Oz/NZ). Of course, that genetic ancestry is being carried forward to present and future show Border Collies in the US, thus maintaining the split.

[Donald McCaig]

Dear Sheepdoggers,

 

As I dimly recall, the Australian KC "recognized" the Border Collie 12 years before the brits did. Interestingly - and perhaps because there was some residue of "these ought to be working dogs", the Brits altered ISDS dogs rather than importing the Aussie dogs.

 

Donald McCaig

[Maja]

Very interesting graph, though it would look quite different in Europe for the reasons mentioned by Mr. Donald McCaig.

 

Maja

[Eileen Stein]

Very interesting graph, though it would look quite different in Europe for the reasons mentioned by Mr. Donald McCaig.

 

Maja

 

Well, it might or it might not -- that's the intriguing question that is yet to be answered. Remember that the dogs imported to Australia in the late 1800s and early 1900s were brought over by Englishmen and Scotsmen to be their working sheepdogs. As far as is known, they were the same stock as the dogs just then coming to be known as border collies in the UK. Australian Joan Bray, in her book Border Collies, shows Border Collies being judged in breed in New South Wales around 1950 (after conformation standards had been adopted for the Border Collie in NSW and some other Australian states, but before the Australian National Kennel Club adopted their first national Border Collie standard in 1963), and they are indistinguishable in appearance from our working dogs. Through enhanced inbreeding to fix the traits desirable for the show ring, Australian show breeders significantly changed the genetic makeup of these dogs. IF show breeders in the UK did not import show dogs from other countries, but went through essentially the same type of breeding on selected dogs from their working population to achieve essentially the same conformation goal, it's entirely possible that their "show branch" is just as distinct from their "working branch." Or not. We won't know until this type of research and analysis is done on a wider array of show and working border collies, ideally a worldwide population.

[Pam Wolf]

The working BC's I've seen photos of from NZ/Australia are more in appearance to the UK/NA dogs than the show dogs. Even coat aside (many of the true workind dogs are smooth coated whereas many areas do not recognize the smooth in the show ring)the physical appearance is different. It seems the Aussies rely more on hand signals than the Other places so the dogs tend to look more at the handlers than in other regions.

 

It would be interesting to see if there is a split in the genetics down under between the working and show dogs.

 

I would suspect the split not as great in Europe. While many dogs are from Australia and NZ a large number are from the UK and the two have been crossbred for a while now in Europe so I would imagine the genetics to be less well defined

[Mark Billadeau]

As long as the KC accepts ISDS registered dogs I suspect the "split" will not be as significant as between Oz/NZ and other regions.

 

The study shows there was a genetic difference between the imported Oz/NZ-Show bred dogs and the US dogs; this genetic difference could be due to breeding selection and/or geographic/legal (i.e. rabies) separation. The data does not allow one to determine which caused the genetic difference.

 

 

 

As long as, one gene pool accepts infusions from another gene pool it may be difficult to find a genetic separation between two gene pools (i.e. ISDS vs KC or ABCA vs. AKC).

 

 

[Maja]

Eileen,

True. We won't know for sure. But the breeding is not as separated in show lines and working lines in Europe as it is in the US. It's not at all uncommon for one parent of a KC dog to be ISDS or some of the grandparents, and usually a sprinkle of ISDS in fourth and fifth generation. That puts the the working ancestors as late as the eighties of the last century.

 

I am not defending the KC, I just wrote the way it is, I think. It's still not good to breed BCs according to conformation, and in some European countries it is not only possible within the KC but also practiced. These breeders are usually dual-registered in order not to cause complications for non-herding homes and their participation in sporting events. So all I am saying is that I would bet that the DNA of the European show dogs versus the DNA of European ISDS dogs is much closer to each other than in the US, from what I can see.

 

Maja

[Eileen Stein]

True. We won't know for sure. But the breeding is not as separated in show lines and working lines in Europe as it is in the US. It's not at all uncommon for one parent of a KC dog to be ISDS or some of the grandparents, and usually a sprinkle of ISDS in fourth and fifth generation. That puts the the working ancestors as late as the eighties of the last century.

 

I would expect the split to be greater in the UK than in continental Europe, though, because although the British KC accepts ISDS-registered dogs, AFAIK it's unknown how many ISDS-registered dogs are actually brought into the KC. It could be very few, and is almost certainly fewer than in continental Europe, where as I understand it many countries require registration with the KC equivalent if one is to breed or compete in KC events of any kind.

 

It would be interesting to see if there is a split in the genetics down under between the working and show dogs.

 

It would indeed. It would pretty much answer the question.