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Breeding pet border collies


sogj
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"Slightly" on topic: I have a female rescue mix and a male border collie. Had them both in my car in their crates, at our little country store in Upperville VA. A young girl comes out of her dad's pick up truck, and points to my female rescue dog and asks: "What kind of dog is that?" So I explain that it is a rescue dog and tell her what breeds of dog I think are in her, but that she behaves mostly like some kind of hound. (We live in foxhunting country so she kind of understood that.) I then point to "Cowboy" my border collie and I ask her if she knows what kind of dog he is. She replies: "Of course. . .that is a sheepdog!"

 

Sheepdog it is then. . . :D

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Knew a guy who in my estimation made a nuisance of himself always correcting other's pronunciation. He gave me a "twofer" one day, with correction of my pronunciation of a Dam I had lived next to for a good portion of my life, and a City where my family shopped all the time. You know, the kind of guy who asks you to repeat yourself in front of others as if he does not understand a certain word, and then lectures about rules of English pronunciation. I don't know who prevailed in our debate (as nobody, other then me, had lived near the places under consideration), although it became clear that neither of us wanted to be in the same room again with the other person, when it could be helped.

 

If a person asks to make issues out of terminology and pronunciation, he/she is entitled to thorough discussion of the topics. Nevertheless, I believe that when you understand a person's meaning, just let the differences alone. Handled improperly, use of words can divide and exclude.

 

BC is in the title of this forum.

 

Christians were persecuted for centuries, devising ways to communicate among themselves, and to identify friend/foe. Many of those symbols have continued in culture/history, while the need for them may have diminished over time. It's fitting for this forum about border collies that the Greek letter rho (P) in the chi rho symbol is often stylized to represent a shepherd's crook.

 

Try "Geoduck", a clam native to the Pacific NW :) . It tastes the same no matter how it's pronounced. Christmas is Christmas, regardless how it's written. -- Wishing all a wonderful and peaceful New Year, TEC

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Sogj,

Most people don't think about ranchers and certainly (as Pam noted) at least here in the U.S. find sheep something or a foreign concept, since they don't even necessarily see lamb in the grocery store. Many farmers and ranchers use mechanized means (4-wheelers, etc.) to handle stock, and of course feed lots don't necessarily need dogs. But honestly, the average person probably doesn't really think of meat production at all beyond the packaged product they get in the store, or maybe the latest shocking undercover video that goes viral. What they see are border collies doing agility, flyball, obedience, or catch Westminster or similar on TV. They have no clue that border collies have a real purpose (beyond what they might have seen in the movie Babe) and are used for work on a daily basis throughout this country. To them, the border collie is all those other things first and foremost.

 

J.

 

Added to which, there are a great many people that think stock work is mostly a trained set of behaviors. They think conformation dogs are fine because you just pick a smart one and train it to herd cows or whatever. They have no idea of how much of what makes a good stock dog must be carefully and vigilantly bred for. They hear of sheepdogs receiving training and think that the training is what's responsible for their brilliance in the paddock.

 

I remember when I was in my twenties and saw an ad in the LA Times for sheepherders wanted. (Yeah, I really did.) I thought I could train my big, galumphing, dumb-as-a-bag-of-hammers Lassie Collie to herd sheep.

 

:rolleyes: Ah, youth...

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We do call it training but I like to think of it as "development", "guidance", or "refining" more than "training". I can "train" a dog to do something that isn't quite natural to it, or something that it wouldn't generally choose to do on its own, but I sure can't put a useful suite of working ability into a dog that does not possess it. All you can do is train it to follow your direction (*if* the individual can be trained in that manner) so it can look like it is working stock - but it is really not being instinctive or thinking, it is just following directions.

 

Of course, there are the people who ask if the sheep are "trained to do that" and, for some school sheep, I think they might be due to frequent and constant repetition!

 

Added to which, there are a great many people that think stock work is mostly a trained set of behaviors. They think conformation dogs are fine because you just pick a smart one and train it to herd cows or whatever. They have no idea of how much of what makes a good stock dog must be carefully and vigilantly bred for. They hear of sheepdogs receiving training and think that the training is what's responsible for their brilliance in the paddock.

 

I remember when I was in my twenties and saw an ad in the LA Times for sheepherders wanted. (Yeah, I really did.) I thought I could train my big, galumphing, dumb-as-a-bag-of-hammers Lassie Collie to herd sheep.

 

:rolleyes: Ah, youth...

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