BritFarmers

A good dog is the cheapest labour a sheep farm will ever employ and the hardest to replace. Most British flocks answer the dog question the same way their grandfathers did, with a collie, and usually that is the right answer. But the question is worth actually asking, because the breeds are tools with different shapes, and the loud one from New Zealand that half the internet is suddenly searching for genuinely does a different job.

The working Border Collie is the most organised breeding project in British agriculture. The International Sheep Dog Society, founded in 1906 with the stated purpose of improving the shepherd’s dog, registers more than 6,000 pups a year into a stud book that now holds over 300,000 entries, with pedigrees traceable back a century. A dog without papers can still earn its way in: the society’s registration on merit route admits any dog that proves itself a good working example, which tells you where the breed’s priorities sit.

The collie’s method is the famous one: silent work, the crouch, the eye, the wide outrun that ends with sheep flowing back towards the handler. It is a gathering dog before anything else, and for the fetching, folding and close work that makes up most lowland and upland shepherding, nothing touches it.