020. Herding Dogs
Description
This article is from the Working Dogs FAQ, posted to rec.pets.dogs newsgroup. Maintained by Cindy Tittle Moore with numerous contributions by others.
020. Herding Dogs
Herding, along with hunting, is probably one of the oldest professions for dogs. There are many breeds bred specifically for herding. There are many forms of herding, as well: boundary, fetching/gathering.
There are different styles, as well. Some breeds use what is called "eye", the tendency to stare down sheep. Dogs may be strong-eyed, medium eyed, or loose-eyed. Border Collies are an example of a strong-eyed breed. An Old English Sheepdog, in contrast, does not have much eye. Dogs may use nipping or barking to move the sheep. Corgies are well known for their ability to dart in and nip the heels of cattle, for example. Other dogs were drovers; that is, they physically butt up against the stock to move them. Rottweilers and Bouviers both were used for this type of work.
Several different organizations offer herding trials and tests, including the Australian Shepherd Club of America, the AKC, the American Stockdog Club. For more specifics, see the Stockdog Server.
A short description, as provided by Dianne Schoenberg:
The European herding breeds can be roughly divided into two factions: the British herding dogs (Border Collies, Bearded Collies, Old English Sheepdog, Rough & Smooth Collies, Shetland Sheepdogs) and the continental breeds (German Shepherd Dogs, Briards, Bouviers, Belgian Sheepdogs). There are significant differences between temperament and working style between the two groups.
In comparison to continental Europe, Britian is an isolated island with a significant lack of natural predators. British sheep-ranching operations, most particularly in Scotland, involved flocks of rather shy, flighty sheep that often lived for generations spread thinly out over the same, rather inhospitable hillside, only rarely being gathered for shearing and such. The Border Collie is the breed most superbly adapted to working in these conditions. The BC runs very wide in order to gather large groups at one time, stays far out from the stock and creeps up slowly in order not to spook the sheep and make them run (which is undesireable). The BC is superbly responsive to command (Scottish shepherds typically work with whistle commands, as the sound carries well-enough to be heard and obeyed when the dog is as far as a mile off(!)) and the BC has few if any protective instincts (not necessary because of the lack of predators and the sparse population of the districts where sheep were raised). The style in which BCs work is generally referred to as "fetching" or "gathering" because their primary function as herders is to "fetch" the sheep to the shepherd.
The situation in continental Europe was far different. Rather than the far-flung flocks that reigned in Britian, most sheep were raised in small farm operations. In comparison to flighty British sheep, most continental sheep are quite tame ("heavy" in herding parlance) and are readily trained to follow a shepherd about. The sheep were typically kept in a barn at night and taken out to unfenced fields to graze by day. Since the fields used for sheep pasture were often side-by-side with those used for growing crops, the shepherd needed a dog that would patrol the "boundary" of the area, serving as a sort of living fence. Furthermore, predators (both animal and human) were always a threat, so all the continental herding breeds have strongly-developed protective instincts (which is why they are the breeds most often chosen for police and protection work). The German sheepdog trials (HGH, pronounced "haw-gee-haw") are a demonstration of this style of herding (variously referred to as boundary, tending or continental). Typically using a large number of sheep (something on the order of 100) that are conditioned to follow a handler around, the dog demonstrates its ability and desire to patrol the "boundaries" of the flock as the handler leads the flock around. A courage test, in the dog must protect his handler and flock from a stranger wielding a stick, is an important part of every HGH trial.
[Australia has a lot of herding dogs; what about them?]
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