Eminent Dogs, Dangerous Men: Searching Through Scotland For A Border Collie
The end note to this book says: “If this has persuaded you to buy a Border Collie for a pet, I have done you and your dog a disservice. If you don’t have work for a Border Collie, or time to train it properly, your bright young Border Collie will invent his own work, and chances are you won’t like it.
There are dozens of dog breeds bred to be good pets. If a pet is what you seek, you should choose among them.”
You might be tempted to reply, “Condescending, superior bastard.” Read the book, and you will be humbled. McCaig’s authoritative voice has been earned through years of dedication to the Border Collie and to the work he and his dogs do together.
I will never own a sheep farm, or train a herding dog, but oh my, how this book made me long to be among the company of those “Eminent Dogs” and “Dangerous Men”.
Generally in western society, dogs in our families have come to play the role of children. “Americans are often uneasy around dogs.” McCaig avers. He’s not wrong.
Just as it seems that many parents are hesitant to correct their children of fear of the temper tantrum that will result, obedience classes are full of people asking their dogs in a pleading, ineffectual voice to do what they are told. Many of us feel a flush of pride if we can persuade our dogs to sit five times out of ten.
In Britain, a dog is a “well mannered beast you can take anywhere…” In America a dog is a “…willful but CUTE creature who cannot be trusted in modern civilization.” McCaig thinks it’s a form of contempt that we treat our dogs like stupid pampered babies.
But then again, in his mountain home, his neighbours let their dogs run wild. They are killed by cars, shot by farmers when they attack livestock, or simply vanish. When McCaig suggests to some of the owners that they might do it differently, he’s told dogs want to roam; they want to be as wild as can be.
Should a dog be left to be a dog? What duty do we have to make sure a dog can fulfill its potential? Are we merely responsible for controlling their world and and fulfilling their every need, even if they are bored literally to the point of insanity? It’s a question suitable for a writer whose university degree was in philosophy.
With a minor, apparently, in Mark Twain impersonations. Behold the Author:
In McCaig’s world, dogs and ‘men’ relate as equals. Sometimes the man gives the commands; sometimes the dog makes his own decisions and takes action without a command. (There are quite a few women mentioned as dangerous competitors at sheep herding trials, but hey, McCaig is the product of earlier times when men were men and women who displayed any kind of competency at ‘men’s work’, were honorary men.)
If anything, McCaig is more attached to his dogs than then they are to him. He acknowledges that sheepdogs don’t necessarily love their men. They love their work.
A working dog who will ignore a bitch in heat who is working right beside him is hardly likely to fawn all over the human he works with. McCaig respects his dogs utterly, but as dogs, not as furry people: “Pip jumps on the bed [at a trial] “and gives me a look. His eyes are whirling, Betty Boop eyes. After all, he is another species – his mind unfathomable.”
The Border Collie, this book makes clear, is a master of his craft, and lives to work.
In that respect these dogs have more than a passing kinship with those driven Captains of Industry McCaig left behind on Madison Avenue and Wall St.
A brilliant dog can be defeated by an inept handler. One of McCaig’s first dogs is Pip. After a disappointing run at a trial, the Scottish judge tells McCaig that he gave Pip a command in error. Had he not done so, the judge says, Pip would have done the job almost perfectly. McCaig tells us that “Pip was so mad, he wouldn’t look at me. He wouldn’t meet my eyes for three days.”
It goes the other way as well. Peeved at Pip for ignoring a command at a trial, McCaig plays Springsteen on the radio on the way back “loud as I like.” Pip doesn’t like Springsteen.
The dogs work hard, to the point of exhaustion. But they work no harder than their remarkable owners. The hardships of life on a working sheep farm are shared equally.
Trials are even more demanding: “A sheepdog trial is the most difficult test of a man and a dog ever devised. Tubs of cool water are kept at the end of the course because, after just ten minutes of running a trial, the dogs need that water to drop their body temperatures back to normal…. It’s the difference, you see, between racing at Indianapolis and driving Aunt Millie to the airport.”
McCaig’s dream is to one day qualify for the World Sheep Dog trials. He recognizes that he made a lot of mistakes training Pip, and his blunders still show. When Pip gets old, he decides to make finding a dog who he might take to the top, into “a pilgrimage.” He’ll spend three months “sitting at the feet” of the shepherds and farmers who created wonderful dogs.
Many (if not most) successful working Border Collies are born and trained in Scotland, where the Border Collie and other herding, driving, and guarding breeds of dogs have been the passion of working shepherds for hundreds of years. So that’s where his pilgrimage takes him.
If you or I might find it difficult to find the right breeder to sell us the puppy of our dreams to be our pet, the difficulties of finding a dog with this sort of potential is daunting indeed.
The numbers of eminent dogs is small: “Of a Border Collie litter of six puppies, five will work stock. Of twenty young “started” dogs, perhaps one will be good enough to trial. Of sixty trial dogs, one can win a local trial. A couple of wins will qualify him for the Scottish, English, Welsh, or Irish National Trials, where eight hundred trial winners are winnowed down to a team of fifteen dogs per nation. Of the fifty-five dogs that run in the International, only one is supreme champion.”
At 1991 prices, you might get a trained border collie for $1,000 U.S.. One dog sold for $8,000. Twenty years after this book was published a working Border Collie was sold for about $10,000 U.S., a record price.
For a while it seemed to McCaig that there were only dogs he could have bought for £3000, which was much more than he had to spend, and dogs not for sale. McCaig finally got wind of someone who might sell a dog. The owner admitted to needing the £1200 McCaig offered him for his dog, but wouldn’t do the sensible thing and sell. Instead he complained about all the dogs being sold to America.
McCaig says he “…felt like a Quaker slave owner denounced from the pulpit.”
This person went on to tell McCaig about a friend who bought a dog rather than a car, saying this guy had made “a wise choice”.
He does finally get his dog; a “wee bitch” called Gael. After the tortuous negation is completed, McCaig returns to his B & B, full of second thoughts about his decision. But Gael turns out to be brilliant; in the words of the Scot who sold her to him, “a useful bitch.”
He really starts to fall in love with her when he leaves her in his room and comes back to see she has selected a stuffed sheep from among all the other knickknacks and is lying on the bed with it in her mouth.
When he takes Gael home and introduces her to Pip, Pip disappears. He reappears some ten minutes later with 150 sheep in front of him, just to showing he is still up to the job.
The book is fascinating for the light it sheds on sheep dogs and herding. “A trained … dog will be able to gather eight hundred ewes scattered over two or three thousand acres. He will be able to work by himself or to whistled commands at distances of a mile or more. He can run a hundred miles Thursday and get up Friday morning and do it again.”
And that is just the average working Border Collie.
“Good runs [at trials] are characterized by respect: sheep for dog, dog for man, and man for dog and sheep….[At a trial] the dog sails out, out and cannot see the sheep until he’s almost on top of them. The instant the dog loses faith in himself or his handler, he’s lost….Out here, a handler’s commands are almost inaudible, and whistles are fainter than birdcalls.”
It’s not enough for a Border Collie to be trainable, to understand and follow commands. He needs more than that. He needs spirit and confidence and the intelligence to figure things out for himself and act accordingly. He must be able to dominate the sheep, without frightening them into panic.
Not every Border Collie can do the job. It is easy for we uninitiated city dwellers to discount the sheep as stupid. They’re not. “Sheep can read an inexperienced dog, and may refuse to do what the dog tells them.”
The book is full of fun facts about sheep.
Unless she is prevented from doing so, a ewe will return to the same spot she was born to have her own lamb. Sheep graze uphill in the evening and downhill on the morning. One reason why sheep stray onto the roads, especially a dusk, is because the pavement is warm.
In Scotland, sheep are left to graze together on the hills. Sheep form themselves into their own small groups called hirsels. If like me, you’ve wondered why sheep in the U.K. have coloured marks on their shoulders, it’s because it identifies their hirsel. Even when gathered into a greater flock for shearing or dipping, they will return to their own hirsels when released.
“So important is this instinct (it has no value in American agribusiness) that Scottish sheep are legally “bound” to the land. If you wish to buy a farm, you must buy the livestock already on it. If you bought a farm and stocked it with strange sheep, your new sheep would drift hither and thither, across the boundary lines, onto the next farm, where they’d mix with the neighbour’s flock and cause no end of difficulties.”
But the great joy of this book is dog talk – dogs, dogs and more dogs, the dog men and their joint history and culture.
Commands are given by whistles, words, and body language. Even the dog’s name can be a command. The famous J.M. Wilson used his dog’s name to mean any number of things. “Bill” meant ‘Go left’. “Bill-uh!” meant ‘Go left NOW’. “Will-yum” meant ‘Go right’.
Dogs on the same farm are often trained to the same whistle commands. A man left one of his dogs behind while he took another out to herd the sheep at a far distant hill. When he got back the dog who had been left behind was gone. He got a call from a neighbour telling him his dog had suddenly appeared at their farm and started chivvying their sheep about. The only reason the neighbour hadn’t shot the dog was because he knew him. As it was, he just thought the dog had gone mad. In fact, after some discussion, it became clear the dog had been following the distant whistles the owner had been giving to the other dog miles away.
One woman won’t sell her dog to anyone, because “They’ll find out what a terrible coward she is and they’d lose their temper and it’s not her fault”. Another’s behaviour changed when his owner’s husband died. “During the night, if something was wrong – a car parked by the gate, some fox worrying the sheep – [her dog] would reach out, and touch her cheek with his paw, just a touch.”
One person who bought a dog for trials called the seller to complain that the dog was erratic. One day he’d work great; the next day he’d sulk and refuse. The owner was advised that, just before the dog stepped out onto the course, the owner should give it “a wee tot of whiskey”.
After that, there were no more problems. “Of course, he was a Scottish dog.”
A shepherd’s biggest problem is finding a good dog that he can afford. It might cost five months’ of a hill shepherd’s wages. Often, shepherds end up selling their best dogs to wealthier farmers and those who are into trials.
Land ownership being what it is in Britain, the working shepherds who train these dogs are most often employed on one of the great estates. It is not unusual for these dog men to retire into a life of relative poverty, having to give up their own dogs, if they have been fortunate enough to be able to buy one.
One such who worked for the Duke of Roxburgh was redundant. His wife explains to McCaig that they “could have gone on the dole, but what would [we] have done with the dogs?” Unthinkable to get rid of them. Instead, they bought an old school house and started the “Border Collie and Sheepherding Centre”. They made part of the building into a B&B, put on demonstrations for tourists and sell dog related stuff. Brilliant and I wish I had thought of it, or even had the capability to do it.
Jock Richardson was one of the most renowned sheep dog handlers of all time. His dog Wiston Cap was perhaps the greatest Border Collie ever. At one International, Wiston Cap brought bought his sheep straight down the fetch line to Jock’s feet “in uncanny silence, without command.”
The dog portrayed in silhouette on the International Sheep Dog Society Badge is Wiston Cap.
McCaig was able to meet Richardson, now living in Council Housing. He had a bad drinking problem, and eventually managed to get himself barred from the International Sheep Dog Society.
I was weeping as I read this tragic story. McCaig has an unsentimental Scot give his verdict on Jock Richardson: “He was a silly man.”