At The Welsh National Sheep Dog Trials: Take a look at what you do for food

At The Welsh National Sheep Dog Trials.

By Oliver Craner

Are dogs pets or parasites? This is the question posed by biologists Ray and Lorna Coppinger in their contentious 2001 studyDogs – A New Understanding of Canine Origin, Behaviour and Psychology.

Lorna is a dog sled champion and Ray once wrote an entire book about guide dogs for the blind. They are pro-Siberian husky and anti-Paris Hilton Chihuahua. They demolish, with relish, everything you hold dear about your pretty pooch. Why does she look at you with such big adoring eyes? Does she love you? Nope. She doesn’t love you. The animal is hungry.

In their contentious study, the implications of which have been carefully ignored by a whole world of dog-lovers, Ray and Lorna turned the old and accepted story upside down. Dogs do not descend from wolf cubs systematically domesticated by nomadic human tribes, they assert. The very opposite is true: canine evolution began with rogue scavengers scouring Mesolithic rubbish dumps. Dogs escaped the hunting world of wolves, coyotes and jackals for the easy pickings of human waste. They domesticated themselves. Dogs are a parasitic species.

I saw this with my own eyes at the 2011 Welsh National Sheep Dog trials in Narberth. Dogs will do anything for food, I realised, while watching one of the more intelligent breeds chase terrified sheep around fields and into pens for a bowl of Pedigree Chum. This was a feeder event for the International and World Sheepdog Trials and there were versions of it happening in England, Scotland and Ireland, and as far away as Australia, Canada, Chile, South Africa and New Zealand. The central actor in this global mania is the handsome and clever border collie. The collie will subject itself to mindless routine for the sake of competition: not with other collies, but between the farmers who feed them. They’ll do it for food and for love. For a dog, that emotional and physical parasite, food is love.

I’d been studying the rules of sheep dog trialling at the Cressely Arms in the agrarian heart of Pembrokeshire, surrounded by hill farming thugs from the Black Mountains. The hill farmers of Mid Wales are famous for their high suicide rate, and the grey Pembroke bungalows and low electricity pylons seemed to magnify their misery. Even their collies, that irrepressibly Tiggerish breed, looked downbeat. The rules of sheep dog trialling don’t make a lot sense and the hill farmers looked too depressed and unfriendly to explain them to me. Sheep-herding is not a sport and does not even resemble a competition so the rules are, therefore, convoluted and clotted. They read like (and probably are) the result of a committee botch.

Observing this abstract construct unravel in the countryside is not an enervating experience. Nothing happens with any sense of direction or purpose. The One Man and His Dog ambience that enchanted city-sick urbanites in the 1980s and ‘90s is absent and Eric Halsall is not around to impose narrative order on what otherwise appear to be random bucolic events. A shepherd whistles — long, curling swirls followed by short, staccato tweets, like a confused curlew — allegedly directing movement on the pitch. The dogs perform a variety of tasks, such as chasing sheep, manoeuvring sheep, separating sheep and persecuting sheep. Every now and then a collie will crouch down and glare at the quivering flock in a menacing way — the technical term for this is giving them “the eye.” This cycle of sheep-molestation is then scored in a highly subjective and potentially dubious way, like Strictly Come Dancing. All of the rules appear to be arbitrary — for example, a dog can be disqualified for biting a sheep. (Why?)

Hardly anybody present was watching any of this — except for me, for the sake of science. It was all about Barbour and Real Ale in white tents. Is this where the high-rolling betting syndicates circulate? What heavy scene was going down in the rural marquee? Who cares? I was here for science. Dogs were allowed into the parlour and, I noticed, the sheepdogs often seemed more intelligent and energetic than their owners. The genetic material was of a higher quality, relatively speaking. Yet, all of these smart and handsome collies had been chasing sheep around fields all day for somebody else’s sport — a sport that didn’t make sense and might not even exist. Their reward was food, shelter, affection. Pride? Maybe. Maybe not. (Take a look at what you do for food.)

The Welsh National Sheep Dog Trials in Narberth was one big Mesolithic rubbish dump. It was swarming with hungry dogs attached to wandering human tribes — for example, suicidal Black Mountain hill farmers or Carmarthenshire betting syndicates clad in expensive Barbour gear. On the Celtic fringe of Europe, surrounded by broken dolmens and druidic remains and oppressed by these barking rituals and parasitic packs, I could sense the bronze age just beneath the surface. The Coppingers had to be correct, for the ancient canine impulse, the genetic lineage of the collie, was palpable and pouncing. It could not lie or be suppressed. These dogs are the loveliest parasites in the world.

Dogs and the Aesthetic trend

‘If it’s in Vogue, it’s smart,’ announced British Vogue in its first issue on 15th October 1916. True to its word, dogs have been ever-present ciphers in the spirited and glittering world of fashion and art. From the miniscule to the large, these ‘smart’ breeds are an enduring testament to the role they play in people’s lives; in the general consciousness of those that not only need companionship but demand an augmented extension to their sensibilities.

It was in 1909, that the newly acquired Vogue first started to notice the burgeoning trend amongst society women of New York, Paris and London. Dogs started to assimilate the very merits normally attributed to dresses, shoes and hats. Indeed each season would bring about the new ‘in’ dog with pronouncements made by the leading arbiters of fashion as to what every self respecting lady should have; famously Dorothy Parker flippantly asked what would happen to Pugs now that the Pekinese were de rigueur .

The thirties which officially heralded the age of modernity initiated a fascination for larger dogs; the phenomena saw interest grow for breeds like Cairns, Sealyhams, Salukis and Afghan hounds. There was a frenetic need amongst women of a certain class as to who could outdo the each other in the bid to find larger and more exotic types. Each trend-however ephemeral –suggested a political underpinning; where the consumption of say- larger dogs resonated with the growing belief amongst modern women of their growing equality.

The Post war period saw a profusion of breeds proliferate and whilst the turning wheel of fashion continued to turn. There was a growing discrepancy between the exclusive dogs heralded by the elite and the dogs championed by the majority. It was the British kennel Club that records the registering of twenty-one Afghans in comparison to the one thousand Labradors and the five thousand Airedales.

The decline and fall of the British aristocracy and the erosion of the large estates had a decisive effect on the ideal of the larger dog. As the platonic ideal was diminished and England began life under rations- dogs became smaller, more economic and so this socio-political state fed into the general aesthetic. There was a demand for breeds like the Chihuahua and mastiff-short haired breeds and non-shedders like poodles which were easy to maintain and were congruent to city living. New exemplars of the day were catapulted to the public forum-figures like Jacqueline Bouvier, Gloria Guinness and CZ Guest. These demigods were an amalgamation of the modern, fast paced, liberated woman with nothing larger than a Yorkshire terrier. Forever this image was to be imprinted on our consciences and as stayed with us ever since.

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