When you’re looking to protect your assets physically, to ensure your future financial assets, which canine can provide the best insurance for your farm? The Border Collie and Australian Shepherd, among other herding breeds, are typical for a farmer to employ on his land, so why not other breeds? What makes a herding dog the best choice for the farmer’s right hand man? How trainable is the herding breed to ensure a cooperative relationship with the farm? The dog was the first animal domesticated by mankind and is today, the most altered species through selective breeding(Hart pg. 66). Over many years the breeding has become more selective for physical attributes and along with selective breeding there have been changes in behaviors. Some of …show more content…
The American Kennel Club(AKC) uses a 5 point range, ranking breeds on indoor/outdoor activity, vigor, behavior, consistency, dominance, territoriality, emotional stability, learning rate, obedience, problem solving, watchdog/guard-dog ability, and sociability and the scores are based upon breeder input(Hart pg. 67). Biologically dog breeds are groups of individuals in the subspecies Canine familaris that strongly resemble each other based upon many characteristics identified as different from the others. Microsatellite DNA across the dog genome was used to genotype 85 breeds into four clusters – Asian/African breeds, Mastiff-type dogs, Herding dogs and Sighthounds, and modern Hunting dogs – with some breeds being assigned to more than one cluster(Mehrkam et al. 2014). The AKC Herding breed group consists of 25 breeds and the top researched are the Australian Cattle Dog, Border Collie, German Shepherd and Shetland Sheepdog. Regardless of the origin of individual breeds, the immense diversity in the dog breeds we know today is produced and maintained by ongoing human selection. This selection for specific behavior mutations as well as coding for variations in size, coat type and color(Mehrkam et al.