What Smart Dogs Can Teach Us

[persephone]

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excerpts

O’Connell is here to sell Bart. Born to the farming life, O’Connell is fit, lean and weathered, with blue-grey eyes that seek the horizon. He now splits his working life between farming sheep and training people to handle working dogs; around 500 people a year take his courses. He also breeds kelpies – selectively. “Perhaps two litters a year. I’ve got this thing about quality not quantity,” he says. “My hobby is to find the perfect working dog. I hope it never happens, otherwise I don’t know what I’m going to do with the rest of my life.”A Kelpie working the sheepCREDIT: AUSTRALIAN KELPIE MUSTER 2015, CASTERTONThey might not be perfect yet, but the dogs O’Connell breeds are exceptional as evidenced by the top auction prices he has claimed over the years. Sitting on the back of his ute, O’Connell affectionately rubs Bart’s handsome head. Bart’s brother Balgalla Coke topped the 2014 auction, selling for $10,000.

Calm and relaxed in the lead up to the auction, which has drawn a paying crowd of 3,000, O’Connell has set Bart’s reserve at $5,100. He says: “If he doesn’t make that I’m only too happy to take him back with me. I just want him to go to a good home. I’ve spoken to a lot of people about him and I’ve told some of them they won’t suit him.” So what kind of owner-handler would be suitable? “Someone that understands traits, which is hard to find.”

“I see amazing dogs who have all those wonderful traits

but the handler’s got no idea.”

Some geneticists are now convinced canine DNA is the best place to look for the genes that control human behaviour. Witness the titles of these recent scientific papers: "The canid genome: behavioural geneticists' best friend?" or "A fetching model organism" or "Both ends of the leash — the human links to good dogs with bad genes".

Geneticist Claire Wade at the University of Sydney agrees. "They're so much a part of our lives and we observe them so closely." Her main quest is to find the individual genes behind behaviour. "It's not obvious how they work. I'm keen to find out."

Kelpies are a great place to look. They have extraordinary problem-solving behaviours – most likely passed down from the border collies they were bred from. Patrolling sheep through the rough wilds of the Scottish borders, collies needed to solve problems independently and think on the fly, explains University of Sydney vet Paul McGreevy. And their ability to learn is legendary: McGreevey cites the example of Chaser, the border collie who can decipher sentences and recognises more than a 1,000 words.

But kelpies also combine other curious psychological traits such as the ability to intimidate a sheep by giving it 'eye', fearlessness, or phenomenal resistance to pain as epitomised by the legendary Coil that won an 1898 Sydney dog trial, despite fracturing his foreleg in the first round. How do you write those traits into DNA?

That's what Wade and McGreevey are trying to find out with the Farm Dog Project. But they face two obstacles.

Edited December 7, 2015 by persephone

[skip]

Hi Thanks for that article. Having a kelpie I had to go to that link and have a read. Very interesting. Find the variation in dog breeds pretty amazing as well.

[Lablover]

Sensational, we do live in exciting times.

Article raises so many questions. Was Bart from non paddock parents? Ooooooo so many questions.

I breed working labradors so inheritance is contemplated often. Love it!

[persephone]

it is all interesting .. I love watching how working methods in particular carry down generations .. the amount of 'eye' .whether a dog works wide or close ..tends to be bitey or not ...what a dog prefers- yard, paddock, sheep, goat ....even which way they innately prefer to 'cast' to teh left or right ...

Most of ours tend to 'air snap' for attention - that's carried down from the maternal great great grandma :) ..