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Title

Dedication

Dedicated to the late Raymond Coppinger—the father of the modern canine science movement, whose life’s work revolutionized our understanding of dogs.

Your honesty, humor, and friendship were never lost on those of us lucky enough to know you.

FOREWORD

Raymond Coppinger
Professor Emeritus of Biology, Hampshire College

I wish I had read this book fifty years ago when I first started to train dogs.

Back then I was a college professor with a team of sled dogs, which were part of my professional academic research. I published dozens of scientific papers, often with my students, about the neurophysiology and anatomy that help make a successful sled dog.

Toward the end of the 1970s, my wife Lorna and I started the Livestock Guarding Dog Project at Hampshire College, where we raised and trained pups to protect American sheep from predation. Eventually we had records on over 1,500 dogs, most of them descendants of the original imports that we had collected in Eurasia as breeding and working stock. We placed them on farms and ranches where they did a brilliant job defending livestock.

In those early days of introducing this relatively unknown type of sheep dog to Americans, people would ask if you could train a dog to both herd and guard sheep. Could one dog do both jobs? We didn’t know the answer. So Lorna and I went to Scotland on our way home from a field trip with a pile of puppies from Italy and Yugoslavia, and bought ourselves six border collies. Many of the pups were born on the same day. Thus, we had a controlled experiment going where we raised those pups in a large pen for almost a year and watched their behavioral development. What we found was that each breed was different in the timing of their development. They also acquired very different kinds of behaviors.

So, we got our answer: No—dogs did not develop with joint guarding and herding abilities.

It was during that experiment that I acquired the most difficult dog of my life—Jane, one of the six Scottish border collies. She was an intense drover’s dog, so when I put her on a mountain road behind 3,000 sheep, she would work all day long pushing them up the mountain. We herding guys would sit on the roadside playing cribbage and someone would say, “Shouldn’t someone go and check on that dog?” And someone would answer, “Naw, she’s all right.” She was a hard worker.