This photo comes from W.E. Mason’s Dogs of All Nations:
The author describes the bearded collie as follows:
He is famous as a worker of sheep and cattle and is endowed with great intelligence and highly prized in both the highlands -and lowlands of Scotland, equally for his companionship and faithful service as a guard to either homestead or flock.
This dog looks very different from the dog we now call a bearded collie.
That book is quite interesting, but under the IG it says:
“Color: Self-colored, golden fawn, but all shades of fawn, red, mouse, blue, green, and white are recognized.”
Green?
It means “grey.”
In another book on Chest of Books, it has a breed called the “Chesapeake Bat Dog.”
Now, there are mastiff bats. They are incorrectly named, for the scientific name for three of the genera is Mops (Mops, Eumops, and Promops). Mops doesn’t mean mastiff. It is the name for the pug in the Germanic countries (Netherlands, Germany, and Scandinavia). But at the time it was believed that pugs were toy mastiffs, which they aren’t. The original English name for them was Dutch Mastiff (and they cropped the ears as they would with any mastiff). The dogs were associated with the House of Orange (a pug saved William the Silent from a Spanish assassination attempt), which eventually did become the Royal Family of England for a time, but pugs are not Dutch. So they are not Dutch or Mastiffs.
That said, there are no Chesapeake Bat dogs.
I can’t imagine anyone used a dog to hunt bats.
It’s true that the promoted dogs have much more hair but there are still working Beardies (including a few dual champion ones):
http://tassietaywbc.tripod.com/
http://www.greatplainsbcc.org/page3.html
=– the last is a video of a dog running in level I in the French herding trials (large flock)
As is typical, there aren’t many good photos on the internet of the good herding dogs still out there. Ann Witte imported some dogs directly from working farms (still was a working line) a few years ago and has one of the more successful herding lines, but I couldn’t find any videos of her dogs working.
It is entirely true that once you stop caring / selecting for a working dog and breed only for appearance, the appearance starts drifting pretty radically from the working type. I’d rather see AKC opt to allow seperate registries for “field” vs “bench” dogs or at least publically acknowledge the different types.
VR, Peggy Richter
I’ve seen photos of Old English sheepdogs (bobtailed drovers) that were used for work that looked a lot like Australian (sic) shepherds with beards: http://www.gis.net/~shepdog/BC_Museum/Permanent/OldEnglishSheepdog/ChambersBobTailSheep-Dog.jpg
I wish they would at least acknowledge a field and show split.
And yes, bearded collies can still herd.
And some of them still have the “old” look: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:BeardedCollie.jpg
Geat picture, todays show dogs look nothing like the real ones, the older look ia just fantastic