Lumen Autumn 2024 - Flipbook - Page 40
Pets and animals
On the
dog’s back?
“Everyone thinks they have the best dog.
None of them are wrong.”
swapping it for a stock horse. Gleeson named it Kelpie, a
Scottish name for a water sprite, and mated Kelpie with a
collie called Moss. The resulting pups were highly prized and
began the Kelpie bloodline. This provided working dogs better
suited to hot and rugged outback environments than those
brought in from cooler climates.
By Susan Hazel
Should we think about South Australia being founded on the
sheep’s back or the dog’s back?
By 1874 when the University of Adelaide was created,
warehouses storing wool for export in Port Adelaide were
booming. Farmers needed working dogs to help them manage
the increasing numbers of sheep. The benefits of working
dogs were being recognised at this time. In Australia the first
recorded sheepdog trial was on 5 September 1868, at the
Wangaratta Spring Show.
Other working dogs have also played their part. Border
Collies are not an Australian breed but have been used here
for herding livestock for longer than any other country outside
the UK.
Australia’s cattle dog, the Blue Heeler, was the first
successful Australian dog breed, when Thomas Simpson Hall
crossed an English drover’s cur (cross bred dog) with a dingo
in 1825. Hall had a team of drovers and provided them with
his new breed of dogs (Hall’s heelers) and by 1832 they
were a very useful cattle dog. It was believed they had the
toughness and stamina of the dingo.
Working dogs were highly valued, and the prize for the best
sheepdog in the yard was 20 pounds (around $3,250 today).
But working dogs from other countries were not well suited to
tougher Australian conditions. Enter stage left the Kelpie.
In 1864, George and Mary Ann Robertson imported
two Sutherland or Highland Smooth collies from Scotland.
A female, who became the foundation female for the Kelpie
breed, was given to Robertson’s 18-year-old nephew.
More recent scientific research has expanded our
knowledge. To find out what makes a working Kelpie tick,
scientists performed genetic analysis of the Australian Kelpie
(a non-working dog) versus the Australian Working Kelpie.
Although he initially missed the dog’s potential, Jack
Gleeson, an Irish-born stockman later recognised an
opportunity when he saw it and acquired the pup by
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