Bonnie’s favorite thing in the world was to help me with the chickens. She would lie in the gate and keep them in while I worked in the pen, but I rarely let her do anything else. One day, when Bonnie was about six or seven months old, I forgot to let the pullets into the coop in the late afternoon, and when I went to close up at bedtime, there they were, huddled against the fence pathetically. Chickens can’t see at night, and are thus completely helpless.

There was only a chicken-sized door between the coop and the pullet pen, which made for a tedious problem. I shooed the pullets slowly through the chicken door, but it only closed from the coop side, so when I went around to close it, they stupidly jumped back through, out of reach. It was a two-person job. I sent Bonnie, who was at my elbow as always. She ran all the way down the path and around into the pullet pen, pushed them all calmly through the door and then, at my word, lay down in front of it so they couldn’t go back. Good girl, that’ll do, let’s go to bed.

The next day, I called the only local person I knew who trained herding dogs, Sam. I said I had an Aussie who I was wondering about training for herding. He sighed, and said, “Well, I’ll tell you the truth. If you want a herding dog, get a Border Collie. Aussies just aren’t any good. They’re too much trouble, they take a long time to train, and then at the end, they aren’t as good as a Border Collie anyway. You’re really just wasting your time.” He then went on to describe, at length, how his Kelpie puppy, at four months of age, burrowed under the fence and gathered a whole field of sheep before anyone was aware. When I could get a word in edgewise I said feebly, “well, she’s guaranteed to work . . .”

Sam said, “She’s just gonna tear up my sheep. Wait until she’s a year, two years is better. Then you might try it. But really, Aussies aren’t worth the trouble.”

I hung up and was depressed for a day. Then a slow burn developed. I said deep in my secret heart, ‘One of these days, Sam, I am going to come up to you at a stockdog trial and say, this dog that just kicked your butt is the one you told me sight unseen was worthless.’

Since that conversation I have met others who think of Aussies as crude, barky, grippy dogs, the little talent they might have once possessed extinguished by selling out to the beautydog industry. They consider those who use Aussies as either too stubborn or too stupid to realize the only true herding dog in existence is the Border Collie (according to this logic, Kelpies are a variety of Border Collie, something Kelpie breeders might dispute.)

I also now know people who once had Border Collies and would never have another, now that they discovered the Aussie. Some intransigent Aussie fans think of Border Collies as obsessive weirdos capable of creeping over your bleeding body in a hypnotic trance after their sheep. The stark, unforgiving truth seems to be that both breeds produce worthy, capable stockdogs, which tend to excel at different things.

It would be a narrower, less pleasurable world if every milk cow was required to be a Holstein, and every laying hen a production Leghorn. At one time, each agricultural settlement on earth had its local beer, its particular strain of potatoes or rice, its unique breed of plough animal, and its own farm dog. We’ve lost this to the efficiencies of capitalism and technology. We are rarely fortunate in that the history of the American west is so recent, we still have a dog developed for our conditions that can be found in pretty much its original form, just as useful as ever it was.

But these are all retrospective reflections. At the time, I had no idea what was true or not true. I kept doing my pre-agility puppy classes, which Bonnie sailed through hardly noticing, and read everything I could get my hands on, and wondered what to do with my real stockdog, who followed me around everywhere, hoping to be offered a job.