When I was young and foolish, like many another I was all fired up to Do Good. But the older I got, the more it seemed like simply not making things worse was pretty much the limit of what I could sign on for. As Will Rogers so pithily put it, "Stupidity got us into this mess, why can't it get us out?"

In other words, it is important, when you find yourself in a hole, to pause to ponder your surroundings, and your next move.

I've gotten more and more focused, these days, on the problem — I may as well just come right out and call it a problem — of breeding. Working Aussies have a lot of challenges to survival as a breed that really does a job, as opposed to a breed that can accumulate herding titles, or a breed that merely looks like some people's idea of a breed that works. But those aren't the biggest problems facing working Aussies, I have come to believe. That distinction belongs to the shrinking gene pool.

Compared to most show-type breeds, and that includes the show Aussie, working Aussies have a comparative wealth of genetic diversity still available. In pockets and corners of North America, there are people breeding lines of working Aussies virtually unrelated to what is popular. But these lines are dying out, one by one.

Used to be, geography kept lines separate from each other. No longer. When it turns out that Imaginary Finals Champion Bob can reproduce his excellence to a marked degree, people flock to breed to him, and then they breed his offspring together, over and over and over, in hopes of reproducing that original excellence. This time-honored method is called linebreeding, and it works. At first.

After a few generations, the inevitable, unavoidable, recessive genetic junk appears, and the inbreeding depression. Okay, you say, time to outcross. But what if, by now, everyone else's pedigrees go back to Imaginary Finals Champion Bob too. Who, come to find out, carried a recessive gene for both epilepsy and cataracts. The less glamorous, unrelated lines, like those which never left the back corner of north Wyoming, that breeder died of old age and his daughter sold all his dogs; no, she doesn't know to whom any more. Yeah, old lady Jones out in Texas, she used to produce some good gritty dogs too, don't know what happened to her, guess she's out of the dogs now. And Doc Smith, sure he developed a talented line but now that he's been breeding to that quadruple son of Bob for the past five years, there's no help there . . .

If you don't think this scenario isn't unfolding right here and now, you are not paying attention to the right things.

What are the alternatives to linebreeding? Well, as far as I have explored in my amateur research, there are two other basic strategies, both of them designed to maximize reproduction of desired traits while also minimizing the inevitable effects of linebreeding, which is really inbreeding with an acceptable name.

First there is the double line strategy, highly developed in sheep and other livestock species, in which two lines are developed, often focused on completely separate qualities, and then crossed together. The offspring are never bred, they are eaten. In this way hybrid vigor is maintained, recessive genes are never matched together, and intensive focus on specific traits can be maintained.

The second, more workable for dog breeders, is called assortative mating, in which unrelated individuals with the same positive traits are bred. Two biddable low heelers with a strong sense of group bred together will probably reproduce those qualities, whether they are related or not, but if one happens to carry a recessive gene for Collie Eye Anomaly, say, the chances of its unrelated mate also carrying it and hence their producing CEA-affected pups are quite slim. Not impossible, but quite slim.

This last strategy requires a spectrum of available, worthy, unrelated dogs, in order to be usable. That's just one of the many excellent, indeed, imperative reasons why genetic diversity is so important to maintain.

Well, off my soapbox (how many people have even seen a real soapbox, I wonder? I sure haven't), and on to my next adventure, which happens to be the famous Silver Bullet stockdog trial, out at Sherry and Boyce Baker's ranch.