Ty is seventeen weeks old now, and his ears look different ways every time he wakes up in the morning. Despite my feeling that I am pouring kibble down him with a funnel he resembles a children's drawing of a giraffe, all legs and nose, connected by a mailing tube. In other words, he is perfectly normal.

He torments my other dogs right up to the limits of their tolerance, which in Bonnie's case means trying to drag her around by her ruff, heeling her every time she turns her back, and stealing chew toys out of her mouth. With Luke the Corgi Ty is more circumspect but they play far more together than Luke does with any dog other than Bonnie.

So far, all just typical pup, but Ty is otherwise unusual, in ways that people who've been around awhile describe as "the way Aussies used to be". He is already a serious, 'thinky' dog. If I get tough on him, for, say, eating the fringe off my turkish carpet, he doesn't get the apologetic please-like-me-again look that Bonnie gets (she will run to jump in my lap when I scold another dog). Instead he looks startled and alert, and then that thinky expression. It's rare that I have to tell him something twice (although I did roll up the rug).

But he's not quick, as dogs go. George told me he preferred Border Collies because they "offered behaviours", and anyone who has ever trained a Border Collie knows how blindingly fast they do this: do you want me to sit or stand or bark or roll over or jump or lie down? Tell me before I do them all over again—too late! Teaching Ty the command "Lie Down", using the clicker-training technique of simply waiting until the behavior is offered and then rewarding it, was an exercise in patience. First, he had never been taught to offer "guesses", so the whole concept was new to him. But it still took him at least four sessions of short lessons before he realized that lying down in response to the words "Lie Down" was the only thing that resulted in a payout. It seemed a bit dimwitted to me.

The following day, every time I looked at Ty he lay down. Every time he wanted attention he lay down. If I didn't give him anything for it, he would wiggle, and flap his oversized paws in a goofy way without getting up, which generally got me to at least laugh.

With strange dogs, Ty is already shaping to be rather formidable. I was both impressed and alarmed the first time he responded to a strange dog's dominance stare with a stare of his own, backed up with a deep growl. The first time this happened, they were both lying under a pickup truck in the shade, and before it could escalate, Saint Bonnie appeared from nowhere and stood between them with a pointedly neutral look on her face. Of course the humans grabbed their growling dogs then. And Ty was perfectly okay with that dog subsequently. But it has not been the only incident. He does not fly at strange dogs, in fact he is happy to greet any newcomer — but even at twenty-five pounds and four months he is not going to be insulted.

It seems to me that the modern emphasis upon various competitions could be changing the personality of the Aussie almost as much as its physical appearance has been changed by the show ring. Just as a bouncing happy dog who never met a stranger is a much easier dog to show in conformation competition than the older type of Aussie who reserved their affection for their families, a restless, driven dog is more rewarding to do Agility and Flyball with than the Aussie of yesteryear who was expected to lie on the porch when there was nothing important going on. In this way, at first subtly, large changes can occur in a breed over generations.

Ty is more of the antique ranchdog pattern than Bonnie is, as Bonnie is again more like her ancestors than the modern show Aussies I meet, in personality as well as appearance and talents. With Ty I feel I am taking one more step backward in time, back when dogs weren't selected for how many ribbons in different venues they might accumulate, but for virtues which now seem quaint or even problematic to most people, such as protecting your family with your life, finding the cows which got out in the night, and not letting yourself be stolen.