Tuesday, December 21, 2004

Old Border Picture



This picture of "border terriers" is by the famed dog artist Arthur Wardle (1864-1949) and shows what these terriers looked like, probably around the turn of the 20th Century.

Today's working terrier enthusiast would not identify these dogs are border terriers -- they might be fells, or perhap fell-border crosses or even patterdales.

In fact all the colored dogs -- fells, border, lakelands, welsh and patterdales -- are very closely related dogs with essentially identical gene pools.

The speciation of terriers really began during Victorian times, and after a few decades of forced selection by non-working rosette-changing kennel club breeders the artifice of breed differences without distinction had been established.

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