THE GOOD LIFE
AUTHOR AND JOURNALIST Sally Coulthard
Ideas and advice for would-be smallholders in the country and the city
It’s often said that dogs are a man’s best friend, and this couldn’t be more true in smallholding and farming. For thousands of years, humans and dogs have worked together in the name of agriculture – but the relationship hasn’t always been so companionable. Far from sleeping on the sofa and going for the occasional walk, early domesticated dogs would have enjoyed an uneasy truce with their human friends. Some would have been used for hunting, others to guard settlements and livestock. Some dogs cleaned up and scavenged scraps around the camp, while others were deployed for combat or dog fights. It wasn’t unusual for dogs to find their way onto the menu in Iron Age settlements.
While the first domesticated dogs appeared more than 12,000 years ago, it wasn’t until humans started farming sheep that the relationship became really close. As sheep farming gathered pace, two types of dogs became indispensable
to our ancestors: ‘livestock guardians’ and ‘herding dogs’. ‘Livestock guardians’ were the bouncers of the dog world, big breeds designed to protect herds from wild animals – dogs such as the Anatolian shepherd, mastiff and Great Pyrenees. In England, however, thanks to our consistent persecution of large predators, bears and wolves had vanished by the 16th century. Our farmers seemed to prefer ‘herding dogs’, which required an entirely different skill set. Rather than defend, the agile herding hound’s instinct was to drive herds or flocks in a particular direction by barking, body language, nips or touches of the muzzle. Breeds such as Border collies, Welsh corgis and Old English sheepdogs are some of the best known.
On our smallholding we need an all-round dog. It’s a tall order. Training a herding dog is well beyond my capabilities and I don’t have enough stock to warrant it. Many of the farmers around here have terriers; they tend to use them for vermin control, as they make excellent ratters. We’ve had a few close calls with other people’s terriers and our free-range chickens and ducks, however, so we didn’t plump for one in the end. And so, when it came to choosing a new puppy we went for a Labrador (right). Kip is not a traditional farm dog as such, but he has some key traits which make him an excellent smallholding pooch. He doesn’t have much of a ‘prey drive’, so leaves the other animals alone; he’s territorial without being terrifying, so he’ll bark to let us know that a stranger is coming down the drive but leaves it at that; and he’s sociable and eager to please – a real bonus for training and an excellent companion for me. He won’t be winning any One Man and His Dog competitions any time soon, but if there were prizes for ‘Best Eyebrow Acting’, Kip would sweep the board.
Breeds such as corgis and collies are among the best-known herding hounds