Cattledog pups

Cute!  Those people sound like really decent breeders too.

Thanks for that. I truely did not know that's what Cattle Dog puppies looked like. I've never seen any that young, only the adults and puppies old enough to be at their new homes.
 
Makes me want one all the more, but I'll stick with my Aussies until I have more time to train a dog. I only know this because the assistant trainer in my obedience class has 2 and I asked her about the difference between them and Aussies.
 
Really cute puppies too.
 
Shiva

Hi Shiva,

I'm new to the world of dogs and curious! What did your trainer say about the differences between aussies and ACD's?

ORIGINAL: Shiva
Makes me want one all the more, but I'll stick with my Aussies until I have more time to train a dog. I only know this because the assistant trainer in my obedience class has 2 and I asked her about the difference between them and Aussies.

Really cute puppies too.

Shiva

Well, the main thing she said is that Cattle Dogs are more intense than Aussies. Where and Aussie can be left alone(depending on the dog) without a lot of excercise or stimulation, the Cattle Dogs really need a lot of stimulation or they're more likely to be destructive than the Aussie. My Aussie is kinda a mix between the go, go, go and the couch potato. If it's too hot to walk or go to the dog park, she'll be annoying, but not to the point of an always go, go, go dog that needs to get out and do something. From what she said, the Cattle Dogs are always go, go, go dogs.
 
I also think the Cattle Dogs require a little more one on one training than say an Aussie. I mean all dogs can benefit from one on one training, but I believe the cattle dogs need more of it from what she said.
 
That's why once I have more time to actually take a half hour or so out of my day to work with a dog, I'll look into getting one. The downside to both these breeds is they're both very smart and if you don't find them something to do, they'll find something to do. Though I swear my Aussie is on the dumber side. She still hasn't figured out that if I'm stepping over her, she should just lay there. I can't tell you how many times I've kicked her because she's gotten up while I was stepping over her.
 
They're both great dogs, but I need more time before I even consider a cattle dog. I'd consider a Border Collie before a Cattle Dog until that happens. The funny thing is, I always wanted a Border Collie then I met some Aussies and fell in love with them. I guess my dog breed likes and dislikes are because of my working at boarding kennels while in high school and the first couple years of college. I got to see what different breeds were like and could go from there on what I liked and would want.
 
If you consider getting one, you could always talk to a trainer or even a Cattle Dog and Aussie breeder to get the pros and cons of each breed. Or just do research on your own. The only major con for me is that the Aussie has more hair than the CD so you have to groom the Aussie more. I would take her in to be groomed but the only affordable one is stupid and didn't do what I asked when I did bring my dog in. I asked her to cut the hair on Dizzy's butt but she didn't except for maybe a half an inch. So I just cut the hair myself, I butcher her butt hair, but oh well. I'd rather cut the hair myself than ask someone else to do it and not have it done.
 
Shiva

ACDs are a very different type of dog than the Aussie.

Aussies are descended from largely sheep-working stock, from dogs that worked large flocks on the range or sheep operations. They are a conglomeration, genetically, of the base stock that the Basques carried around with them everywhere they worked sheep around the world, with local collie breeds grafted on as time went by. In the last century of US history, they caught on as cattle working dogs and their gene pool stabilized under cattle work-focused breeding.

They are not an Australian breed, they are a US breed - the Australian name came because many of the dogs came over with shepherds who worked flocks in Australia and New Zealand first. The pay was better in the US. []

Australian cattle dogs, on the other hand, are very much an Australian breed. They are a meshing of some of the more hard-hitting Border Collies (like the "pre-Kelpie"), some extinct similiar collie breeds, some local random bred dogs that were rumored to have more than just a little dingo in them, and probably some bully breed blood in them too. Their job was to provide the muscle in stockyards and driving large herds and flocks.

Aussies tend to be quite focused on their handlers - they are extremely people-oriented dogs. They are also task oriented - they tend to think in terms of the whole job that needs to get done. They are quite adaptable as a rule and amenable to suggestions from their handlers - or pressure from the working environment. They are the Golden Retrievers of the herding world. A good Aussie should be pretty much bombproof in personality.

ACDs, on the other hand, are driven more by their instincts. It's super, super hard to get a cattle dog out of "the zone" once he's decided what is the right thing to do. It's easy to "shut down" a cattle dog because once you get in the way of letting the dog do it on his own, the dog may give up. It's weird for people who think of dogs like this as really hard headed, once they start training and find this out, then you have to dance around it as a training issue.

Wow!  I never knew they went through such a transformation, thanks for sharing!

I am so in love! []
 
I makes me see when my pup probably looked similar to before I rescued him. Now every time he is driving me up the wall I can have a little visual of a cute puppy that I can pretend was him at 2 weeks to calm me! lol! Thank you so much for sharing those adorable pictures. []