brookcove
Posted : 11/21/2008 11:22:24 AM
Hey, some Poms have eye- remember that the sheltie and german spitz have common ancestors way back when !
LOL. Sorry Cait, it's not the same thing. Eye is more than a physical posture. It has to do with the ability to keep the stock together in a certain way, with a minimum of having to physically block escape.
Erica, I'm not sure they'll ever be able to sort out breeds in such a way that there are discrete markers for discrete breeds. How on earth could they tell a Hanging Tree dog from an Aussie/BC/Cat mix? For that matter, how could they tell a Cat or any cur dog from a collie/bully breed mix, which is essentially what they are? And BCs and Aussies themselves are "curs" as mixed breed sheepdogs were called overseas - with free intermixing between useful breeds dating to as late as the late sixties - that's within MY lifetime!
Most of the sheepdogs are like this, as Cait points out. In fact, those common ancestors aren't really very far back - I was reading a book the other day that descibed a wartime farm in northernmost Scotland and they had small spitz-like dogs as farm guardians and to help with the scrub "cattle." Cattle in the northern UK describes any type of four-footed livestock, even horses.
There's only a few breeds which have been pedigreed pure for long enough to be reliably discrete in the gene pool. And those breeds are dying out from their limited genetics!