Kindred Spirit Farm

08/30/2026

08/29/2026

Time to share this one again....

08/29/2026

A 2-year-old collie was chased off by three dogs at an Indiana gas station.

His family searched for days, then drove the 2,551 miles home to Oregon without him.

Six months later he appeared at their door in Silverton - gaunt, paws bloody, claws worn to the bone. He had crossed the Continental Divide alone, in winter. Dozens of witnesses confirmed he had sheltered with them along the route.

They called him Bobbie the Wonder Dog.

08/28/2026

HAPPY BIRTHDAY FIFE. 🥰

08/27/2026

The word collie is Scots, and it is older than the breed it now belongs to. 🐕

It is attested in Scots from the sixteen fifties, long before anyone was writing pedigrees. And that matters, because the honest story of this dog is better than the tidy one.

Let me be straight with you, since somebody always knows. The Border collie is not purely a Scottish breed and it never claimed to be. It is a Borders dog, and the Borders were one shepherding world spread across both sides of a line on a map. Its foundation sire, Old H**p, was born on the first of September 1893 at West Woodburn in Northumberland, about fifteen miles south of the border, bred by a shepherd called Adam Telfer.

What Old H**p did, though, changed herding everywhere. He worked with what handlers call the eye: silent, crouched low, controlling sheep by sheer unblinking stare rather than by rushing and barking, which was how most dogs had worked before him. He is credited with over two hundred offspring, and every winner of the international championship from 1906 to 1951, twenty nine of them, traced back to him. One dog rewrote the job. 🐑

Scotland's own claim in all this is real and specific. The International Sheep Dog Society was founded in July 1906 in Haddington, East Lothian, and held its first trial at Gullane on the Firth of Forth that August. Scottish handlers and Scotch bred dogs dominated the early trials so completely that even the winner of the first recorded British trial at Bala in north Wales in 1873 was a Scotsman with a Scotch bred dog.

The name we all use is younger than you would think. Border Collie was put into print by James Reid, secretary of the society, in 1915, purely to separate the working dog from the show ring Collie. It did not appear on registration papers until 1946. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

Stand on a Border hill and watch one work to a whistle from half a mile away and you are watching an inheritance. Not a pedigree. A skill, handed shepherd to shepherd, across a border that the sheep and the dogs never once recognised.

08/26/2026

08/26/2026

Happy International Dog Day!