I did not buy Bonnie to herd chickens. I had recently given a dog away because I could not keep him from tearing into the coop and not just killing but eating my chickens. Sometimes he left the legs (too chewy). All my other dogs had quickly learned that chickens were to be absolutely ignored unless they wanted something Really Traumatic For Dogs to happen to them. I had no intention of doing anything different with Bonnie. But I had never had a real working dog before. I didn’t know it yet, but my life had taken a turn.

I got Bonnie because I had gotten interested in agility competition with my corgi, Luke. When I had a space in my life for another dog, I wanted one who would be a natural for the sport. Which meant, a nimble fast responsive dog who was good at jumping. Go to any agility contest and you’ll see for yourself that Lhasa Apsos, Borzois, and even very popular breeds like Labradors are severely under-represented. The easy-going, the clumsy, the stubborn, and the distractible tend to stay home. In England, they have what are called ABC trials for lesser dogs who can’t win the regular ones. The acronym is for Anything But Collies. Border Collies that is. In the States as well, trials are seemingly at least half Border Collies. Black-and-white blurs, everywhere.

What Border Collies are, besides good at agility, is a long discussion. Suffice it to say, they are not the breed for me. I wanted some other breed which was good at agility. I had had corgis for twenty-two years, but I was ready for something different. This different something, I decided, was an Australian Shepherd. And here I am obliged to digress, not just once, which might be forgivable, but twice.

First, why an Aussie at all? The answer probably lies deep in my childhood. At about the same time I was running paring knives under my fingernails, I was spending a large part of my waking hours in an elaborate fantasy world inhabited by small china animals. This world was divinely ordered, not by me (I was only the Invisible Hand), but by a proportionately gigantic ceramic Collie dog named Lad, after the Albert Payson Terhune stories about a preternaturally talented Collie, stories which I believed wholeheartedly. My Collie god-dog Lad was my first and perhaps my most profound spiritual experience, and I have to think he was a predisposing event in my conversion to Catholicism as an adult (“I am the good shepherd . . .”). Be that as it may, Collies have always had a kind of indelible nobility for me.

So when I finally reached the end of my affair with Corgis, I realized that what I really wanted was a dog like Lad. Or, the closest a real dog could come, anyway. I was aware of course by this time that Terhune’s Lad was actually a 1920's hero in a dog suit, and that the modern AKC Collie was too large and too inclined to timidity to be my ideal breed, even if I wanted the mountain of hair and teeny eyes and anteater nose. What I wanted was an Old Fashioned Farm Collie, the kind immortalized in sentimental Victorian prints.

The commonly available breed which most closely resembles that old style Collie in this country is the Aussie. I had been admiring Aussies for many years, but while I was coveting them from a distance and wondering if I would ever get one, something was happening to them, which brings me to my second digression. Stay tuned . . .