Up until now, I have tried to keep my personal journey with Bonnie more or less separate from my Working Aussie Source journey, but it is so much on my mind right now that I'm going to step over that boundary.

The trouble with a neophyte like me starting up a website which caters to a disunited community with a long, complicated history, is that I am put in the position of constantly making decisions about people I have never met, based on often-blurry distinctions and a handful of not-always-verifiable information. Putting my beliefs on the line like this, I am forced to define those beliefs quite a bit more publicly than most, with a lot less experience to fall back on. Hence, I make a lot of mistakes, some of which are unmendable.

I vowed when I started, that one of my purposes was to create a central place where all working Aussie breeders and buyers could connect. Now Working Aussie Source has grown from a marginal idea to a widely popular site read by thousands of people. I typically now get three to five submissions for breeder ads per month. And I reject most of them, as nicely as possible.

Sometimes it is the dubiously 'working' pedigrees, sometimes it is the lack of experience, sometimes it is just an odd feeling I get that I have to track down the origins of. And the more I learn, the more wary I become. I look back upon my original naïveté with chagrin. And I struggle over each and every rejection. I always ask myself the same question: would I myself buy a pup from this person if I needed a real ranch dog?

I don't like being in this position, and truly cringe at being in the position of telling well-known respected breeders with a lifetime of experience that although they may believe they breed working Aussies, in my opinion they actually don't. I mean, the nerve of me! Yet that is exactly what I signed on for, and I knew it at the time.

It is all so very gray. Some well-known breeders of working Aussies also breed show Aussies, and in addition, breed the two together. Should they be listed as working Aussie breeders? in this case I often say yes, hoping that they never sell a rancher one of their show dogs. But not always.

Versatility breeders run the gamut from producing show dogs which are obedienced around the stock arena to those who produce competent arena sheep-and-duck dogs which are also finishable in the show ring. Are these latter "working Aussies"? Not exactly. Would I buy one for a ranch dog? Well, no.

As my site becomes more widely known, I also get an increasing number of submissions from farmers who have a couple of dogs with a working background who breed them together occasionally. Some are not even ASCA registered. There are a lot of "dog people" who would sneer at them, but aren't they some of the very people I wanted to serve with my site? Yes, and some are simply country folks looking to make some extra bucks, and haven't a clue what they are doing. How to tell the difference? What exactly would that difference be?

When I turn people down, I try to tell them why, but it is rarely acceptable to them. Some people get highly insulted, and some people can't or won't understand no matter how much I try to explain. I dread it, but it can't be helped.

I cling to the truism that what is worth doing is worth doing badly. If I offend people by judging them as not being a good fit for my site, I also am preserving Working Aussie Source as the sanctuary of the true working Aussie according to my best current abilities and knowlege. If I offend people by trying to tell the truth as I see it, it still seems better to me than accepting the status of the Aussie as the standard example of a used-to-be-useful stockdog breed.

If wishes were horses, I would wish for more company on this difficult road. Even the people who have been dedicated to breeding working Aussies for decades are not interested in fighting the lost war over again, and who can blame them? It's a struggle in a fog.

But don't misunderstand me, I am not complaining. I know that creating this website has given me the world's best crash course in the whole convoluted world that is the working Australian Shepherd community, and stockdogs in general. I can't imagine where I would be without it. I just want everybody to know: sometimes it's not easy.