Australian Shepherd dog

The parent organization of the Australian shepherd is the ASCA, which opened the first studbook for the breed in the 1950s.

Despite its name, this breed has it origins in North America, where copies of many different European herding dog breeds of immigrants were crossed. Most notably, the Basque shepherd dogs were crossed with other European and Australian dogs.

At the same time, Merino sheep from Europe were first exported to Australia and later imported into America, where they received the name “Australian sheep”. The “little blue dogs” thus got their misleading name of Australian shepherds because of the sheep they cared for.

The myth that this dog or the Australian kelpie is crossed with the dingo is wrong. Even a dog with an extremely low proportion of dingo blood in his veins would be far too wild to be a working dog.

A breed registry for the Australian shepherd was not opened until the early 1970s by the International Australian Shepherd Association (IASA), founded in 1966. In 1971 the Arizona Australian Shepherd Club of America (ASCA), created in 1957, took over the official registration of the dogs.

The ASCA is the parent club of the breed and, since its 1980 merger with the IASA, has become the largest single breed club in North America. The breed standard of the ASCA entered into force in 1977.

Since the early 1990s, the American Kennel Club (AKC) is also a studbook for Australian shepherds, and has developed its own breed standard, which came into force in January, 1993.

The Australian Shepherd has been a recognized breed since 1996 by the Federation International Cynologique (FCI), but will still run as a provisionally adopted race. There have been Australian shepherds in Europe only since the 1970s, but since then their numbers have grown.

Description

The Australian shepherd has a balanced body of medium size and bone strength. Males should be, according to FCI standard, from 50.8 to 58.5 cm and the females from 45.7 to 53.4 cm. Its coat is medium length, weather resistant and has a dense undercoat, where the fur is wavy and slightly stiff.

The fur is short and smooth on the head, on the outside of the ears, the front of the front legs and below the hocks. The coat colors are strong, pure and rich.

There is a distinction between the following colors:

black
red
blue-merle (marbled black with a gray base color)
red-merle (marbled red/brown with a pale red/beige base color)

Each of these primary colors can stand alone or be combined with white and/or copper-colored markings. Thus, there are 16 possible colors – 4 colors times 4 possible combinations – of badges (without white, copper, and copper and white). They are:

solid black
solid red
blue-merle
red-merle
black-bi (white)
black-bi (copper)
red-bi (white)
red-bi (copper)
blue-merle (white)
blue-merle (copper)
red-merle (white)
red-merle (copper)
black-tri
red-tri
blue-merle white / copper
red-merle white / copper

In all the colors, the areas around the eyes and ears are to be dominated by colors other than white.

The eyes of this dog are almond shaped and of medium size. Colors are blue, brown, amber or any other variation or combination of the colors, including spots and marbling. The semi-pricked ears are triangular and slightly rounded at the tip.

Care

As this breed was bred for hard hands-on working, these dogs are only kept by active sports owners who may properly employ and utilize the dogs. A purely physical job such as walking or cycling is not sufficient to call for an Australian shepherd.

So that the dogs do not get bored, demanding dog sports activities are the right thing, e.g., agility or obedience activities. These dogs do very well in obedience or skill exercises.

Because of their vigilance and well-developed protective instinct, they are provided to authorities and emergency services to track trails and for tracking of drugs. For animal-friendly utilization, Australian shepherds are excellent family dogs.

Breed-Specific Diseases

Like collies, the MDR1-defect occurs in the Australian shepherd that causes a hypersensitivity to multiple drugs. Of the investigated dogs, 6.9 percent are homozygous for the defect; this implies a carrier frequency of 38.7 percent.

There is also epilepsy, cataract, hip and elbow dysplasia (HD/ED), autoimmune diseases, dental errors, allergies, thyroid and heart problems. These diseases took on increasingly in recent years, which certainly created a boom in the breeding and thus partly wild proliferations of this breed.

Merle x merle matings may cause severe defects such as blindness or deafness. Such matings are therefore prohibited in the European Union.