'It is quite understandable that anyone who is first interested in Kelpies would not appreciate the vast differences that exist between the show and working strains of the Kelpie breed. I am not too proud to admit that I was misled when I began with Kelpies 58 years ago. Fortunately, I was very soon put on the right track and ever since then I have been a protagonist for the working Kelpie.

To better explain the differences I refer to, and to try and make the explanation as simple as possible I will take the letter Y. Lets say that the base of this letter represents the Kelpies bred by John Qinn, the Maiden Bros., King and McLeod and some other early breeders of the working Kelpie. And then in 1902 the late Robert Kaleski drew up the first standard for Kelpies (and Barbs) and for Cattle Dogs and these standards were endorsed byt the original Kennel Club of NSW. Kaleski�s standards were to remain in place for many years. It is worth mentioning that his Kelpie standard was based on the black and tan Kelpie which was regarded as the truest colour and also the major original colour of the emerging Kelpie breed.

Once the standards for Kelpies and Cattle Dogs were set down people began to exhibit them at shows. Old show schedules show quite clearly that some of the original dogs exhibitet in the show rings were produced from genuine working Kelpie. In fact there was no other kind of Kelpie. For some years after shows began there was not a great deterioration in working ability because a lot of people who showed Kelpies were genuine stock people. But by the 1930s, maybe even earlier, there had been a deterioration in the working ability of show dogs when judged against the abilities of Kelpies worked by the likes of Frank Scanlon, Jack Goodfellow and some others. Put simply, the show breeders had lost the plot.
During this period, that is, from 1902 to say 1930, the show breeders for some strange reason had virtually abandoned the original black and tan in favour of the red or chocolate Kelpie with blacks running a poor second.

Now what I want to get across to all readers, Australian and international, is that the original working Kelpie was a magnificent creation. It arrived virtually by chance, by a combination of factors that will never come again. The fact that we have good working Kelpies today is testament to the quality of those early working Kelpies. Despite the many thousands of fine working Kelpies lost by accident, illtreatment and nong nong breeders, the breed has continued to produce outstanding specimens. That is because it has been reproduced on the basis of performance. By performance I mean the way a Kelpie works. The true and great Kelpies had a marvellous �feel� for sheep, great cover and footwork and the best of them had �drive-and-hold�. It was the latter factor that made them so different a worker from the newly arrived Border Collies.

A few, a very few, stockmen down through the years managed to preserve the working Kelpie�s unique qualities. But as strains of Kelpies were developed for the show ring these unique qualities were lost. Consequently, there would not be a show bred Kelpie alive today that remotely resembles the original working Kelpie. Footwork, cover �feel� for sheep and the drive-and-hold abililty have all disappeared from these show strains.

It is important to point out that working ability can deteriorate in one generation if care is not taken. How then can working ability remain high when no selection for work has been made for umpteen years as is the case with so many show strains of Kelpie? Moreover, after discussions with many show people I know they have no idea what a good �break� means let alone footwork. They see a dog running about aimlessly on sheep and think it is �work�. There is work and work and the bench dogs have lost real working ability.

So if we go back to that figure Y we find that the two arms have moved further and further apart over the years. This is not surprising as virtually every breed of utility dog has been ruined by show breeding and their original purpose forgotten. Show people talk of the �purity� of the show dogs but what value is there in purity if the show dogs are only a parody of the working Kelpie. It is what a Kelpie does that matters, not that it has a nice chocolate coat.

As most people who show Kelpies are not stockpersons it is not surprising that they are ignorant of what makes up a good working dog. To appreciate a working dog you need to have worked stock and therefore to know what is required in a working dog. You need to appreciate natural working ability and to select for it.

So one can sympathise with the Swedish (and other European *)breeders who have taken the trouble to travel to Australia to find genuine working dogs when they find their dogs given breed titles that do not do them justice whereas the show strain dogs, which are only masquerading as true Kelpies, are favoured. Even here in Australia where there is less excuse for breeders and fanciers of show Kelpies not to know that their dogs are sadly deficient in working ability, there is virtually no understanding of the unique qualities that distinguish the true working Kelpie.

At the risk of sounding immodest but because I want to drive home what I have been saying, I regard myself as one of the �keepers of the flame�. That is, I am trying to retain a nucleus of Kelpies that exhibit some of the characters of the old-time dogs. This is not because of any desire to sell a lot of dogs because I have ceased to be a commercial breeder, but because I have the wellfare of the working Kelpie at heart and there is nothing I like more than to see a top class Kelpie in action. Despite the many working Kelpies being bred it is becoming rarer and rarer to find very high class Kelpies. For example, the quality of Kelpies being bred in my State (Queensland) is the lowest it has been in my lifetime. I am not alone in this view. So if we can�t easily produce high class working Kelpies after generations of breeding on the basis of performance, how can breeders of show dogs produce such dogs when there has been virtually no selection on the basis of performance but only on looks?

The show breeders do not seem to understand any of the above. They never have in my lifetime but have continually casitgated me for pointing out how wrong they are in their judgements of what constitutes a true Kelpie. They fall back on the argument that the working Kelpie is a �crossbred� dog. All Kelpies were �crossbreds� originally as they were derived mostly from strains of working Collies

The show Kelpie traces to these dogs just as surely as does the working Kelpie. All Kelpies stem from the same source. What the show breeders have done is breed a strain of mostly red dogs that lack the qualities of the dogs from which they sprang. They don�t understand that handsome is as handsome does when it comes to moving sheep.

The people who are trying to produce genuine and high quality working Kelpies, whether they reside in Sweden or the United States or here in Australia, have got it right and the show people have got it very wrong. We could lose every show Kelpie in this country and it wouldn� t matter a damn but we could not, and cannot, afford to lose what is left of the working Kelpie strains whose contribution to the wealth of Austrlia via our great wool industry is impossible to calculate'.