Quote Originally Posted by So-Crafty View Post
From what I understood, people have stated that the Smooths and the Roughs have different personality types and the fact that the workload between the two different coats was different. Smooths were used as drovers and Roughs were used as pastoral guardians. This being said, people felt that there was a large divide between the two varieties that they decided to split them up. Personally, I think this narrowed the gene pool even more and will eventually do more harm than good in the Collie. In all actuality, from what I read it is the ROUGH coat that is recessive to the Smooth coat - if you breed two Roughs together you'll get 100% Roughs, but if you breed 2 Smooths together and they both have the same recessive Rough trait, you may wind up with a few Roughs in your smooth litter.

The European Collies seem to have been outcrossed at one point to a Chow Chow - I do not like the look of them at all. I think that they have too big of a stop and that coat looks neither functional or very easy to maintain. The function of the coat is important, to keep both heat and cold and whisk moisture away while they are doing the job they were bred to do. I prefer the American Collie vs the European Collie anyday.

I have heard many people claim that roughs and smooths have different personalities, and honestly I have not seen it. I think its more of different personalities based on the individual dog rather than rough vs. smooth. If smooth collies had the kind of temperament over a rough that some people say, a smooth would have been a much better guardian dog than a rough.... Collies in general were just an all around farm dog. Rough or smooth, they all did herding, guarding, droving whatever they were asked to do. Besides that, the split between the rough and smooth collies in europe was done fairly recently in terms of Collie history... just within the last couple decades.

The below text is from this website: Collie Breed History

A point of interest here is that the mother of Ch Christopher's great grandsire, Scott, was a Smooth Collie by the name of "Ch Waite". She was the very first Smooth Collie champion, and thru Ch. Christopher, is an ancestor of all Collies today. Thus there exist no Rough Collie lines in which Smooth Collies do not appear.

But you are correct, rough is recessive and smooth is dominat. Rough x Rough will give you 100% roughs... smooth x smooth you CAN possibly get roughs and smooths.... if both parents are rough factored (carry the recessive rough gene).... my current litter is a rough factored smooth x rough factored smooth and all the puppies are smooths.... again, if you breed rough x smooth you can get rough puppies IF the smooth parent is rough factored. If one smooth parent is pure for smooth (2 dominat smooth genes) all pups will be smooth.

The different between the american collie vs. european collie is more than the stop and coat though... the european collies are very short backed, which throws off their movement, they have straight fronts and rears and they and are cow hocked, and lack any bone and substance.


Quote Originally Posted by So-Crafty View Post
Now...on to a breed that has changed drastically over the years.
American Cocker - Red Brucie circa 1921


Black/White Parti



Can you honestly tell me where in that second photo, it matches the AKC description of a moderately coated dog?
Along with the coat difference in cockers.. their heads have changed, muzzles are much shorter than they were originally, which makes it harder for them to pick up any lager birds...