ok after a great city performance i get home to see sheep dog trials on the telly . my first question was ... What made the first shepherd use a dog ? I imagine the first time he was wondering about getting his sheep to the pen or to the next field - he thought i know ... ill get a dog to help move them. The first time this happened i imagine the dog ate a sheep and kinda loved it , but crucially the shepherd persevered amongst the bloodbath until the dog learned not to attack the sheep . this is clearly unlikely . Now i have to go back a step further , when the first farmer decides to collect sheep - obviously without the dog as god hasnt yet invented them , Right , he has a bunch of sheep , he doesnt see a need to move them around the fields and gather them up as a group - the dog never gets a job - there was no problem , problem solved . how Sheepherding evolved baffles me
back then the sheep probably hadnt evolved wool, and were probably scaly and breathed fire. THAT is where the Welsh get their dragons from!
It's easier to pick a sheep in a pen then chase one round a field, and by the time you'd caught one you'd be so knackered that intimate moment of bliss would be more like a workout.
Instead of using selective breeding and training the dog/wolf not to eat the sheep, it could have been easier just to train the sheep the same way.
thats probably why there was a long row of french photographers lined up on the south bank of the humber with long lens cameras - snapping the goings on at foreshore
