374 The Dog Book 



"My Bawty is a cur I dearly like, 

 Till he yowled fair she strak the poor dumb tyke; 

 If I had filled a nook within her breast, 

 She wad have shawn mair kindness to my beast." 



These quotations demonstrate that cur was in common use as a synonym 

 for dog, and was not confined to any one variety. It did not mean a dog 

 with a short tail, hence it is not an abbreviation of curtail, to shorten. 

 Another thing that must not be overlooked is that there is not a single 

 reference to any of the peculiar characteristics of the bob-tailed sheep dog 

 and a dog of such peculiarities would surely have attracted some special 

 mention to his shaggy coat, rug as Shakespeare has it in "water-rug "-and 

 again in his description of the unkempt shock-headed Irish soldiers in 

 "Richard II.," ii, i: 



"Now for our Irish wars; 

 We must supplant those rough rug-headed kerns," 



kerns being the lightly accoutred foot soldier of Ireland. 



We have suppressed nothing that we have any knowledge of, and have 

 demonstrated that the English sheep dog of 1570 and the smooth sheep dog 

 of 1800 were one and the same dog, a lightly built common farm dog, that had 

 been developed from the guard and watch dog and gradually reduced in 

 heaviness of frame as necessity for protection from attacks of wild animals 

 ceased. There is not the slightest evidence that any rough-coated prede- 

 cessor of the bob-tailed dog was then in existence. So this smooth dog 

 is the genuine old English sheep dog, and w^e will later endeavor to prove 

 him to be the original of the bob-tailed sheep dog. It is also clearly shown 

 that so far as the smooth dog being a variety of the Scotch collie, the claim 

 has no foundation whatever, for no person has ever advanced the suggestion 

 that the Scotch dog was originally of mastiff stock. 



More interesting to the reader not concerned materially in tracing 

 ancestry is the description that Caius gives of the sheep dog and how he 

 was used. He is the first dog considered in the fourth section of the "dis- 

 course" which treats of "Dogges of a Course [coarse] Kind serving for 

 Many necessary uses, called in Latine Canes Rustici, and first of the 

 shepherds dogge, called in Latine Cams Pastoralis. 



"The firste kinde, namely the shepherds hounde is very necessarye 

 and profitable for avoyding of harmes and inconveniences which may 

 come to men by means of beastes. Our shepherdes dogge is not huge, 

 vaste and bigge, but of an indifferent stature and growth, because it hath 



