COLUMN ONE : Scotland’s ‘Border Patrol’ : ‘The smartest dogs in the world’ may also be the hardest-working. Scottish shepherds lavish praise on their border collies--but that doesn’t mean they coddle them.

The usual suspects were there on a frosty Sunday morning. The bright skies were painted with fluffy clouds, and the hills around the valley rose in a patchwork of vivid green, dusky heather and rust-colored bracken. Beneath them, cars and mud-spattered farm pickup trucks pulled into a wide semicircle at the edge of a field.

Bobby Dalziel was there with Dot, his 3-year-old bitch. Viv Billingham with Moss and Holly, Alisdair MacRae with Nan and Ray MacPherson with Cap. Maybe 50 families, altogether--along with 100 or more dogs with names like Glen, Craig, Bute, Lass, Shep, Sweep and Roy.

These were the stars, the border collies--the working sheep dogs of Scotland, England and Wales.

“The smartest dogs in the world.”

That’s Bobby Dalziel’s opinion anyway, and although fanciers of other dog breeds might quibble, he wouldn’t get much argument from his friends and neighbors here, most of them farmers and shepherds from the Scottish border country, gathered for a day of competition, driving sheep back and forth across the field, between gateposts and into pens, testing their own skills and those of their collies.

Border collies have been working sheep on these hills for at least 400 years, and probably longer. Mentioned in a 1576 treatise as simply “the shepherd’s dogge,” they are now named after the Scottish border country from which they sprang--and they remain as essential here today as they were in Elizabethan times.

Because of their intelligence and skill, their winning temperament and their crisp good looks, the fame of border collies has widened massively in recent years, extending even to a supporting role in the popular movie “Down and Out in Beverly Hills.”

Their popularity has also been spurred by the introduction of sheep-dog “trialing” as a sport in the United States, organized contests in which dogs and trainers compete in herding sheep across a field, through a series of gates and into a pen. With the breed’s renown has come an enlivened debate between border collie fanciers over the question of skill versus beauty.

Some die-hard shepherding enthusiasts in the United States are even trying to fend off official recognition of the breed by the American Kennel Club, on the theory that popularization of border collies can only lead to an emphasis on show-ring qualities and a gradual dilution of the animal’s instincts as a working dog.

The growing popularity of border collies, in this view, could lead also to a deterioration of the breed, the way that show collies were “damaged” (they say) by the over-breeding and inbreeding that resulted from the popularity of “Lassie” movies and TV shows beginning in the 1940s. They also point to genetic weaknesses such as hip dysplasia (a congenital deformation of the hip joint) that have afflicted German shepherd dogs because of inbreeding.

Collies are vital to a shepherd because they can cover ground quickly, sometimes ranging out miles over rough and hilly terrain to gather the sheep and move them to other grazing areas, or into shelter out of storms, or to round them up for shearing or lambing season. Without a good dog, the shepherd would soon be out of business, for there is no way to cover such wide ground so quickly, even on horseback.

There are wide variations in the appearance of the shepherd’s dog, particularly among working collies, a characteristic that has helped delay recognition by the American Kennel Club.

A “classic” border collie, however, has emerged. It is black and white, with a long coat. Like the more familiar “Lassie-type” collie, or “show collie,” it has a ruff of long hair (white) around the neck and chest, a white muzzle and white strip running to the top of its head, white feet and a fluffy, curling tail. It weighs 40 to 45 pounds and stands about as high as a boxer bulldog.

In the British show ring, where the breed is recognized, those characteristics have become virtually essential. On the farm, however, there are no rules. Some collies can be short-haired, and, although black and white tend to predominate, the dogs may also be tricolored (black and white and tan). A few may even be red and white, or a kind of marbled gray.

Whatever their variations in appearance, border collies are eager, fast, extremely agile, keen of hearing. They are also quiet, because barking at the sheep is considered bad form. The best of the sheep dogs also have what is known as “the eye.” It is this fixed, locked-on stare that shepherds say is usually the mark of a great sheep dog, the tool it uses to control the sheep, to hold them stock-still or to move them into a pen without spooking and scattering them.

Dalziel, 37, is a sheep farmer, running 1,200 head of sheep across the hill regions near Selkirk in southern Scotland, and, like every other shepherd in this country, he cannot conceive of farming sheep without his dogs. They are not, to men like him, the coddled creatures of the show ring, or even of the sheep-trial competitions such as the one on this recent sunlit Sunday in the borderlands, but the essential tools of his trade.

His 6-year-old Wisp, a two-time international trialing champion, works in the field with him daily, doing the routine jobs of a sheep farm--fetching the sheep, moving them about the hills, separating one group from another. In lambing season, Dalziel says, this may amount to 12 or 15 hours a day.

Although Wisp is a proven champion as a sheep dog, he wouldn’t fare well in the show ring, only because his head is three-quarters white. Dalziel couldn’t care less.

“The thing about the collies,” Dalziel says, “is that they can think for themselves. You send them out for the sheep when you can’t even see them. Both the dog and the sheep are out of sight from you, and he gets them, and he brings them back. And a good sheep dog loves to work. A good dog will work till he literally drops.”

In the rigorous International Sheepdog Trials, the collie must dash up to 1,000 yards away from his handler to 20 sheep that are out of sight from the starting point, circle them cautiously and move them at a calm and steady pace through a series of gates. At the end, the dog must separate five marked sheep from the group and drive the remaining 15 into a small enclosure, making sure, at the same time, that the five separated sheep remain under control. Stern-eyed judges deduct points for any loss of precision along the way.

Wisp won the international trialing championships this year, beating the best dogs from Scotland, England, Ireland and Wales. Since the competition began in the 1920s, only six dogs have won the international twice. Only one dog, the famous Roy, won it three times. Wisp, Dalziel hopes, has a chance of matching the record.

Along with Dalziel, Alisdair MacRae’s name is frequently mentioned among Scottish shepherds as one of the “dangerous men” among the dozens of talented dog handlers in the region. MacRae, 33, rents a sheep farm at the edge of the Trussoch hills west of Edinburgh, and he supplements his income from sheep farming by training dogs. Peter Hetherington, who buys sheep dogs and sells them to buyers in the United States, says MacRae has “a remarkable way with dogs. He takes a difficult dog, takes it apart and puts it back together again.”

“There’s not another dog in the world as intelligent as a border collie,” MacRae says. “All you have to do is look at your obedience trials and your agility trials. . . , and you see. Nine out of the top 10 are going to be border collies.”

Each trainer has a method of his or her own, but all build on the dog’s natural inclination--the result of four centuries of breeding--to herd sheep. Training usually begins around the age of 6 months, by teaching the pups to move left, right and forward and to halt on command. After working initially with a handful of compliant sheep, the dog will move on to harder tasks. After that, it’s a matter of adding polish.

MacRae cannot explain his talent for training dogs with much more scientific certitude than Willie Mays could explain his talent for hitting baseballs: Beyond certain basic training, it’s simply a gift. And practice. Dalziel talks about “getting inside a dog’s head.”

In the field behind his house, MacRae keeps six sheep just to work with his dogs. “Dogged to death,” he says, the sheep are easy to work. With a young dog, generally, he seldom works for more than 15 minutes at a time. The dogs learn to work with voice commands close up; when working at a distance from the trainer, they learn to respond to his whistle. MacRae varies the whistle commands for each dog so that he can work a brace of dogs in the field without the collies responding to the wrong orders.

Trainers and shepherds such as MacRae see their dogs unsentimentally, a trait so universal it seems like a code among them. These are working dogs, they say, and are kept, appropriately, in their place. MacRae’s dogs, when not working, are chained up in a dark shed with a stone floor that is frequently damp with seeping Scottish rain. To a non-shepherd, the dogs, in their dim quarters, look like prisoners. To MacRae, that’s the way it is supposed to be.

“You keep them penned up,” he says, “because when they get out, they are happy to go to work.”

Enthusiasm for border collies runs far beyond the concerns of shepherds training dogs for the farm. Tom Quinn, for example, is a plumber from near Glasgow. He and his wife, Margaret, have four collies they train to compete in obedience trials.

“I know people say they are not house dogs,” Quinn says, “but that’s not necessarily true. I know people who have collies and don’t do anything more strenuous than walk with them, and they are fine pets. But they need company.”

Tales abound of city dwellers buying border collies, then leaving them alone--indoors--and returning from work to find disaster.

“That’s an invitation to trouble,” says Lorna Stephens, who competes with her collies in agility trials at dog shows, another area where border collies excel. “You have to have a reason for having a border collie. I don’t think of them as a pet. You have to respect their intelligence, because if they don’t have something to do, they’ll start eating the furniture or peeling the wallpaper.”

All caveats noted, demand for the border collie continues to grow. In Scotland, a farm pup costs about $60. A show-quality puppy can run to $200. The price for a trained working sheep or cattle dog, exported to the United States, runs between $500 and $1,000. And for a champion, or a proven trial winner, prices may go as high as $2,500.

With popularity, some of the feared breeding defects have shown up in border collie lines. One is a progressive disease of the retina, which leads to blindness, and “collie eye anomaly,” a sort of tunnel vision. Any registered collie should have passed a test for these diseases, as well as hip dysplasia.

In the United States, the debate over American Kennel Club recognition continues, but Carole J. Presberg, who has a sheep farm near Ithaca, N.Y., and publishes a newsletter called The Shepherd’s Dogge, figures that recognition, sooner or later, is inevitable.

“I don’t see that having the border collie as a ‘show dog’ is necessarily going to ruin the breed,” Presberg says. “What I think is going to happen is that you’ll wind up with two types springing out of this--a show type and a working type. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.”

Every border collie owner looks for a certain quality. For men such as Bobby Dalziel, it is the varied personality of the dog, each with its quirks, weaknesses or strong points, that is the real allure.

Dalziel’s first eminent dog was Dryden Joe, a calm, steady collie who had, curiously, little of the famous border collie “eye.” He bought Wisp, his current champion, at the age of 3 from a shepherd who found him “too strong.” His up-and-coming star, Dot, a 3-year-old bitch, is eager, sometimes flighty and too fast.

“Dryden Joe was unreal; everything was so easy with him,” Dalziel says. “With Wisp, I’ve got to handle him a lot more. Little Dot, she’s hot and high-strung, and I’ve got to keep calm with her, cool her down.”

Beneath those varied traits, though, is one consistent quality. “All a collie really wants to do,” he says, “is to work and be with you.”