Where does Blue heeler (Australian Cattle Dog) come from?
The blue heeler, or Australian Cattle Dog, comes from New South Wales, Australia. In the 1800s the cattleman Thomas Hall crossed collie-type dogs with dingoes in the Hunter Valley, and Sydney breeders later refined his 'Halls Heelers' into the modern breed.
A dog for wild cattle
The Hall family ran cattle stations in the Upper Hunter Valley from the 1820s and drove their herds to the Sydney markets along unfenced routes through rugged bush. The droving dogs of the day, Smithfields, often barked at the cattle and bit their noses. On his Dartbrook station, Thomas Simpson Hall crossed collies with dingoes, which seldom bark and instinctively nip at the heels. A plaque near Dartbrook dates his breeding experiments to 1840, and the dogs became known as Halls Heelers.
Refined in Sydney
After Hall died in 1870, some of his dogs reached Sydney, where men interested in the new hobby of dog shows took them up. The most influential were the Bagust brothers, Jack and Harry, who 'bred a lot and drowned a lot' until, by about 1890, the blue cattle dog bred true. Harry Bagust's young associate Robert Kaleski drew up the first standard for the breed, published by the New South Wales Department of Agriculture in 1903. The dog, he wrote, should look like a 'small thick-set dingo'.
Why people think of Texas
A tough dog that works cattle brings American ranches, and Texas, to mind, and the breed did find work in the United States. Greg Lougher, a California cattle rancher who had been stationed in Australia during the Second World War, imported dogs from there, and in the late 1950s Californian breeders advertised them as 'Queensland Heelers', guaranteed to work. The American Kennel Club fully recognised the breed in 1980. But its home is the Upper Hunter, where a statue in Muswellbrook has honoured it since 2001.
Sources: en.wikipedia.org › Australian Cattle Dog ↗ · en.wikipedia.org › Bluey (long lived dog) ↗ · monumentaustralia.org › 22995 thomas s. hall ↗ · monumentaustralia.org › 22428 blue heeler ↗ · adb.anu.edu.au ↗
