Australia isn’t a country for sissies. Of the country’s 170 land snake species, 100 are venomous, and the three most venomous snakes in the entire world are found there.  Australia is also home to some of the most poisonous eight-leggers on the planet; spiders are the most widely distributed venomous creatures in Australia with an estimated 10,000 species inhabiting a variety of ecosystems. Oh, and let’s not forget the Saltwater Crocodile, the largest reptile in the world in terms of mass, and said to be one of the most dangerous animals in Australia

No siree Bob, Australia is not a country for sissies, and certain not for a “sissy dog,” and yet ranchers and farmers have always relied upon working dogs to help them manage livestock. There are three sheep to every one person “down under,” and as for cattle, the Australian beef industry had 25 million head of cattle in 2017 and was the world’s third largest exporter of beef that year. If we go back in time a bit, the country was even rougher than it is now. Dogs were used to control wild cattle in groups of several hundred on drives that negotiated the inhospitable wilderness of Australia and sometimes lasted weeks. Between wild, unruly cattle, critters with deadly bites and stings, and extremely harsh conditions, traditional working breeds were useless. It took an extraordinary breed to do the job: Enter the Australian Cattle Dog.

The working style of this breed has been covered elsewhere on these pages, and our preamble to this point is to lay the groundwork for the fact that this is an intelligent, and highly independent thinking breed. Once trained, an ACD is fully able to carry out tasks without supervision. The “ACaDo” is versatile enough to handle different classes of cattle over a variety of terrain, but he also excels in managed trials, so when we tell you that the very first dog to earn an AKC advanced herding title of any breed was an Australian Cattle Dog, you shouldn’t be surprised. The dog was CH Buzzards Red Tubs HX, 56 pounds of excellence who sired 85 Champions before his passing in 1992. Tubs was an actual working dog who worked cattle daily, and was shown in conformation shows on weekends.  He won more high in trials than any other herding dog in 1990, but was also a conformation champion of record. Forgive us if we lack patience for those who charge that our breeds are useless beauty contestants because we know of too many dogs like Tubs who have proved otherwise.

Our image is not of Tubs, but comes from DepositStockPhotos and was taken by Erik Lam