Shetland Sheepdog

In the best-known ranking of canine intelligence, the Shetland Sheepdog came sixth. At school in Poland a six is the top mark, so it all adds up, although the dog itself would rather know who came fifth. The Dobermann. The Sheltie, as everyone calls it, has taken note and is still practising. The ranking was compiled in 1994 from the assessments of nearly two hundred obedience judges, and the threshold for the top group was this: a new command understood in fewer than five repetitions and obeyed first time in at least 95 cases out of 100. That is not a description of a dog. It is a description of the star pupil in the front row: the one whose hand goes up before the teacher has finished the question, and who reminds everyone, just before the bell, about the test that was announced.

It went to school in Shetland, an archipelago where everything comes a size smaller: the ponies, the sheep, the fields. The crofts there were too poor to keep a dog for one job only, so this one had to be able to do everything. It herded sheep, ponies and hens, and above all made sure none of them got into the crops the family needed to get through the winter. At the beginning of the twentieth century it arrived at dog shows as the Shetland Collie. Breeders of real Collies protested, not caring to have a poor relation from the islands trading under their name, and the name had to be changed. People in the street still call a Sheltie a “mini Lassie”. It is worth knowing, when they do, that in the same ranking Lassie comes sixteenth.

At home the star pupil never stops learning, including things nobody taught it. Spelling out “w-a-l-k” works exactly twice. The word “vet” it mastered in a single repetition. It also acts as class monitor: when the children run around the flat, it plants itself across the corridor and loudly reports the breach of the rules. It barks a lot in general, although it would not call that noise, only class participation. Guests it treats like new pupils: for the first ten minutes it watches them from behind your legs, then sits down opposite and waits for them to show what they can do. And anything that moves fast — a bicycle, a runner and, unfortunately, a car — it regards as a pupil who has wandered off from the school trip and must be turned back.

The star pupil does have a favourite subject, though, and it is not any command. It is you. It knows your footsteps on the stairs and tells them apart from the neighbour's. It reads the putting-down of the remote control without error and gets up a second before you do. It recognises the end of a phone call by your tone, two sentences before “bye then”, and is already standing beside you, because now it is its turn. It also knows that on Sunday evenings you go quiet. It brings you its best toy then, because that is the only medicine it knows. You teach it for a quarter of an hour a day. It studies you for all the rest, and nobody set that as homework. That is why it needs no sharp tone and no punishment. You do not give a star pupil a failing mark: it is enough that it does not hear “good”, and it already knows, and feels worse about it than you would wish.

The trouble with a star pupil is that it is so easy to reward. And the five-repetition rule works at the table too: five times a piece of cheese from your plate and it is on the timetable for good. In this breed it is not only a matter of calories. Shetland Sheepdogs are exceptionally prone to gallbladder mucocele, a build-up of thick mucus in the gallbladder; in a British study their risk was more than ninety times higher than in other dogs. The disease goes hand in hand with raised blood fats, so fatty titbits are a bad idea for a Sheltie for two reasons at once. Fortunately, it does not work for cheese. It works for “good”. And “good” has no calories.

The judges tested it on sit, on fetch and on walking to heel. The result was sixth place in the world.

Nobody tested it on you. A pity. It would have come first.