Making Sense of Sheepdogs

Tracing the invention of sheepdogs in the UK, and their journey to New Zealand and back again, this book shows how sheepdogs, shepherds and the countryside evolve in response to global agriculture, rural cultures, and soundscapes.

This book offers a unique, empirically rich understanding of how sheepdogs, shepherds and the landscapes they work in co-produce sheepdog cultures that circumnavigate the world. The book’s benefit lies in showing how global sheepdog cultures evolve through multispecies relations, offering new understandings of rural change, mobility, and soundscapes. It delivers this through a distinctive blend of historical research, multispecies ethnography, and sonic geography, combining archival materials, interviews, field observations, and analysis of sheepdog trialling, shepherding, media, and rural events. Each chapter shows, in detail, how sheepdogs function as cultural, economic, and affective resources and provides comparative insights into how working dogs adapt, and transform rural life under pressure from climate change, afforestation, labour shifts, and agricultural modernisation. In bringing these materials together, the book equips scholars, students, and sheepdog enthusiasts with a powerful framework for understanding the global evolution of sheepdogs and the wider multispecies rural worlds they help to create.

The book will appeal to all dog lovers, researchers and practitioners working in human–animal studies, rural and cultural studies, agricultural policy and working-dog training as well as shepherds, rural organisations and anyone curious about the evolution, movement, and cultural significance of sheepdogs across diverse landscapes.