RIGHT: Ron the border collie was sold for £5,000 at auction. Photo: rossparry.co.ukAt 14 months, he has attracted a record transfer fee at an age when many footballers were unable to walk.
By John Bingham
Published: 7:30AM BST 22 Jul 2010
And when it comes to running rings round the opposition, Ron is very much the Wayne Rooney of the sheep dog world.
The tricoloured border collie was sold for £5,000 at an auction that set new ground for the value of sheep dogs, which have become increasingly difficult to come by because of a shortage of trainers.
A 26-month-old sheepdog named Rex fetched the same sum at the sale in Skipton, North Yorkshire, as farmers competed to snap up the best animals in scenes more akin to Sotheby’s or Christie’s.
Ron’s trainer, John Bell, said he knew the dog had star quality the moment he bought him as a six-month-old pup in Northumberland.
“Quite honestly he is just a special dog,” he said.
“He was going far better than the average and he is also, at 14 months, a year younger than the average.
“He has come on so quickly, he has the brains, style, power.” The sale at Skipton Auction Mart drew an audience of 1,000 and broke all records for sheepdog sales.
Potential buyers travelled from as far as the Shetland Islands and the west of Ireland in search of the elite of the sheepdog world, while others even put in bids by telephone.
Adopting the currency of the horse racing world, the two dogs went for 4,900 guineas (£5,145), breaking the record set at the same auction mart six years ago.
Ron was bought by a Scottish farmer and Rex by Nigel Watkins, a farmer from Llangadog, Carmarthenshire.
“There was silence,” said Mr Bell, 77, of Howden, East Yorks. “When dogs go up to £4,000 you can hear them go quiet.
“You get an atmosphere, you get 1,000 farmer types there are a lot of characters.”
Although exceptional, the prices were not unexpected.
With around 90 highly trained sheepdogs for sale, all went for several thousand pounds each.
As the number of specialist trainers available has declined, the market for Britain’s best sheepdogs has begun to resemble the Premier League transfer market.
So highly valued are they that some farmers have installed extra security to prevent them being stolen to order.
Mr Bell also earned more than £4,000 for Floss, a 15-month-old border collie bitch at the same sale.
“People who can’t manage dogs go and buy quad bikes at £7,000 or £8,000,” explained Mr Bell.
“A quad bike will depreciate by about £1,000 a year but a dog, if you multiply that by 10 years of work it is very very little to get a job done bringing in 3,000 sheep.”
In demonstrations on a hillside next to the auction mart, Ron impressed the crowd by carefully rounding up one sheep which seemed determined to break away from the flock.
“Its head was up the moment they let them out of the release pen, I could see straight away that there was going to be a problem,” said Mr Bell, a former horse trainer. “The way he handled it for his age was amazing.
“A lot of them are only just beginning to be trained at that age and he was tracking sheep in two fields.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/agriculture/farming/7903305/Ron-the-border-collie-the-Rooney-of-the-sheep-dog-transfer-market.html
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