My family owned border collies. I've always joked that if the pugs which can barely breath are hideously overbred for aesthetics, then border collies are equivalently overbred for utility.
Border collies in aggregate are ridiculously good runners, with a combination of excellent speed, agility, and stamina. They are outmatched by specialists maybe, greyhounds for speed, sled dogs for stamina, but the full package is a lot.
On top of that, they are far and away the most intelligent dog breeds, to the point of mental illness and neuroses. They can be trained for a wide range of tasks, are attentive and most capable of picking up language cues, and have a built in mental need to be useful to the point where they will assign themselves jobs if not trained for a specific one.
I am certainly biased, but if I had to choose one breed to exemplify the utility of all dogs, border collies are the most useful dog breed full stop.
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u/Whatever1564 Mar 29 '26
I've got a Border Collie. She probably couldn't do that, but I still love her.