Inside the global market for elite $30 000 sheepdogs

Del set off at a tear, turning on a dime as he corralled three sheep around the field. His white socks and the flash of white across his nose were nothing but a blur.

Nearby, his trainer stood with a whistle between his pursed lips. The 5-year-old border collie stopped, sank low to the ground and waited. On cue, he took off again.

This ballet between sheepdog and flock continued for a few minutes in front of the roughly 200 people who’d gathered on a mild July morning in Skipton, a town near Leeds in northern England. Several dozen others watched via webcam. Then the bidding began.

Over the past three decades, Skipton’s Craven Cattle Mart has grown into an international hub for some of the world’s best working sheepdogs. Some of them end up in the US and Europe, even as far as Japan, where one dog now herds sheep in the shadow of Mount Fuji.

Dogs sold here have fetched as much as $30,000, putting them among the most expensive sheepdogs ever sold.

Among the pickup trucks and farm vehicles in the parking lot were high-end SUVs adorned with personalised license plates. Most of those in the crowd appeared to be locals.

But watching from the edge of the field was Toru Takei, who, among the work boots and fleece vests, stood out in his Los Angeles Dodgers cap and sneakers.

Takei had read about the Skipton sheepdog sales from his home in Japan, where he farms 23 sheep as a hobby and has a keen interest in herding competitions known as sheepdog trials, a sport that’s taking off abroad.

He already has two – one from the Netherlands and another from Wales, where he had plans to visit during his trip to the UK.

“There are less dogs in Japan. I have no selection,” Takei says, noting that the quality of the training they undergo here makes the arduous task of getting them back home worth it. He hopes to buy another one day, this time from Skipton, but today, he tells me, he’s just here to watch.

Border collies have been bred for generations to herd sheep, their natural instincts moulded further by trainers and farmers to respond to voice commands or a whistle. They’re sold as puppies or fully trained, or “broken”.

Unsung to outsiders, sheepdogs are vitally important to operations of commercial farms — and adored by devout trialists, some of whom travel the world competing.

On 20 September, thousands of spectators and competitors from 34 countries converged on Scotland for “the biggest World Trial ever,” according to the president of the International Sheep Dog Society.

Christine Ryder, who manages about a thousand sheep and a herd of cows with her husband at their farm in nearby Blubberhouses, tells me the signs of a good worker.

“Their ears are up, and they’re watching everything. They’re ready to go,” she says, explaining that dogs must be confident enough to stand up to sheep, which are often many times bigger. “If a sheep turns and starts coming towards it, if they turn and run away, well, that’s no good to anybody.”

Del caught their eye. “You could see the concentration on his job,” Ryder says, speaking of the handsome pooch moving effortlessly across the grass. It would be their first time buying a broken dog.

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They placed their bids as auctioneer Jeremy Eaton whipped up interest among the crowd, his voice booming over the crackly loudspeaker.

At a crossroads 

Skipton has long been synonymous with sheep farming – the name comes from the Old English words scēap, meaning sheep, and tūn for town. References to a “sheep town” on this site date to as early as the 11th century.

It sits at the southern edge of the Yorkshire Dales National Park, with valleys and moors carved into fields by drystone walls stretching for miles to the north. The area is dotted with old, quaint villages, the type you might have seen on the PBS series All Creatures Great and Small, which is filmed locally.

A charter granted by King John in 1204 first allowed Skipton to start a market selling sheep and wool. The town’s importance as a market hub grew when the Leeds & Liverpool Canal was built during the Industrial Revolution more than 500 years later.

The first official Skipton auction took place in 1886 not far from the town centre, on the site of what’s now a grocery store.

Today, Craven Cattle Mart (CCM) sits just outside of town. It’s become a place farmers go not only to buy and sell but also to socialise.

The sheepdog sales – with their record-setting prices and international clientele – now attract many who simply come out to watch.

A good sheepdog is often more useful than a human employee, able to cover huge distances quickly, gliding over rough and rutted land. It’s part of why some buyers will travel so far to buy one. Some dogs can also work cattle.

And while drones and robots have been touted for more than a decade as potential replacements for sheepdogs, sheep grow used to and start to ignore drones. A dog’s natural instincts for herding is a hard thing to replicate.

Neil Winton had set off at 4:45 a.m. that summer morning on the five-hour drive from Perthshire, Scotland, with his wife and son.

Their 5 000-acre farm is home to 900 sheep and is “all hills,” he says. When I ask him what it would be like working without a dog, he replies: “Totally impossible.”

Another sheep farmer at the sale, Craig Procter, tells me he was “desperate” for a dog after the unexpected death of his previous one: “It’s 70% of the work, really.”

Going international

CCM started sheepdog sales in 1996. At that time there were only a couple of other places selling dogs in Britain. In those early days, many sold at auction were “rejects,” says Eaton, the auctioneer, meaning surplus to a farm’s needs rather than quality.

But shepherds and trialists who trained dogs saw an opportunity to start intentionally breeding, finding and training the sheepdogs, specifically for the auctions.

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“It opened up almost a new cottage industry,” Eaton says. Interest grew in lockstep with the quality of the dogs on offer, particularly among sheepdog trialists who were competing at an international level for their countries.

Over the next two decades, Skipton grew into a premier sheepdog trading destination, and the dogs themselves became headline-making luxury investments.

In February 2020, Megan, a 2½-year-old border collie, was sold at CCM to a farm in Oklahoma for £18 900 ($25 215), at the time a record price for a sheepdog.

“I had to ring the auction and just make sure it wasn’t a hoax and that I wasn’t dreaming,” Megan’s trainer, Emma Gray, told the BBC after the sale. The 2021 online auction of 1-year-old Kim, organised by Farmers Marts in Dolgellau, Wales, holds the Guinness World Record at £28,455.

Despite these figures, Brexit has made it significantly more difficult for trainers and farmers from Northern Ireland and Ireland, which had been a crucial market, to sell their dogs because of complex and costly export processes — not to mention repatriating them if they go unsold.

Crowds have thinned, and Eaton went from selling as many as 150 sheepdogs in a single day to the couple dozen he had on the books for the July sale.

But online-only sales, a vestige of the pandemic, are filling the gap. Also in 2021, a 9-week-old puppy sold at CCM for £7 600, still a record for an untrained sheepdog. And in the years since, sales of the top-priced dogs at each of the Skipton auctions have frequently reached five figures.

Trainer Eric Jacques says times have changed from when you “used to put a bit of an advert in [the Farmers Guardian], and somebody would come and buy one.”

He tells me about how several years ago his children uploaded videos of his dogs online. “I got a message one day on my phone saying this person had seen my dogs on YouTube and wanted to know if they were for sale,” Jacques says.

The caller asked him if he could organise getting the dog a pet passport, prompting him to ask her where it would be going. To his surprise, she told him Denmark.

“They sent the money, and a lady came over – she drove over from Sweden – picked the dog up, took it back to Denmark. It was then flown out from Denmark to the Faroe Islands,” Jacques says. “It just shows the difference from 15 years ago. You’ve got a bigger market now.”

Under the hammer

These days, CCM runs several sheepdog sales a year. Some are entirely online, such as the one on 23 September, where trainers uploaded recorded videos of their dogs.

Over the past 12 months, multiple dogs sold online have made five figures, heading to southern England, Ireland and the south of France. They can have resale value too: A 5-year-old dog previously bought by a now-retired shepherd, and whose father was one of Gray’s dogs, was sold to an anonymous buyer in Germany for £4 200.

In-person “field sales” like the one in July have started accepting online bids too. A webcam shows a live feed of the dogs herding sheep before the bidding starts; as many as 100 additional buyers typically log on.

Eaton says many potential buyers still prefer seeing the dogs in the flesh, to watching videos, which can be edited and reshot.

American Samantha Furman got her first border collie 30 years ago. At the time, she had planned to become an accountant. But she started doing lessons with a highly regarded handler, for whom she ended up working for several years.

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Then she got a few sheep of her own to train her dogs with and became art of the then-fledgling US sheepdog trial circuit, which has since boomed in popularity. Farming followed.

“Somewhere in there, I really just got pretty passionate about the sheep and wanted to do the best I could,” says Furman, who lives appropriately enough in Farmville, Virginia. She now has a flock of 600.

But like Takei, Furman recognised how difficult it is to find high-quality sheepdogs at home. “The inability maybe to find as good a sheepdog here as I’d had when I got my first dog 30 years ago, it inspired me to want to import dogs,” she says. “And with Covid and the livestock market, it allowed me to shop for dogs all over the world.”

Furman had already bought a dog from Dewi Jenkins, a prominent Welsh sheepdog trainer, and they’d been in touch about Jen, a 19-month-old border collie, before the dog went on sale at CCM last October.

“I talked to him, and I really like the looks of her,” even though she “wasn’t really in the market for a dog,” Furman says.

“He says, ‘Well, what’s the top you can go?’ And I’m like, ‘Well, I’m probably a buyer at 15 [thousand pounds].’ So that was the last word to my husband.” The bidding began at 5 a.m. Virginia time, as she sat in bed in her pyjamas.

“I kept hitting the button, and I was about to have heart failure” as the figure grew higher and higher, Furman says. When the gavel dropped she’d bid £24,550, a record at CCM.

Extra expenses, including the cost of transporting Jen to Virginia, meant Furman was in for an estimated $40,000. “To watch it back, I almost threw up,” she says.

In July, when Eaton hammered his gavel to end the bidding for Del, the Ryders came out on top at 3 600 guineas, which works out to be £3,780 (a guinea is worth £1.05; the auction takes the 5 pence as its commission).

As much as the auction mart and the trainers have embraced new technology, nothing can oust tradition, like using the old British currency that was officially demonetised more than 200 years ago.

It’s part of what’s kept CCM a centre for the local agricultural community – protecting “the principal of the auction,” Eaton says — even as buyers have arrived from around the world.

A few weeks after the sale, I texted Christine Ryder to see how Del had settled into his new home and job.

“He runs like the wind, never grabs at the sheep and he’s totally under control,” she texted back. “We love him. He positively bounces with excitement at the prospect of going to work.”

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