Talk:Welsh Hillman

Landrace
This is was a landrace not a standardised breed. Adjusted text to reflect this. The distinction is important. A landrace (or "landrace breed", as some prefer) is adapted over a long period of time to its environment, and has a rich gene pool. Standardized breeds are inbred, decreasingly fit over time, bred for conformance not performance. I've looked and I find no published breed standards of any kind for this. There's not even any evidence they were genetically consistent at all. See David Hackock's works on regional dog varieties ("Bob-tailed survivors in the cur-dog tradition" (The Field, December 1987); Old Farm Dogs (1999), Old Working Dogs (1984). He addresses this very issue, specifically with regard to various extinct and rare types of herding dogs in Wales, "where dogs have long been valued for their work rather than their conformation to a breed standard."