Making sense of sheepdogs: Breeds of empire and the sound of the global countryside

Enticott, Gareth ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5510-9597 2026. Making sense of sheepdogs: Breeds of empire and the sound of the global countryside. Routledge Human-Animal Studies Series, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. 10.4324/9781003531807

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Abstract

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.

Item Type:	Book - authored
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Schools > Geography and Planning (GEOPL) Schools > School of Social and Spatial Sciences
Publisher:	Routledge
ISBN:	9781032872742
Last Modified:	23 Sep 2026 10:30
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/189777

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