About the OTSCA

Starting in 1892 when The Fancier’s Journal said “sooner or later (it will) have to be recognized that the show bench collie is absolutely distinct from his ancient prototype, and the formation of an old Scotch Collie Club will have to be seriously considered” there has been a small minority of collie owners who wanted to keep and breed the original collie as it existed before conformation breeding changed it into the dog know as the Rough Collie today. In 1912 the publication Country Life in America took up the cause and argued for the formation of an “Old-Fashioned Collie Club”, this effort proved premature and in time fell apart. The numbers of these old fashioned Scotch Collie lovers were small and in most cases they were separated by hundreds of miles of distance and had no easy way to locate or contact one another, so slowly the twentieth century wore away at the numbers of these dogs as breeding mates grew harder and harder to locate and great dogs grew old and died.

In the late 1990s after the discovery of the Allison dogs in Central Tennessee, J. Richard McDuffie organized the Old-Time Farm Shepherd breed under the auspices of the National Kennel Club (NKC) to keep these dogs alive and true to type but he did not realize that the formation of the OTFS breed was seen as a threat but some people. Ole Shep and some other key dogs were stolen and pressure was exerted on the NKC to stop recognizing the breed which they did while continuing to register new OTFS dogs, disheartened McDuffie handed the reins to Chandler Strunk who kept the OTFS going for a few more years but declining health brought an end to Strunk’s efforts to promote the breed in the mid 2000s. In the meantime Guy Ormiston attempted to get the Scotch Collie breed recognized by the United Kennel Club (UKC) in 2002 by writing a breed standard and club rules but the UKC declined to recognize the breed. Andy Ward became interested in the breed about this time and visited Strunk who signed papers to make Ward an OTFS breed inspector however the NKC refused to finalize his status as an OTFS breed inspector so when Chandler Strunk passed away in 2015 so did the Old-Time Farm Shepherd breed with no living breed inspector to admit new dogs.

What had been needed most for all these years since an “old Scotch Collie Club” was first suggested in 1892, was a written breed standard, a place to track pedigrees and an organization to promote the Scotch Collie, and in 2010 Andy Ward working with the advice and support of a handful of breeders (Jessica Hennings, Miriam Munson and Rebeca Bradley) put these pieces in place with the formation of the Old-Time Scotch Collie Association (OTSCA). The OTSCA used Guy Ormiston’s breed standard with some amendments and also put together an open, online, user-edited pedigree database using the Whippet Breed Archive as a foundation to build upon, the rules used for registering dogs and entering new blood were based on those of the Jack Russell Terrier Club of America, so the foundations of the OTSCA came from various organizations that were already doing similar things. The OTSCA offers a way to connect breeders of Old-Time Scotch Collies with people interested in the breed, the money they collect for memberships and registration fees goes towards promoting the dogs to a wider audience. Please join us in reviving the beautiful, smart, landrace collies that were so popular as farm helpers and pets one-hundered years ago.