I have had two border collie at the same time here in Germany and I can confirm that they are wonderfully smart. But they both had an almost uncheckable instinct to herd and what was available around here were either cars or horses. It was truly impressive to see a border collie work six or eight horses into a corner of the field just for the fun of it and hold them there. Even more astonishing was there acuity in avoiding the horses hooves as they kicked out at the dogs. The dogs were so clever that they simply lowered themselves to the ground and let the iron shod hoof sail over their head with lethal force missing them by millimeters.
The male was a Randy bugger who could spell estrus from at least 5 km and would plan is jailbreak and be out the door and disappeared in warp time. Both dogs were lightning fast as would be required by sheepherders. So when the male took off on amorous adventure there was no hope of catching him but the next morning he always came back looking like Sylvester the cat after a bad night.
