The Sheltie Inu is an intentional crossbreed, the combination
of an extremely popular and extremely old breed of small hunting dog native to Japan,
the Shibu Inu, and the Shetland Sheepdog, a petite shepherding dog that was
developed on the Shetland islands off the coast of Scotland. The Shiba Inu, also referred to as the Shiba Ken, is the
smallest of the six breeds of hunting dog that are native to the Japanese
islands, all with similarities in structure, appearance, and temperament. While the Shiba Inu may have
occasionally been employed to hunt larger game like boar and deer, they were
more often utilized to find and flush out smaller game and birds. Bombing raids
in World War II coupled with outbreaks of distemper shortly following the war decimated
the Shiba Inu population and breeding programs in the 1950s were developed to
save the breed by intermingling several strains of Shiba dog. The Shetland
Sheepdog is also a small island dog, developed on a very different island for a
very different purpose. The Sheltie originated on the Shetland islands off the
coast of Scotland as a herding animal to help control the unusually small livestock
that grew on the island. This animated little dog is the product of many centuries
of development and although the history of this dog is somewhat murky, there are
speculations that many different breeds were involved in their original
development, including the Scotch Collie, the King Charles Spaniel, the
Icelandic Sheepdog, the Border Collie,
and a mysterious, now extinct dog known
as the Greenland Yakki. When tourism to the islands increased in the 1800s the
farmers began selling the little dogs to visitors to the island, even breeding
them with smaller dogs such as Corgis, Papillons, and Pomeranians to decrease their
size and increase the cute factor. In time, this made the dogs less suited to
their original purpose and breeders reintroduced more Collie genetics to the
breed, and today’s Sheltie is capable of being
both an accomplished herding animal and a loyal and affectionate home companion.
