Our gorgeous coat colors and patterning is a part of what makes us Australian Cattle Dogs unique – it’s part of why we are nicknamed Blue Heelers and Red Heelers, after all. But I bet you didn’t know that our coats start off completely white! Newborn ACDs have totally white fur, but our humans don’t have to wait long to find out what we’re going to look like. Our true colors show when we are about six weeks old.

We Australian Cattle Dogs come from (you guessed it) Australia! We have many different names – Blue Heeler and Red Heeler (for our coloring), and Queensland Heeler (for where we were bred). All our nicknames end in Heeler because nipping at heels is kind of our thing – how else are we supposed to boss around big herds of cattle? That’s what we were bred to do, after all, but it took a lot of breeding to get us just right. In the early 1800s, a human named Thomas Hall came to Australia with his family. The Halls were in the cattle business, but the climate and terrain of Australia was a lot different than England! They realized pretty quickly that the English herding dogs (an extinct breed called Smithfields) were not suited to the temperature or long distances required to drive cattle in their new land. Hall decided to import blue merle Highland Collies from Scotland and bred them with the Dingo, a wild dog native to Australia. These were my earliest ancestors, called Halls Heelers, an