Pal had several bad habits, which included constant barking and chasing motorcycles. He ran a kennel that not only supplied movie dogs, but taught "regular" dogs obedience. Weatherwax got Pal as payment for a debt. Female collies were not ignored because they are any less intelligent in fact, some of Lassie's stunt doubles have been females. Also, fans tend to think of Lassie as a "big heroic dog." Female collies are usually 10-15 pounds lighter than their male counterparts, therefore a male dog playing Lassie would look more impressive. Weatherwax continued to use male collies in the role for a good reason: both sexes shed in the summer (when most movies and television shows traditionally film most of their episodes), an event called "blowing coat," but since the male has thicker fur, he wouldn't look so scrawny during filming. Rudd Weatherwax's collie "Pal" was substituted, and not only stole the stunt but won the role. A female collie was hired to play the lead in Lassie Come Home, but when an opportunity came to film "Lassie" negotiating some rapids, the female reportedly would have nothing to do with the rushing water. Lassie, incidentally, was based on Knight's own collie, "Toots."Īll the dogs portraying Lassie have been male. Knight wrote one other book of note, the humorous The Flying Yorkshireman, before being killed in a plane crash (circumstances surrounding the crash are still unknown).
(See more about this matter in the FAQ.) At the time of Lassie Come-Home, Knight was most well known for his novel This Above All, later made into a movie starring Tyrone Power and Joan Fontaine. (It was said that people who raised collies had always disliked the blaze and had tried for years to breed out that particular marking, thus it was a great blow when the Lassie films became popular and everyone began clamoring for collies with white facial blazes like MGM's favorite "dog star," but I have since read that this fact isn't true.)īecause of Lassie Come-Home (which began life as a short story for The Saturday Evening Post), people tend to think of author Knight as primarily a dog writer, confusing him with the more prolific Albert Payson Terhune, who wrote Lad: a Dog and other books about collies in the 1910s and 1920s.
She is also described as having a "perfect black mask" which means she has no blaze. But the original Lassie, from the seminal novel by Eric Knight, was described as "a beautiful tricolor collie," meaning she is mostly black, with the familiar white markings, and touches of sable. Most folks will also cite the long white blaze down her muzzle. When people think of a "Lassie type" collie, they always envision a sable (brown) and white dog with some black markings.
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