Pups pose for picture on Shropshire farm
Each of these little balls of fluff could end up being worth thousands of pounds – but for now they are happy just playing around on a Shropshire.
This bevy of border collie pups was snapped by wildlife photographer Andrew Fusek Peters as he was passed through a farm under the Stiperstones.
He has been working with the farm to get shots of the areas wilder animals, but the eight young pedigree pups were too cute to pass up capturing on camera.
They belong to Phil and Sue Wood of Kinnerton Hall Farm, a 1,300 acre family farm in the Ratlinghope area, and are the offspring of 11-year-old border collie sheep dog Jo and two-year-old bitch Jill.
One of the pups will be trained up to follow in the footsteps of his dad Jo, but the rest are up for grabs.
Sue, 57, said they already had eight collie dogs on the farm – along with a kelpie owned by Phil's brother Mike – though not all of them were working dogs.
"We've got about 4,000 sheep so you need more than one dog to work it all," she said, "Though we did get Jill to breed.
"Jo is retired now, we won't work him any more, but he has been a good dog and we wanted to continue his line.
"We normally buy them ready trained from Aidan Gallagher, a sheep dog breeder in Northern Ireland, or Kevin Evans in Wales, but we will keep one of the puppies for ourselves and we're selling another to Aidan.
"We want to sell the rest as working dogs though they do go for pets as well."
She said they were hoping to sell them for about £400 each, but once trained working dogs were worth about £5,000.
While they deliberately bred the dogs to carry on Jo's line, Phil and Sue got a little more than they bargained for, she said.
"Usually you have about five but we've got six bitches and two dogs. They will be eight weeks old on Friday.
"I've got seven grandchildren and three of them play with them all the time, they just love them," she said.
