Progress has been slow, to say the least, but animal lovers on either side of the Atlantic shouldn’t need to get their news from scientists, and certainly not from their dog walker. Simple farmers and nomadic hunters reached the same conclusions tens of thousands of years ago and with no help from evolutionary biology or population genetics, or the steady stream of coverage on Nightline, the Today Show, and local stations across the country. Breeding for blood “purity” and formal perfection is pure madness and always has been. So why do purists cling to this idea that “traditional” breeds they can’t imagine in other shapes, sizes, or colors are anything more than commercial inventions of Victorian England? What keeps socially aware, politically correct, otherwise educated consumers from seeing that investing in a golden retriever is like buying derivatives from Goldman Sachs, and that saving the brand is like saving the Mars bar?
The answer is often as simple as snobbery, a motivation as old as the hills and an impulse that archaic institutions are vested in preserving. A Matter of Breeding is a critical social history of the dog fancy in England and America, an odyssey of wonder and disbelief. This does not pretend to be a scientific study, but plenty of those are waiting just keystrokes away from anyone who really wants to know. Combined herein are years of observation of people and pets in places public and private with as many years of research in archives underground. I’m eager to share my mystification over (1) how dogs came to occupy their wide array of shapes, sizes, and coat colors; (2) who decided how they had to look and for what elaborate reasons; (3) what possesses people to continue respecting their questionable judgment today; and finally (4) the price dogs have had to pay for living up to misplaced priorities. Breeds as we know them on sidewalks and green carpets didn’t fall from the sky. They were deliberately designed and packaged for appeal, like any other luxury products. Applying the same baseless biases to humans would invite charges of shallowness, callousness, racism, or insanity. Imposing stringent but unnecessary standards on dogs is what dog lovers think they’re doing in their best friends’ best interests.
The history is here, some old and some recent, for readers to decide how much has changed. “It is very pleasing to have a new suit, a new car, a new wife, and it loses much unless you are able to exhibit it,” as English historian Edward Ash explained in 1934 the timeless appeal of “fancy” pets—the reason they were invented in the first place.8 Another noted English authority cut closer to the heart of the matter when he wrote: “I somehow never feel the same respect for a man who allows himself to be accompanied by a badly-bred cur, for dog and master are so often of one type.”9 His fashion advice in the 1890s: “Nobody who is anybody can afford to be followed by a mongrel dog.”10 Director Christopher Guest confirms this observation while explaining his inspiration for Best in Show: “I noticed a real dynamic that existed between owners and their pets. The pure-breds looked down on our mutts in the same way their owners looked down on us.”11
Dogs are not science experiments, artworks, or historical artifacts with traditions to uphold. They live very much in the here and now, which is where our hearts and minds ought to be. Our dear friends have faced avoidable health problems for some time, and while these have grown to extremes, none of this is news. What’s changed is how we value our companion species, after taking a wrong turn about a hundred fifty years ago, and how far we feel we can fairly bend them to please us. If only it were possible to step back and recall falling in love with our first puppy, before the fussbudgets told us why.
I leave you with a final word from a leading British authority on matters canine, his expert advice to Americans back in 1875 when we were still acquiring our taste for show rings, rosettes, and aping English royalty. That same fine gentleman who advised against wearing the wrong dog in public warned in no uncertain terms: “The market-price of a mongrel is the price of his hide, minus the value of the rope you buy to hang him.”12
Now, how do you suppose we should respond—knowing what we do?
CHAPTER ONE
THE ENGLISH VICE
Inserting the key, I could already hear the sound of whimpering from somewhere deep inside the apartment. Two strained yaps barely penetrated the darkness as I stood in the entry feeling the wall for a light switch. I’d been working as a dog walker for years and there was something not quite right about this. Normal puppies were energetic and unstoppable when I arrived to give them their midday walks. They barked and clawed and I couldn’t open the cages and attach their leashes fast enough to rush them outside before an accident happened on the nearest rug. The dog I was about to liberate didn’t sound average at all. He was too reserved, or maybe something was holding him back. Pathetic yelps were muffled and punctuated by unsettling silences. This pup knew very well that I was in the apartment and tried to react but seemed to be struggling for breath. His snorting, coughing, and wheezing accelerated as I slid my hand along the wall, stepping carefully into the living room where indirect light paved my way, then moving down a dark hall into the kitchen. Still no light switch, though I could make out the grey outline of a cage. The creature gave all his strength to the next cry before this tapered off into a strange gurgling sound. Then silence.
Bob the baby bulldog had his own personal way of expressing happiness, and the cartoon noises resumed in full force as I approached the oblong box at the back of the room. I couldn’t see the dog yet but knew him from our first meeting a few nights before. A five-month-old English bull, one of the more popular breeds these days, Bob looked just like any other of the dozens of his kind I passed each day along tree-lined streets with brownstone stoops. He had that same distinctive look, centuries of selective breeding having led him far astray of his ancestor the wolf. Wide, bulging eyes frightened other dogs on the street. Expressive folds of skin draped his opulent forehead. Ears drooped as they never would dare in nature. The snout was collapsed like a child’s nose pressed against a pet shop window. This brute looked all muscle, but he didn’t seem to be a survivor. The massive frame, sumo-wrestler shoulders, and truck driver’s neck brought to mind his two gay dads who had obviously spent a good portion of their lives pumping up at the local gym. This dog was pear-shaped, only upside down like his man-parents. He had that “waspish waist” said to be distinctive to the breed over a century ago. Also like his dads, Bob had muscles that were purely cosmetic. In fact, he barely had the strength to walk. Even more extravagant than his frame, his super-sized skull was larger than life, completely out of proportion to his body.
Preposterous heads are one of the most prized features on this breed and are encouraged despite all the health complications created by such an extreme anatomy. Long before Bob was born, the standard skull for bulldogs had expanded to such proportions that Cesarean birth was the only way out for them, and mating had also become an unnatural act. Manly hips, on males and females alike, were made extremely narrow by inbreeding to accentuate the larger upper half of the body, making artificial insemination a normal practice. The imposing physique, like the muscle-magazine bodies on his two gay dads—together measuring no more than eleven feet high, and deflating like hot-air balloons the moment these guys opened their mouths—somehow didn’t seem threatening. The short and stumpy legs would make this little fellow “bear meat” in any woodland setting, and the sudden, slapstick motions that people find so entertaining distracted from the fact that he had trouble moving at all.
Still, you had to love this dog, and his two dads, perfectly nice people who spent endless hours at the gym but lacked the self-discipline to resist going with the crowd. They clearly worshipped their new designer-label puppy with all their hearts, and with genuine love. A few nights before, when I came for the interview, they were sitting on opposite ends of a high-end, state-of-the-art living room praising precious, disabled Bob for hobbling back and forth between his two jacked dads as they took turns calling out his name. I, too, took some sort of perverse pleasure in watching the challenged pup struggle more than a five-month-o
ld should to move only a few feet. All three of us laughed and cheered as he huffed and puffed like the Little Engine That Could. I knew that his long list of handicaps could have been prevented—Bob could not have been born—and yet the familiar story of ambition in the face of adversity always sells. I’d try laughing again, a few days later, as the small, tightly packed pooch popped out of his cage with a cannonball thrust, then slowed to a waddle halfway across the kitchen floor and labored to raise his concrete head high enough to look at me with those startling bloodshot eyes. In his cage were three piles of half-digested food he couldn’t hold down from breakfast. I would clean up the mess when we got back. For the moment, we had a schedule to keep. I’d been instructed to give the dog water before our walk because he was often dehydrated from all the vomiting. But even the liquid might come up in the elevator, and so I’d been told to carry paper towels.
There’s nothing quite like the sound of a bulldog drinking. The sickening sound effect made by the pitiful mutant golden retriever in The Fly II as he sucks up gruel is the closest anything comes. After Bob’s long, slurpy inhalation from the porcelain bowl bearing his name, I reached down to slip an impressive black-leather studded harness over his beefcake frame. Then came the mad rush to the sidewalk, twelve floors and a slow elevator ride below. Bob was getting better at “holding it,” but he didn’t always make it to the curb on 23rd Street. Trying to hurry, I passed the kitchen counter and couldn’t help marveling at an extensive collection of bottles, jars, and cans in all shapes and sizes. Here was the power center of this home. Protein powders, steroids, energy elixirs, all sorts of muscle-building concoctions for his dads, and about a dozen other products I couldn’t make out, were mixed indiscriminately among the dog’s hundreds of pills and potions. Prescriptions for Bob’s endless list of ailments had the familiar brown label of a local animal hospital. My morbid curiosity satisfied, I guided Bob toward the hall, remembering the warning about possible seizures. His owners had assured me that, like his inability to hold down food and water, or to walk more than a few feet at a time without resting, fainting was normal and I shouldn’t be alarmed and go dragging this dog to the vet for every little thing.
Turning the corner out of the kitchen with my charge tagging faithfully far behind, I caught a last ray of morning light that streamed through a back window. A blade of fire cut across the length of the room only to land mundanely in the sink. In the deepest recesses, at the bottom near the drain, a bowl was tilted to one side where it had been left unwashed after a hurried meal. Floating in a puddle of milk, as though positioned at center stage by the sun’s golden spotlight, was a huge, waterlogged wheat flake, the remains of a breakfast of champions, hideously bloated and freakishly deformed.
Any writer not gay himself would never get away with poking fun at the fads and fashions that come out of homo heavens like the few square blocks in Manhattan known as Chelsea. I live only a few blocks away, and share the sexual preference, but the comparison stops there. The whole place seems alien to me. As in so many trendsetting gay neighborhoods, the outward forms of things are forever changing at a dizzying pace. It’s hard to keep up with the mutating facades of buildings, the restocked shop windows and refurbished front lobbies, the new clothes on the street. If I weren’t a dog walker carrying keys to a large number of apartments in this neighborhood, I might have been stuck in the 1980s as my nearby Greenwich Village apartment still is. Being constantly on the move gave me an educated eye. Every few years, I learned, any self-respecting Chelsean is required to redecorate, to change his wardrobe—and his mind. Food that wasn’t edible yesterday is suddenly a staple. This year’s designer drugs will soon share the fate of last year’s variation on a boxer brief. And it’s not just the appendages that mutate. Entire bodies come and go. After decades of allowing the slender, androgynous type, everyone was expected to beef up and look like a Marine. Smooth, hairless chests reigned supremely for a time, then body hair was back and “treasure trails” were carefully sculpted with razors by men who didn’t have them naturally. Heads were buzzed clean for the “Dachau look”—a style that soon caught on across corporate America—only to grow into plush seventies shags with blond highlights before anyone had noticed. Silly and arbitrary as all this rapid change might seem to naive outsiders, it would be a mistake to underestimate this gay ghetto’s influence. Oddly enough, a minority of people considered far from normal ultimately determine what is au courant in the outside world. So many outward aspects of being average are decided in this place, and by the time something has reached Boise, it’s already socially unacceptable in Chelsea.
The same rule applies to tastes in dogs, which are in a constant state of flux. That’s how Bob got here, and only recently. Not long ago, the cute and feisty Jack Russell terrier was the breed of choice for trendsetters. The Frasier show featured one of these misleadingly sweet, tightly wound time bombs that managed to resemble puppies their entire lives. Being forever young and toylike was their gay appeal, but even Peter Pan pets were short-lived. Soon these dogs du jour grew old and tired, and along came the foxy Shiba Inu, which was sleek, chic, and Japanese—only to be displaced by the lean, mean, athletic basenji, billed as the wild dog of Africa. The whole tundra story was a sham. The breed was a calculated cross between several domesticated dogs, but a mix that the gay boys found compelling and the nation soon learned to love. Little do people know that the feral ruggedness of the breed, like the manly silence of a dog that didn’t bark, expanded in our eyes only after my straight model friend, Richard, and his basenji named Gunner, were plastered to the sides of city buses in an ad for Canali suits in the year 2000. After that campaign, all of Chelsea decided that if it couldn’t have Richard, then it would have to settle for his dog.
The exotic basenji sat for a few years in the limelight, and then along came the French bulldog, a kind of transition to Bob. The more continental version of a bulldog was less blunt and bullish, more delicate and refined, like a young English gentleman returning from his grand tour with breeding and a fake accent. Only recently had the inelegant English bull, created before the French-ified model, returned to the cutting edge when I arrived in Bob’s apartment that afternoon. Who knew how long this dog would be in style? Thick and top-heavy with wads of folded skin, and faces that only a mother—or Bob’s dads—could love, these creatures began emerging from fashionable homes at about the same time as the release of a popular gay coffee table book, the one in the living room as we passed, conspicuously displayed and stuffed with torrid photos depicting Spanish matadors and their bulging crotches.
The English bulldog has always been a sort of freak-show oddity, even though it’s been the national dog of that island nation for centuries. Across the pond where Anglophiles were eager to imitate, the breed became the official mascot for Yale’s football team in the 1880s, possibly due to its resemblance to the players.1 The bull remains a breed apart, not only owing to its tough, hulky appearance, but because of the original use still preserved in the name. Other dogs were bred to herd sheep, hunt birds, haul carts, or guard children. Not Bob’s ancestor. Believed to have been born of a mastiff and a terrier of some sort in the sixteenth century, this stubborn, allegedly fearless hybrid was conceived, like some “creature of a diseased imagination,”2 as one critic put it, for one reason and one reason alone: to entertain. This performer’s role was to fight a tethered bull, to lock his powerful jaws on its screaming face, ideally on the snout, and to hold on tightly, legend says, sometimes for hours until the poor beast suffocated in its own blood.
Tall tales aside, bulldogs really did fight bulls and were, indeed, bred to approach a restrained animal face-to-face, unlike wolves that attack running prey from behind—that is, if they weren’t kicked in the head first. Most surprising is not the fact that bull baiting was allowed to go on for several centuries and was avidly pursued by Englishmen of all classes, but that it is socially acceptable even today for anyone to harbor a latent nostalgia for the ghastly game.
For reasons not quite explained, people who are normally opposed to violence and to animal cruelty find the breed charming. Even vegans, who won’t drink cow milk and shy away from leather Hush Puppies, are allowed to retain a soft spot for a dog designed to be nothing less than a celebration of bullish bloodlust. Dog breeding as a whole, as we’ll see in chapters to come, is a favorite hiding place for values and beliefs we’re no longer supposed to have.
Despite all high-minded ideals to the contrary, this ugly appetite for pitting dogs against bulls was indulged without reservation or apology since medieval times in England. Before bull baiting was outlawed by an act of Parliament in 1835, it was the national sport among a people said to have rivaled all others in its love for brutal animal hobbies. In retrospect, Spanish bullfights look like puppy mixers compared to the elaborate shows once staged for the elevation of the national character, as Lord Canning and anti-abolitionist William Windham defended the heinous practice about to be banned amidst fierce resistance.3 Dog fanciers, people who are today considered lovers and protectors of animals, were in those days the very opposite. These were the spectators who gambled on the outcome of events and who cheered as flesh was torn, bones were crushed, and agonized cries filled the air. Right up until the nineteenth century when dog shows as we know them first appeared, “fancier” meant “bettor.”
Before the breed learned to sit prettily for judges and resist the impulse to grab onto a leg, it was actually expected to do something for a living, if only “to bayte and take the bull by the eare, when occasion so requireth,” as England’s original hound historian, John Caius, prescribed.4 This dog took his job very seriously. As in “pit bull” (not an official breed but perceived as one) fighting today, high wagers were staked on a dog’s brute force and blind courage that bordered on stupidity. Bulldogs were encouraged to be mad fighting machines that would stop at nothing to subdue and kill their opponent. They were believed to be unthinking, which was considered a virtue in their line of work. Was this the hallmark of British national character that had to be preserved at any cost? As one enthusiast remarked, it was “the diminution of the brain” that was the breed’s most desirable quality. The skull or brain box was overly large, but the organ inside was believed to be somehow diminutive. “The cerebral capacity of the Bulldog is sensibly smaller than in any other race, and it is doubtless to the decrease in the encephalon that we must attribute its inferiority to all others in everything related to intelligence. The Bulldog is scarcely capable of any education and is fitted for nothing but for combat and ferocity.”5 This manmade monstrosity was presented as a sort of canine Sylvester Stallone with a Cockney accent. Bets were taken on how many of these thoughtless soldiers would have their backs broken when angry bulls flung them into the hysterical crowd surrounding Westminster pit. One of many forums where animals of all species were turned against each other and forced into mortal combat, this most famous theater of cruelty, coincidentally, had the same name as a prestigious dog show that takes place each year in New York City, and to a crowd of cheering millions around the world.
A Matter of Breeding Page 2