Wishful thinking has had such an influence that it took sticklers for DNA years to accept that dogs came from wolves, if only to stop short of reexamining their ideas on blood purity. Canis familiaris, Mark Derr suggests, is itself the result of both “inbreeding and admixture, or mongrelization” of dog wolves and their wolf ancestors, and backcrossing with wolves is an ongoing process that continues to blur the imaginary line between “pure” and “impure” blood, and between dogs and wolves as well.24 Only in 1993 was definitive evidence found to prove a common origin for all dogs,25 and until that time, the purists could deny ties to the shifty creature of the night and invent whatever aristocratic fairy tales they fancied. How, they asked, could a noble animal like the dog be descended from a wolf?
Some cultures have considered the wolf an aristocrat. Ours, for the most part, has not. Quite the contrary, many have tried to prune it from the family tree and cut pedigree dogs out of their rightful inheritance. A “cur” was long believed to be, unlike upper-class dogs, descended from the wolf. Canine blue bloods were seen as separate from mutts, which, like wolves, lacked nobility, and the current definition of a cur, “a mongrel or inferior dog,” remains clear enough. One of the most frequent sales pitches from breeders, and an oath of fealty among fans partial to a breed, is that their brand of choice is as “loyal” toward them as they are for favoring it. This need to see character traits such as loyalty, intelligence, and courage in the animals we let live under our roofs—qualities that noble races surely must possess, or else why would they be so popular?—runs as deep as any other human concern. Wolves, on the other hand, have traditionally been viewed as killers of children and stealers of sheep, unholy beasts with satanic ties that are best avoided. These unwanted intruders were systematically extinguished on the British Isles long before the first dog shows were staged, leaving us with poofed-up pets that wear ribbons and can’t breathe. But if nobility is what consumers crave, dogs aren’t always as noble as they seem. Counter to ongoing claims that breeds are more civilized than mixes, or that golden retrievers are incapable of violence, there’s still a lot more wolf in dogs than people want to admit, and even some disagreement over whether they should be considered separate species.26
“Do not demean him by clothing him in the shapeless shaggy coat of his remote and long forgotten ancestor,” a Pekingese expert declared about a creature that might be many things but never a descendant of the lowly wolf. “Would you like to don the hairy robes of your pre-human existence?”27 Canine consumers aren’t entirely to blame for biases supported by quite a backlog of myth. Prior to modern classification of animals based on the principle of evolution, practically anything seemed possible. For centuries it was widely assumed that dogs took different shapes and sizes by mating with other species. Small terriers were thought to be the progeny of foxes, and larger dogs were said to be descended from bears. Theories like these sound ludicrous and laughable today, but they’re no more unfounded than the notion that a breed is more pure than a mutt, or that a house pet who comes in a golden package with a “hallmark” from the AKC is somehow more regal than one that doesn’t.28 Dogs are an emotional topic, and people haven’t had much time to absorb new evidence and bring their beliefs up to date. Until just yesterday, when modern genetics left less room for creative genealogy—or until someone took the time to read the dates on those breed standards at the kennel clubs—it was acceptable to say that purebred dogs and the ill-born sort were products of very distinct lines. “That all the different breeds of dogs of the present day were descended from the same primitive race, I should deem it preposterous to advance,” wrote Gordon Stables, the same sensitive soul who said that mongrels were only worth the rope required to hang them.29 The pet dog business, the show-ring culture—and a vast veterinary industry built on the genetic havoc that both have wrought like Procrustes with his saws and stretchers—are founded on this crackpot notion that officially recognized dogs are racially superior to dogs that are not.
What goes for Canis nobilis goes manifold for all the minor details supposed to make up a dog’s character. Ever since a lone wolf stood beyond the warm glow of a campfire considering his options in the shadows, our best friends have been shape-shifting. Before they could win blue ribbons, dogs had to win our trust. Dangerous predators were not only expected to act harmless, they had to look the part. That meant being selectively bred to be more like playful puppies than predators, and remaining in a state of arrested development their entire lives because this was how to reassure us. Wolves seemed to adapt by some inner drive. Their foreheads were hammered out to take less severe and angular forms. Piercing eyes, set into great domed skulls, grew wide and “cute.”30 Sharp, sneaky snouts were bashed in and long, conniving teeth were forced together to appear less threatening. The arrogant, prick ears on some dogs dropped into a humble posture never seen in animals prior to human contact (the elephant being the sole exception), exposing their wearers to chronic infections. Tails were raised as no slithering wolf’s ever was, though dogs also learned to lower theirs in submissive displays. Their coats grew softer, and colors were aligned with our ideas on proper attire. Sporting these predictable, often juvenile traits would be as much a part of their job as fighting wars, guarding kings, or more recently, finding suicide bomber victims buried at Ground Zero, a job people assume only a dog that looks precisely like a golden can handle since that’s the breed posing with the fireman in the AKC’s art collection.
For as long as we’ve tried to make nature fit our needs, we’ve had this optimistic belief that all happens for a reason and everything has its place. But nature, like humankind, is not so neat. Domesticated wolves evolved haphazardly in any number of directions. Simultaneously here and there, they branched into “landraces,” or general types of dogs, before becoming the picture-perfect breeds we can’t seem to live without today. These roughly similar animals often performed useful tasks for humans, taking on distinctive physical features sometimes related to their work and environments, but sometimes not. Size, strength, running speed, or coat thickness, for example, were vital concerns for specific tasks performed in particular regions. Selective breeding and geographical isolation combined to create a broad spectrum of dogs. Incidentals like coat color and ear style typically had no practical functions but were perhaps side effects of domestication.31
Yet humans, being superstitious, tended to magnify irrelevant details, just as they tried to impose racial stereotypes on each other. Even farmers, hunters, and warriors, whose lives depended upon dogs and who didn’t have the luxury of finding the perfect pet, were not immune to seeing nonessentials as essential. Perhaps they feared that changing a single detail would upset a fragile balance, and they attributed abstract character traits like loyalty and trustworthiness to something as meaningless as markings. Cultural isolation also served to make dogs different in Egypt, China, and Spain, multiplying misunderstandings on how dogs should be bred to look. Vague likenesses in appearance among landraces weren’t strictly governed by genetic barriers called “breed standards” as they are today. In fact, landraces were mixed and became even less recognizable when shipped across the globe for trade and conquest. Some lost their native ties to the places that had shaped them, and to their original tasks. Dogs were subjected to “gentrification,” as one geneticist calls the movement away from practicality toward esthetics.32 They were valued not only for their outward appearance but also for the class of people seen with them. Canines became luxury items exchanged between courts, commodities with reputations that may or may not have been warranted.
“I really do not understand,” wrote Roger Caras, the former head of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), “how a group of fanciers, whatever their breed, can think of coat length, texture, or color as more important than whether the dogs they are producing eat children or not.”33 Early on, the pedigree dog industry showed an uncanny ability to package and market pets according to the latest fashio
ns. They could spin dogs in any direction, and the eternal quest for noble antecedents, blood purity, and formal perfection offered much leeway. Some people liked their pooches cute and cuddly. Others with exotic tastes preferred a more feral look and found their nobility, not in the dog, but in his ancestor, the wolf!
In a kind of reverse snobbery, the idea was to take what features the modern world had corrupted in dogs and restore them to their rightful positions. Ears went back up, noses grew again, and teeth descended to cartoon lengths that would frighten Little Red Riding Hood. According to the tastes of a few very wealthy canine collectors, the wolf was the essence of purity and the model for aristocratic living. The collie as we know it, for example, was created for the show ring in the nineteenth century and billed as the nearest living descendant of the wolf, a sham with no basis in science or birth records, but one that appealed to a target market. Queen Victoria favored collies of the old type above all breeds, and her royal imprimatur gave any dog by that name historical resonance and stimulated demand for an increased “wealth of coat.”34 J. P. Morgan was among many consumers to fall for the show ring version—a cross of several breeds, including the Gordon setter and the borzoi—paying as much as $4,000 per dog and starting his own royal kennel on the Hudson River, not to mention helping launch a fad that lasted decades.
Other dogs have been dressed in wolf’s clothing. The German shepherd’s imposing demeanor made it the wolf-boy of Westminster, and though DNA points to some backcrossing with wolves, by 2004 tests had shown closer kinship to his neighbors, the mastiff and the boxer a few cages down the aisle, than to either a herding dog (where the AKC has grouped the breed for years) or a wolf. The so-called Ibizan hound and Pharaoh hound were also bred to resemble ancient types, though their roots run about as deep as a bas-relief, probably no more than two hundred years. The Norwegian elkhound, another “primitive” dog, is an even older trick,35 and the multicultural “American Indian Dog” is a pure fabrication. “Perhaps we have given too much space to old lore considering that we have little or no connection with the past in the wolfhounds now being shown,” wrote show judge, James Watson, as early as 1906.36 The large and sinister-looking Irish wolfhound to which he referred was once bred to outsize its ancestor, which legend says it drove to extinction on the British Isles, leaving legions of mental midgets parading in show rings or obsessing over birds and foxes. Wolfhounds went extinct themselves once their job was supposedly done, until the nineteenth century when they were miraculously “resuscitated” by crossing at least three different breeds—and still calling them purebreds.37 Breeders of the so-called Irish wolfhound are gearing up for another comeback, as seen in a television ad where a fine specimen trails faithfully after a Lexus. I’ve passed both of these while dog walking in Central Park.
CHAPTER THREE
ROYAL PRECEDENTS AND RUFF DRAFTS
The doggy elite operates on two dimensions: looks and lineage, both of which have been shown to have some serious flaws. This is how dogs were segregated into commercial breeds, and this is how they are valued today. A far cry from the “canine Olympics” of popular imagination, dog shows are beauty pageants where judges base decisions on questionable pedigrees and random recipes scribbled, in large part, nearly a century and a half ago by English social climbers, then copied verbatim by Americans trying to invent similar honors for their own dogs, and for themselves. Each year, these high-profile events like Westminster and Crufts determine which dogs du jour deserve places in our hearts and homes, and for doing nothing more than looking and sitting pretty on official papers signed and sealed by established authorities.
“We live, I regret to say, in an age of surfaces,” a social climber named Lady Bracknell observed in an Oscar Wilde play when the modern dog fancy was just learning to heel.1 If only the fanciers would have done the same by admitting to shallowness, then leaving it at that. Regret accounts for the elaborate apparatus concocted to cover up tracks, extending the Victorian Age into the present day and making its obsessions our own. This quaint hobby of breeding and showing would be easier to swallow if so much energy didn’t go into investing surfaces with substance and giving the whole affair an air of integrity. This distinctively English pastime of preferring dogs of fair birth and aspect to those of less certain origin with uncharted markings has been eagerly adopted elsewhere because it appeals to some lingering taste for formality and an inability to let go of the past.
Show ring judges on both sides of the Atlantic say they’re interested in both form and function. But what function do noble brows and ancient bloodlines serve in today’s world? Nowhere among the major powers is there such a strong attachment to primitive notions of tribalism and ancestor worship as in England, where prime ministers still praise countrymen for that other gift they’ve made to humankind, a wonderful royal family that serves no purpose but whose lavish lifestyle many subjects don’t mind funding. Just as people use fancy dogs to look special, the English like to see themselves in their figureheads, and others want to see themselves in them. The acclaimed film The King’s Speech owes its wild success to the latest version of the same scenario. Seductive is this image of two men alone in a room, one royal and the other mortal commoner, joking around and arguing on equal footing.
England is a fertile breeding ground for snootiness, a kind of cultural greenhouse for the rest of the world to whom it exports outmoded ideas on class and race that might have withered and died if not for their nurturing. The English have never had an equivalent of the French Revolution. They suffered their titled class to live and let them have their land. They’ve killed their fair share of royals over the centuries, to be sure. But English regicides have been motivated more by politics, religion, and personal tastes in rulers than by any grand scheme to eradicate an entire class of people. While Continental chaos reigned from 1789 onward, émigrés found safe harbor across the Channel until the storm blew over and they returned to Europe to assume their unrightful positions. It happened again at mid-century, a decade before the first large-scale doggy coronations were staged for all to admire. The island nation received the hated classes of France, Germany, and Austria with open arms and treated them as houseguests. An almost fairy-tale belief in princes and palaces kept the English living in the past while others were trying to modernize and get on with their lives. The popular appeal of class consciousness has not faded. English toadies (and their toadies’ toadies around the world) still take time to memorize layer upon layer of social distinctions, then all the rules of protocol for greeting higher-ups according to their rank. Many secretly wish to move up the ladder themselves, sometimes even daring to try. This unchallenged expertise in the intricacies of inequality is a source of national pride, like a Frenchman’s instinctive knowledge of old cheeses, and connoisseurs show no sign of breaking their crusty molds. The English have much of their identity invested in the belief that certain people are simply born better than others, and that if they’re not, a little culturing can produce the most astounding effects.
“And a comfortable thing it is to think that birth can be bought for money,” Thackeray remarked in a series of articles for Punch, a journal of satire known for sparing no one. “So you learn to value it. Why should we, who don’t possess it, set a higher store on it than those who do? Perhaps the best use of that book, the Peerage, is to look down the list, and see how many have bought and sold birth—how poor sprigs of nobility somehow sell themselves to rich City Snobs’ daughters, how rich City Snobs purchase noble ladies—and so to admire the double baseness of the bargain.”2 Thackeray’s irreverent collection, called “The Snobs of England, by One of Themselves,” became The Book of Snobs in 1848 at the very moment popular uprisings sent a second wave of unwanted elite packing its bags in a hurry to abscond to England—and barely a decade before the English began staging dog shows on a grand scale to further bedazzle the world with their breeding abilities. During the great century of upheaval and self-promotion—the nineteenth—noble makeo
vers were common and the British Legion of the Fabulous Few was growing more legion by the day. Social standing was courted precisely because of the illusion that it was so accessible, and joining the anointed was an early version of the American dream. In many ways, the English led the way to the future with science, industry, abolitionism, and the humane movement. But they also kept themselves, and their admirers, mired in the past. Not only was their entitled class tolerated, the proliferation of titles spun out of control from the reign of George III into the Victorian years. While the list of recognized dog breeds was growing by leaps and bounds, and throngs of entries within each canine “class” crowded ever-expanding exhibition halls, humans were herded and sorted along similar lines. From the humblest trades and civil services to the loftiest baronetcies and peerages, offices were enlarged, ceilings raised, and the range of decorations multiplied to meet a spiraling demand. The Industrial Revolution seems a trifle compared to what one historian calls the “honorific inventiveness” of the English.3 Since the 1860s, awards within some categories of social superiority have increased by the thousands, even tens of thousands, prompting Lord Salisbury’s remark that “you cannot throw a stone at a dog without hitting a knight in London.”4 Rock stars and socialists have clamored for royal recognition and gotten what they’ve asked for. A recent ruling has enabled even Americans of English extraction to apply for shields and standards and join what one British journalist calls “the Order of Elitist Anachronism.”5 They get a piece of paper and a visit to Buckingham Palace.
A Matter of Breeding Page 6