A Matter of Breeding

by Michael Brandow

  The pedigreed pair of Boston terriers were no credit to their ancestors. The slightest jingle of my keychain was enough to catapult them into a bloody rampage against what they knew not, a senseless diurnal fury that was tough to contain. I’d been nipped a few times while trying to protect them from themselves, though none of their anger was directed at me. Having known the frisky, snorting sisters with their weird, alien-antenna ears for years, I’d seen their sweeter side. These spirited spitfires were all over each other because they loved me too much. Competing for my affection, before I could cross the threshold and dispense that precious commodity, was no different from the way more balanced dogs might fight over other vital resources, like food or water—flattering for me, and good business for the vet, but unsuitable for apartment living.

  Marge and Eunice’s mom and dad, away all day in their respective office cubicles, were painfully aware of their dogs’ slight behavior problem. “The girls,” as they called them, put on the exact same performance each time they too tried to enter. These weren’t supposed to be guard dogs. On the contrary, one of the original selling points for the breed was the claim that it wouldn’t bark too much around the house (the American Kennel Club never said anything about them trying to kill each other if someone came to the door). Marge and Eunice were an overly enthused welcoming committee. The prospect of a visitor was simply too exciting for them to handle with their inbred temperaments and exaggerated under-bites, and corrective surgery wasn’t very promising. Several years prior to my arrival that day, a trainer had been hired to take some business away from the vet. But my clients couldn’t bring themselves to take his professional advice and keep these littermates, together since birth, in separate rooms all day waiting, first for me to come and walk them, then for their mom and dad to return in the evening. Forcing close siblings into utter and inconsolable solitude for six or eight hours at a time, they’d decided, was simply too cruel, even if it meant the girls could no longer savage each other. The trainer was promptly let go. The dogs went on ripping and gnashing for years to come, and the owners accepted this nonsense as normal for the breed. The battle resumed like clockwork when I arrived, but despite all sights and sounds to the contrary, and no matter what the neighbors down the hall might have thought, these dogs absolutely worshipped each other. Ears were shredded and tails abridged, but Marge and Eunice always reunited after a hard day of fighting. Curled up at the foot of the parental bed, they spent hours licking each other’s wounds and celebrating their mutual love—tough love, but love just the same.

  I hurried to unlock that door and burst into the dark apartment grabbing them by their matching pink rhinestone collars. Once their wild rage had all but evanesced, Marge and Eunice were left standing dumbly, with no idea of what they had been fighting about. I cautiously loosened my grip, gauging where their heads were before setting them free.

  Contemplating an intricate weave of love bites as I hitched the two dogs and led them down the hall, layer upon layer of scar tissue on war-torn backs of black and white, I had before me a breed not much older than a century. Difficult to believe, the strange creature we’ve come to call a Boston terrier was once the all-American dog, the most popular breed in the nation—that is, until it was bumped for the German shepherd, who had to move over for the cocker spaniel, who conceded to the beagle, superseded by the poodle, who then got ousted so the cocker spaniel could enjoy another moment in the sun before being demoted by the Labrador retriever, who reigns supremely in homes across the country. The Boston’s rise and fall shows how radically pet preferences and the precise ways we expect dogs to look change for no apparent reason, at least no good one, like any other passing fashion. The Boston no longer enjoys the honor of being on the AKC’s list of top ten for registrations, though the breed is showing signs of new life. Dethroned and living in marginality since the 1930s, this dog returned as a favorite accessory again in the 2000s. The breed is said to be a blend of virile English bulldog softened with hues of the Frenchie and highlighted with flashy accents of the sporty but sterile and deafness-prone English white terrier (now extinct, for obvious reasons).

  The Boston terrier made its debut in the 1890s as the “American gentleman” breed, referring to both the owner and the dog. This was the AKC’s gimmick for promoting its new invention. Here was the club’s own signature model of nonmongrel, a type that it took a direct role in developing and marketing for a rapidly expanding pedigree dog market. The Boston has been billed as the well-dressed gentleman dog for over a century, and the question of how the fancy managed to pull the wool over the eyes of canine consumers is worthy of an entire book. “Gentle,” the AKC’s famous dog man Freeman Lloyd once wrote, describing not Bostons but aristocratic greyhounds and thoroughbred horses, was “a name reserved in a chivalrous age to noble actions and good blood.”1 Thinking of animals, whatever their breeds, as aristocratic took no shorter a stretch of the imagination than believing in social registers and family trees, which Lloyd obviously did. A common variation on “American gentleman” was “Black Satin Gentleman,” more to the point, since the breed was chronically inbred to wear a coat resembling a tuxedo, regardless of a dog’s gender.

  The Boston terrier was the ultimate confusion of species: a dog tailored to look like a human being. The coat, as we’ve already seen, is the main attraction on pedigree pooches, the most likely reason for choosing one breed over another. Could there have been a more fitting costume for the American gentleman breed than evening wear? Set against this elegant attire, the bespoke Boston’s facial expression was “indescribably human,” according to one authority,2 a remark that appealed to prospective pet buyers in search of something more than a run-of-the-mill mutt to represent their households. Getting the dog to look this way wasn’t easy, and the breeders resorted to some colorful extremes to give the Boston the right cut. As we’ve likewise learned, this was not the first Procrustean move made against our best friends.

  For centuries, dogs had been inbred, groomed, and mutilated for any combination of distinctive looks. They’d been assembled ad hoc as patchworks of body parts with coats, legs, tails, necks, heads, and ears inspired by trophy lions, tigers, bears, birds, snakes, hippopotami, and the rest of the royal menagerie. They’d been born Crazy-Glued to vegetation and inanimate objects—ears made to look like roses, vines, ship sails, and buttons, tails resembling chrysanthemums, eyes like almonds, and everything short of having silver spoons in their mouths.

  Dogs picked up a number of items along their way to our hearts, but few people today realize just how much the wolf lost when he moved into the house of Homo status conscious and became what one evolutionary biologist calls “Canis over-familiaris.”3 A domestic dog’s ability to communicate with others of its kind, for example, was impaired without those subtle variations in coat coloring added by nature to enhance body language. Ridiculously plush, curly, or monochromatic fur—or gaudy markings that signaled spending power—flat and immobile faces, inexpressive eyes, glaring teeth, goofy long ears, and stubby or “screw” tails all severely limited what dogs could “say.” Refashioning these poor animals to the point of disability would make it difficult for them to state their intentions to each other, resulting in misunderstanding, fear, and the sort of unnatural aggression that Marge and Eunice displayed daily with their frozen faces and bug eyes. The wolf was stripped of his very practical attire when dogs were designed to signify something altogether different: their owners’ wealth and social standing.

  This custom of forcing dogs to bear the symbols of our pride, this habit of dressing a wolf in man’s clothing, has a long history. The human form had also figured into the dog’s anatomy by the 1890s, and the Boston’s black-and-white coat was hardly the first attempt to impose a dress code on unwitting status symbols. Nor would it be the last. Naturally spotted or piebald coats distinguished early canine landraces from their lupine ancestors, but long before the standardized breed called a “Dalmatian” was invented, upper classes inb
red spotted dogs to wear flecked ermine robes like their patrons, or the trimming on royal crowns. The modern fancy preserves the anachronism in Dalmatians, knowing very well that the look is responsible for congenital deafness in the breed, and that severe depigmentation in animals is linked to nervousness, not to mention the frenzied responses a loud pattern elicits from other dogs.4

  More recently, in the 1950s, the Duke of Windsor tried to pin the “gentleman” title onto his prize-winning pugs by masquerading them in starched white shirt collars and bowties they wore to formal events.5 The collars were detachable from the pugs and no harm was done, but the “shirt” was actually woven onto the Boston terrier. This white portion of a Boston’s markings is due to “Irish spotting,” a not unusual pattern for many breeds and not itself necessarily linked to congenital deafness. But like the white areas on a Dalmatian’s spot-blighted ermine coat, too much “shirt” is a sign of trouble, and even Bostons born with more “perfect” markings are deafness-prone.6 (Marge and Eunice were spared this defect, luckily or unluckily, depending on how well their walker handled those doorway dramas.)

  An animal skin on a human back raises enough sidewalk protest these days. Seeing the opposite on a Boston terrier should raise as many eyebrows. Yet it was this dog’s unusual coat that saved the breed from oblivion on the rag heap of threadbare, no-label mongrels. After a grueling debate in the 1890s over whether to allow the “gentleman” into the registry and baptize him a “purebred,” the powers-that-were decided at the eleventh hour to pass the two-toned tyke through the door and into the pantheon. The Boston’s markings were the deal breaker. Despite the not infrequent deafness handicap, that familiar coat is the very item that established the dog as a breed apart, the Boston’s original claim to distinction.

  Once again, it all comes back to humans. “Black tie” was conceived, not by a dog breeder but by a Savile Row tailor in the 1880s. His Royal Majesty the Prince of Wales had new clothes, and word traveled across the Atlantic to a group of dapper dudes residing in a place called Tuxedo Park, an early gated community and gathering place for Anglophiles calling themselves “The Bluebloods.” From that point forward, any man pretending to the title of “gentleman” would need to dress the part. Thus, the name “tuxedo,” which soon stuck as far as Boston, and the dog born wearing one.

  Anything that made upwardly mobile Americans look lordly was alright by them. The English still enjoyed the upper hand at the end of the nineteenth century. Cultural subservience was a way of life for card-carrying members of America’s upper crust who could afford the best English clothes but were painfully aware that they could have all the money in the world and still not measure up. Men could disguise themselves as gentlemen, but without breeding, they didn’t hold a candle to their English masters. Buying pedigree dogs was one way to get some. While freshly minted moguls self-helped with etiquette manuals and season tickets to the opera, sent their children to British-style boarding schools, and perfected their wardrobes and accents along foreign lines, tapping into their social insecurity was like shooting fish in a barrel for the AKC. New money was visibly nervous. Convincing it that a “purebred” dog with a traceable bloodline was somehow superior to a mongrel with no past was not very difficult.

  But like the self-styled American gentleman who felt a bit awkward in his newly tailored suit, the AKC was still learning its craft. The Crufts dog show, the most prestigious of many competitions held in England each year, was not as old as Westminster with its English-sounding name, but was already a role model for grand American events of this kind. The AKC itself was modeled after the English Kennel Club, though it could boast of no royals on its board of directors. Most of the breeds in American dog shows, moreover, had been either invented or “improved” by the British. They came over on steamships with their standards ready-made, and native fanciers were only too eager to continue improving upon them at home. Breeders, breed clubs, the AKC, and its show-ring judges followed the old recipes faithfully because they still lacked the self-confidence to decide what, exactly, a champion looked like without the expert advice of foreigners. Owning an English breed was like rubbing elbows with royalty. The downside was that dogs competing in American shows were often left at the mercy of visiting English judges whose disapproval could be devastating.

  Some Americans felt they were above showing deference to the English. They decided to go that extra mile and solve their problem in a bluntly American way—they went to England and bought the store. Self-made magnates, when they weren’t collecting foreign castles, monasteries, and statuary in the nineteenth century, were importing entire kennels from the British Isles, piece by piece, including staff and studs. The strategy assured that no one, not even English judges, could question their standing in the ring or out. So it was that J. P. Morgan’s unassailable collies, which he extracted from deep within the hills of Scotland, gave him that added edge back home. The yachtsman of Wall Street slept soundly in the knowledge that his dogs were the finest in the land, at least until another enterprising American with the same idea imported some collies and beat old man Morgan at his own game.

  England’s dog fancy, America’s role model, was also a product of social insecurity. The nineteenth century was an uneasy time for old ruling classes. Aristocrats in Europe and the British Isles were still smarting over the French Revolution when the first dog shows were held. Many of their relatives, after all, had been altered by Procrustean blades of another kind, and socioeconomic change was no less a threat to their way of life. The impoverishment of the old nobility, transfers of land and money to a rising commercial class, and the continual democratization of political institutions were cause for alarm to the powers-that-were. England was not spared the effects of a nonviolent revolution. Shifting status in the fashionable drawing rooms of London brought feelings of instability in 1849 and inspired the first Who’s Who, a list of England’s first families compiled to remind people who they were (or weren’t). Burke’s Peerage and Burke’s Landed Gentry let them know exactly where they stood. Preserving the past became something of an obsession in the nineteenth century when the old ways were changing and the future was up for grabs. A rising interest in genealogy, human and canine, combined with a morbid obsession with taxidermy in the Victorian years were supported by the eugenics movement.

  Across England and Europe, a dying class of impoverished or downsized nobles, often left with little but their titles and taste, was determined to keep a fragment of its former glory by salvaging the glamorous position it still held in popular imagination. It was no coincidence, for example, that a member of the short-lived line of Tweedmouth barons presented the family retriever, a later standardized version of which would be crowned “golden,” to the AKC when this clan was already in decline and selling off the Rembrandts7—and about to leave the Scottish estate in ruins as a shrine for annual pilgrimages to hundreds of identically coated canines.8 Property and privileges went up for auction, but nobles could at least preserve the idea of aristocracy and some respect for tradition by becoming the authoritative experts on “good” bloodlines. A family name could live on, if only through dogs, long after the end of the line.

  Pedigree dog enthusiasts have to blush when they’re reminded of the important role that aristocracy played in repackaging outmoded ideas of lineage and breeding for modern canine consumers. Dog fancying was, in no small way, a form of crown worship. The English fancy was not more than a few years older than the American imitation, but unlike the AKC’s founding fathers with names like Belmont and Mortimer, the key British figures in those early years had pedigrees stretching deep into the past. The royal imprimatur of Queen Victoria gave England’s Kennel Club much of its prestige and helped establish a central authority when any would-be dude in a smock thought he could hold up his dog as a “champion.” The first breed clubs often had kings, queens, princes, princesses, dukes, and duchesses serving on their boards to make sure that only animals with the proper look and the best blood—
subjective ideals though these were—got through. Men like Sir Henry de Trafford, Lord Derby, and Lord Orford were prolific purveyors of breeds, many of which were “preferably called after the breeder.”9 The Kennel Club itself was ruled by the Prince of Wales and his borzois, as it is steered today with HRH Michael of Kent and his black Labs at the helm. Aristocrats were the figures whose preeminence made them the natural consultants when breed standards, the rules which still determine a dog’s outward appearance, were first committed to paper. Where else could the fancy turn but to members of the old elite, who knew better than anyone how to breed “the best to get the best”? So many prototypes had been created or kept by their own ancestors and continued to reside at their enviable family palaces and estates. Overseeing a soon-to-be closed Stud Book was a way of guarding the door, of keeping canine bloodlines “pure,” of preventing mismatings between members of unequal social stations, and of upholding standards of beauty in a world that seemed to grow uglier by the day.

  “‘Royalism’ probably led him to own the same variety as the King,” wrote Lady Wentworth in Toy Dogs and Their Ancestors.10 Breeding and showing were no royal jubilee for the dogs themselves, despite the vow to “improve” them and to “further” their “interests,” according to breed club charters. The whole appeal of pedigrees was as it remains today: no outsiders allowed. Animals logged into a closed Stud Book—in other words, one of those closed populations that account for vast numbers of congenital canine illnesses today—were, like their noble patrons, the products of incest. They were mated to their own fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, and close cousins, a practice that continues to the present day when no new blood is allowed to contaminate the elite. For having been taken under the arm of an inbred aristocracy and its growing legions of imitators, chosen members of the new canine upper crust, not surprisingly, would suffer from crippling deformities and defects similar to those endured by royals. Breeds would develop hemophilia and a host of congenital illnesses. Such is the price of nobility.