A Matter of Breeding
Page 23
Luckily for the squeamish, this harrowing tale doesn’t end in tragedy. A harmless nonhuman bred to be a poseur, not a fighter—in fact, the only party minding her own business that day because she was physically incapable of doing much more than sit and snort—wasn’t sacrificed for a disagreement over coat color or ear shape. “Margot” didn’t suffer too dearly for being seen with the Right People in between the wrong places. But at the end of a day of bitter class conflict, who’s to blame if pooches are, indeed, hurt for standing or sitting in the crossfire? Onlookers feel slighted and want to knock flashy high hats down a few notches, even if they must plow through their canine accessories first.
“He who meanly admires mean things” was Thackeray’s definition of a snob in “The Snobs of England, by One of Themselves.”2 In other words, anyone who buys into the snobbish way of thought by taking the outward signs of pride and prejudice too seriously and then getting nasty is just as bad as the next person and every bit as snooty. The firemen trying to take out their class consciousness on a house pet were no nobler than the owner who taunted them with his wealth and social standing. Likewise, the author of the present irreverent volume might even be tortured into a confession of reverse snobbery, but we can agree: dogs are always innocent, even if people are not. And no dog, no matter how inbred, sickly, freakishly deformed, or mentally feeble, deserves to die for being an unwitting status symbol.
Yet however shocking and appalling these tales of retaliation, it should come as no surprise that by carefully twisting and pulling elastic beasts into things they were never meant to be, we have carelessly placed them in harm’s way. There’s simply no denying that coddled canines have been forged for centuries into unnatural shapes, sizes, and coat colors—forced into stylized behaviors extracted from the wolf and exaggerated to the point of parody. As we’ve seen, dogs have been inbred to wear royal crests, lion manes, ermine robes, and tuxedo jackets. They’ve been made to trot like royal horses, walk with regal bearing, hobble on Queen Anne legs, clown like court jesters, retrieve like black pages, and point at what they can’t be bothered getting themselves. Bogus breeds have been whipped up like artists’ conceptions based on aristocratic ancestors that are but distant relations, no relation at all, or never existed—like the so-called “Cavalier King Charles spaniel,”3 “Queen Elizabeth Pocket Beagle,”4 “Pharaoh hound,” “Chinese crested,” and, another counterfeit, the “golden retriever.”
It should be obvious by now that fancy dogs were deliberately designed as insignias of class, ancestry, racial purity, national identity, and any other false claim to privilege purveyors could concoct. This was the original intent and appeal of “purebreds” from the first shows of the nineteenth century. To claim that dogs weren’t painstakingly repackaged to carry on elitist traditions or that pet preferences are neutral and innocuous expressions of personal taste is to be in denial. Status has always been the main attraction, and most recognized breeds paraded around show rings give people more ways to win blue ribbons and silver cups, to stand with distinction in the public square, or extend their own stumpy family trees.
Tragically for the dogs themselves, the envy of onlookers sometimes gives way to anger. What’s surprising is how rarely mean-spirited snootiness provokes the socially insecure into lowering themselves to taking action. The assault on Kernochan and his ostentatious quadruped isn’t the only time a pet was asked to pay a price for its social ties. This unkind altercation was polite compared to the civil strife, economic crises, revolutions, and wars that have been tougher on canine Mini-Me’s than breedists want to be reminded. While Kernochan was provoking a group of earthy laborers with an item beyond the reach of mere mortals and about to begin tearing up farms by fox hunting on Long Island, an ardent dispute over land ownership was placing hounds in harm’s way back on the British Isles. Angered to see their livelihoods threatened by the kingly sport, English farmers decided to protect their crops with hostile barbed-wire fencing, spoiling a day’s pleasure and hurting any hunters, hounds, and horses that passed. Neighboring Irish were no less irate over the constant reminder of oppression from afar this “truly British pastime” of fox hunting truly was. Saboteurs fudged defining moments of Anglophile sportsmen by poisoning entire packs of their finest pedigreed foxhounds.
“There was never a time when dogs were responsible for more class hatred than at the start of the nineteenth century,”5 writes canine historian Carson Ritchie, referring to the tightening of game laws in England where hunting rights continue to reflect a certain classism.6 In the years leading up to canine beauty pageants, “even possession of a sporting-dog by a poor Irishman might lead to a conviction for poaching, while in England, laws were equally severe.”7 Foxhounds were friendly compared to the bullmastiffs designed to look and act intimidating while guarding vast estates and deer parks of the landed class from trespassers. The breed came to symbolize class distinction and privilege.8 Hoity-toity hench hounds, bred and trained to detain by an arm or a leg, got a bad rap from hungry locals, and along with the master’s gamekeepers, these ungentle giants were shot by organized gangs who believed every man had a natural right to hunt and feed his family. By forbidding generations of commoners from owning certain types, and taking dogs by force so they alone could find protein, upperclassmen drew unflattering attention and acquired a backlog of resentment.
Beyond the British Isles, dogs have been no less harshly abused because their masters misused them. There were roundups and burnings of pets during the French Revolution, and in Italy, Bernabò Visconti, born to one of Europe’s oldest families, set a bad precedent by making his poor subjects pay for the upkeep of his five thousand royal greyhounds.9 Spain was another fertile ground for cyno-snobbery and spite. One forgotten hobby of the Inquisition, Mark Derr reminds us, was its careful approach to breeding. “Spain at the time was fixated on the concept of blood purity, limpieza de sangre, which its soldiers and priests applied to humans as well as animals.”10 Antique hound historian René Merlen attributes anti-canine sentiment in the Hebrew tradition to some lingering anger against former Egyptian masters who deified their pets but didn’t value the lives of ordinary people.11 More recently, “bloodhounds” got their name, not from the trail of Southern slave blood they followed, but from the “pure” substance said to be flowing in their veins.
Members of any canine class can suffer when classes take up arms against one another. “It was not a good idea, apparently, with tempers still running high, to walk a dog that was the symbol of a fallen cause,” said Roger Caras, referring to Holland’s early attempt at nationalism in the eighteenth century. The Keeshond was named after revolutionary dog owner, Kees de Gyselear. After a failed coup in 1787, the breed was marked by its previous owner and shunned by the reigning House of Orange, which preferred pugs.12 During Russia’s revolution, borzois, aristocratic hounds in near-identical pairs with matching coats, used to hunt wolves, were singled out by Bolsheviks and systematically snuffed along with their easily spotted masters. The borzoi was driven to near extinction—if that’s the proper term for discontinuing a product of artificial selection—for its ties to the ruling class, which had exclusive right of ownership.
As for Chinese payback, no one can say exactly what became of those “sleeve dogs” not siphoned off to pay an empress’s dry-cleaning bills for ensembles they were bred to match. All but a few in the imperial kennels are said to have been destroyed in 1912,13 but lacking evidence of an all-out Pekingese pogrom, legends of using palace pooches to humiliate subjects at court, even executing dog-nappers, didn’t inspire much puppy love. Considering China’s track record on inhumane behavior, it seems likely that at least a few Pekes and members of other doggy dynasties were used in venting rage against reminders of the old regime. A tax on useless pet dogs—versus the eating kind—was levied in 1947. The Communist Party considered them a “symbol of decadence and a criminal extravagance” and banned luxury dogs from entire cities.14 “Those who are against Chairman Mao wil
l have their dog skulls smashed into pieces” is popularly remembered as a rallying cry of the Cultural Revolution. Though pet ownership is quickly catching on among a new breed of capitalist—like that Chinese developer who recently bought the world’s most expensive dog—tokens of the bourgeoisie don’t fare well when impromptu rabies scares send mobs into streets clubbing them to death by the hundreds of thousands.
In the same vein, much of the appeal of Cuba’s famous Havanese dogs is the claim that untold numbers were put down when upper-class patrons took flight for Miami, saving their necks and leaving best friends to fend for themselves—and making these dogs more rare and enticing. These fragile, fluffy inheritors of the past have only recently had their thrones restored by counterrevolutionary snobs in the United States and Europe, where they’re becoming more desirable by the day. Romania’s extermination of Transylvanian hounds and Hungarian greyhounds, pooch purges in Estonia, Poland, Czechoslovakia—upper-class canines often share the same fate as those Cuban canines left behind.15
By the early twentieth century, English anger against anything Teutonic had been simmering, and World War I was a good excuse for settling an old score. At least one defenseless dachshund was destroyed, stoned to death in the English town of Berkhamsted, for being born with the wrong papers.16 Dachsies were officially dropped by Crufts in 1915 as a public show of patriotism, and were shunned across the kingdom in the interwar years.17 They were renamed “liberty hounds” in the United States, where sauerkraut became “liberty cabbage”18 (a forerunner to “freedom fries” in post-9/11 America, where a fad for French bulldogs has developed despite the recent rise in anti-French feelings).
The English had a tick against another German breed, the German shepherd, a point of pride for its homeland and Hitler’s last friend. The breed was appropriated in 1911 and redubbed “Alsatian” after the disputed territory. The name was not returned to its original owners, in either English or Continental dog shows, until the 1970s. A similar makeover was given to the British crown in 1917, when, to avoid any unbecoming resemblance to the barbaric tribe, the House of Sachsen-Coburg und Gotha was christened House of Windsor, currently better known for its ties to corgis and pugs.
After the dachshund’s brief nosedive in wartime America, the slow acceptance of another Axis breed, the Akita, provides another interesting tale of doggy borders. Said to have first set paws on American soil as a Seeing Eye dog to Helen Keller in 1937, the breed was followed by reinforcements in 1956, when occupational forces returned with Japanese loot on leashes. Still, the Akita was not recognized as a breed by the AKC until 1972.
On no occasions do dogs feel more pressure to bear human enmities or pick up the tab for fickle friends than during hard economic times, when keeping them as pets can no longer be justified. Forged into useless household items, the vast majority of purebreds stand out as shameful signs of excess and waste when thriftiness is in style. Wartime food rationing has pushed many breeds to the brink of extinction. “Crufts closed its doors during the years 1917–21,” writes Katharine MacDonogh in Reigning Cats and Dogs, “when food shortages made the very idea of exhibiting toy dogs tasteless.” Even royalty risked public wrath for not complying with short-lived disapprovals of showiness, and “British monarchs kept a progressively lower profile and rarely exhibited. They also began to eschew ‘foreign’ breeds, electing to keep such ‘British’ breeds as Clumbers and Labradors—neither of which was of British origin—and cairns and corgis, both quintessentially national breeds.”19 Commoners’ companions haven’t fared as well as royal favorites, and during World War II hundreds of thousands of British dogs, and pets of all kinds, were put down by their owners due to food rationing.20
Peacetime economic woes are often as hard on hounds because disposable luxury items are the first to go when times are tough. Fair-weather friends decide they can no longer afford kibble or perhaps have lost their homes, as seen in the recent spike in abandonment rates and the wholesale euthanasia carried out in overcrowded shelters across the United States.21 How could over-the-top admirers find so much of their identities in pets one moment, then casually discard them as “just dogs” the next? “Why the schizophrenic gap?” asks Elizabeth Marshall Thomas.22 Contradictions can be traced, in large part, to having dogs for the wrong reasons. Half-baked notions of nobility, purity, trainability, and beauty don’t stand up to scrutiny or stress and are easily shed in times of crisis. Sales pitches fall short of promises, and buyers fall out of love.
More recently—but backward enough to make us wonder if these people are kidding or what—a vast array of ancillary products have splintered from this quaint notion of upholding pedigrees. In the age of DNA, cotton-swab sampling, Ralph Lauren, and Ancestry.com, the many goods and services aimed at encouraging delusions of grandeur in humans have their closely related canine clones. An astounding assortment of props, trinkets, cheap tricks, and sealed certificates are placebos for the socially insecure, and as long as the prices are kept sufficiently high to make the advertising claims sound believable, they continue to find buyers. How much do you love your dog? The website ilovedogs.com offers a $3.2 million jeweled dog collar called the “Amour, Amour.” Among other items priced at seven figures and more, this was dubbed “the Bugatti of dog collars” by Forbes. “The 52-carat Amour, Amour is the ‘World’s Most Expensive’ dog collar.” That will show the world how much a dog is loved. For less-favored pups, Louis XV–style dog beds from Paw Printz Pet Boutique sell for a mere $24,000, and custom-made doggy mansions start at $10,500. Descending the love ladder, there’s the Royal Dog Poncho, the Royal Stewart Tartan Dog Coat, the Royal Dog Gate, the Windsor Castle Royal luxury dog bed (also available in Scottish Inn and Gramercy Park styles), and the Pet Royal King Costume for Small Dogs (complete with red cape, scepter, and ermine-trimmed crown). The upscale Pacific Urns company provides “Unique Jewelry Cremation Designs for People and Pets” determined to live on after they’re gone, and the Hammacher Schlemmer catalog offers a do-it-yourself “Canine Genealogy Kit” to help you narrow your dog’s ancestry to a few noble breeds (not included are red arrows marking the inherited health problems that plague each of the noble canine families). “Wear your bragging rights!” urges an ad from Perpetua Life Jewels for custom pendant vials displaying strands of “your special Dog’s unique DNA.”
Oddly enough, the DNA revolution of recent years and the marvelous advances made possible by science seem to be frightening people in the opposite direction. Much in the way that agricultural progress in the nineteenth century inspired a counterrevolutionary fad for breeding farm animals to be beautiful—leading to dog shows as we know them—new knowledge is encouraging an old retreat to more comforting thoughts of blood purity, racial superiority, and class distinction, ideas with a powerful draw that many people don’t want to abandon.
Studies on canine health don’t consider the human, or cultural, factor—the subject of this book—that’s kept us from improving dogs as much as we might. Heads buried in family closets and digging for old bones, stalwart breedists showed heroic determination in the eighties, nineties, and naughties by escorting their royal corgis and Labs along the sidewalk runway. Sights set high, they ignored some pretty gruesome musculoskeletal defects gathering along the way. They were not thwarted by new studies showing soaring cancer rates or hip dysplasia as high as 73 percent in golden retrievers, which didn’t discourage sales of that breed from skyrocketing during those very same years.23 Rin Tin Tin retains a place in the AKC’s top-ten pantheon despite famously failing health.24 Diehards haven’t been daunted by the swelling body of evidence that something is terribly wrong with many brands of choice, or the chance that maybe dog owners play a role in nurturing a health crisis by buying into it. The daily appearance of the neighborhood bulldog, dachshund, or Lab on wheels has only strengthened their mission to support their favorite types at any cost.
The fact that breedism can be traced to eugenics may be too close for comfort among champions of p
edigree dogs. But like it or not, past and present merge to show that even, or especially, the most educated and advantaged people ignore the big picture when self-image is in the balance. This ongoing tradition of linking random appearance and contrived ancestry to accidents of birth is codified and preserved in the very standards “the best of the best” are held up against at Westminster and Crufts to represent us in the best light. Those intricate demands on coat color, skull shape, nose length, ear tilt, tail curvature—or hit-or-miss behavioral ticks people find “predictable” because they make dogs seem less dangerous and dirty—are what make brands appear distinct from others and superior to no-name generics anybody on the street could walk but no one would recognize. Remove breed standards and the royal house of cards comes crashing down.
“The first culling, of course, should be made at birth,” advises the author of The Joy of Breeding Your Own Show Dog, reprinted as recently as 2004, on what to do when pups don’t come out as predicted. “The responsible breeder will raise only those puppies that are correct in color and normal in conformation. Any malformed or mismarked puppies or weaklings should be put to sleep”25—because, after all, who’s going to want to buy a dog that doesn’t meet its breed standard? One of the more arresting points made by the BBC documentary Pedigree Dogs Exposed was that in “cosmetic culling” breeders are selecting for traits that are, in many cases, neither correct nor normal but in fact deformities with serious health consequences. Healthier but substandard littermates are sacrificed for mutants, which as in ancient times are revered as sacred. Symmetrical ridges on Rhodesians, equidistant spots on Dalmatians—the practice of culling for looks presumably goes on less now than in the past, though no one was ever fond of discussing this dirty business in public, and even the Humane Society has no statistics on the subject.