A Matter of Breeding
Page 25
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to Catherine Laur White for her input, support, and eternal friendship; Penn Whaling at the Ann Rittenberg Literary Agency and my editors Gayatri Patnaik and Rachael Marks for believing in this book; my many sources for daring to speak the truth; M. J. Kane and members of the Ladies of the Bleeding Heart book group for helping with the title; and all my faithful friends for their encouragement.
Special thanks to a world of dogs for being who you are regardless of breed, creed, or coat color.
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
1. Melinda Beck, “When Cancer Comes with a Pedigree,” Wall Street Journal, May 4, 2010, http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052748704342604575222062208235690; Purdue University School of Veterinary Medicine et al., Golden Retriever Club of America National Health Survey, 1998–1999 (GRCA, 1998), http://www.grca.org; and Pedigree Dogs Exposed, directed by Jemima Harrison, BBC One, August 19, 2008.
2. Mark Derr, “The Politics of Dogs,” Atlantic Monthly, March 1990, http://www.stirlingcollies.com/id133.html.
3. Mark Derr, Dog’s Best Friend: Annals of the Dog-Human Relationship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Stephen Budiansky, “The Truth About Dogs,” Part III: “The Problem With Breeding,” Atlantic Monthly, July 1999, http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/99jul/9907dogs3.htm; Michael Lemonick, “A Terrible Beauty,” Time, June 24, 2001, http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,163404,00.html; Jonah Goldberg, “Westminster Eugenics Show,” National Review, February 13, 2002, http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/205141/westminster-eugenics-show/jonah-goldberg; J. L. Fuller and S. P. Scott, Genetics and the Social Behavior of the Dog (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1965); Advocates for Animals, The Price of a Pedigree: Dog Breed Standards and Breed-Related Illness (Edinburgh: Advocates for Animals, 2006), http://www.onekind.org/uploads/publications/price-of-a-pedigree.pdf.
4. Patrick Burns, “AKC Speeds to Collapse,” Terrierman’s Daily Dose, February 14, 2013, http://terriermandotcom.blogspot.com.
5. “Dog Breeds: The Long and the Short and the Tall,” Economist, February 19, 2009, http://www.economist.com/node/13139635.
6. Fuller and Scott, Genetics and the Social Behavior of the Dog, 405; Patrick Burns, “Inbred Thinking,” Terrierman’s Daily Dose, May 26, 2006, http://terriermandotcom.blogspot.com; Christopher Landauer, “‘Health Testing’ in Dogs Is Limited,” Border-Wars, May 18, 2013, http://www.border-wars.com; Christopher Landauer, “How Linebreeding Causes Disease Expression,” Border-Wars, February 24, 2014, http://www.border-wars.com; Jemima Harrison, “Breeding—Not Bitching—for the Future,” Pedigree Dogs Exposed—The Blog, May 15, 2014, http://pedigreedogsexposed.blogspot.com/2014/05/breeding-not-bitching-for-future.html.
7. Jasper Copping, “Ban ‘Unhealthy’ Dog Breeds, Say Vets,” Telegraph (UK), December 10, 2013, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/petshealth/10508781/Ban-unhealthy-dog-breeds-say-vets.html.
8. Edward Ash, This Doggie Business (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1934), 205.
9. W. G. Stables, The Practical Kennel Guide (London: Cassell Petter and Galpin, 1875), 19.
10. Gordon Stables, “Breeding and Rearing for Pleasure, Prizes, and Profit,” The Dog Owner’s Annual for 1896 (London: Dean and Son, 1896).
11. Louis Hobson, “Guest Shots,” Canoe.ca, October 10, 2000, http://jam.Canoe.ca.
12. Stables, The Practical Kennel Guide, 115.
CHAPTER 1
1. “Handsome Dan” and his successors have a history crowded with health problems. The first dog to hold this office—a creature that looked like a cross between an alligator and a bullfrog—did manage to live to the ripe old age of eleven, quite a feat for the breed. Dan I was stuffed and displayed in a glass case at Yale University’s Payne Whitney Gymnasium where he can be viewed today. Heirs to the throne haven’t fared so well, nor have bulldogs serving as mascots to teams across the country who have imitated Yale’s bad example. Even descendants of multiple prizewinners are prone to heart attacks and retire or expire at a very young age due to hip dysplasia, arthritis, kidney disease, emotional instability, and so on.
2. H. S. Cooper and F. B. Fowler, Bulldogs and All About Them (London: Jarrolds, 1925), 29.
3. R. G. Thorne, The History of Parliament: The House of Commons, 1790–1820, 5 vols. (London: Secker & Warburg, 1986), 622.
4. John Caius, Of Englishe Dogges (Charleston, SC: Nabu Press, 2012; orig. pub. 1576), 25.
5. Cooper and Fowler, Bulldogs and All About Them, 28.
6. William Taplin, The Sportsman’s Cabinet; or, a Correct Delineation of the Various Dogs Used in the Sports of the Field . . . (London: J. Cundee, 1803), 86.
7. Cooper and Fowler, Bulldogs and All About Them, 18–20.
8. Taplin, The Sportsman’s Cabinet, 86.
9. “10 Dogs with the Priciest Vet Bills,” Main St., July 10, 2011, http://www.mainstreet.com/slideshow/smart-spending/10-dogs-priciest-vet-bills.
10. “AKC Names 10 Most Popular Dog Breeds for 2013,” Examiner.com, February 1, 2013, http://www.examiner.com/article/akc-names-10-most-popular-dog-breeds-for-2013.
11. James Watson, The Dog Book (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1906), 397–98.
12. Cooper and Fowler, Bulldogs and All About Them, 25.
13. Jane Lucille Brackman, “A Study in the Application of Semiotic Principles and Assumptions of Systems of Division, Classification and Naming,” PhD diss., Claremont Graduate University, 1999.
14. Watson, The Dog Book, 398.
15. Cooper and Fowler, Bulldogs and All About Them, 48.
16. Ibid., 28.
17. Ibid., 57.
18. Edward Ash, This Doggie Business (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1934), 113.
19. Gordon Stables, “Breeding and Rearing for Pleasure, Prizes, and Profit,” The Dog Owner’s Annual for 1896 (London: Dean and Son, 1896), 42, 72.
20. Freeman Lloyd, “Many Dogs in Many Lands,” AKC Gazette, February 1924. For this and other citations from the AKC Gazette, I relied upon bound volumes located in the American Kennel Club archive, in New York City.
21. Cooper and Fowler, Bulldogs and All About Them, 29.
22. Ibid., 36.
23. Watson, The Dog Book, 398.
24. Johan and Edith Gallant, SOS Dog: The Purebred Dog Hobby Re-Examined (Las Vegas: Alpine, 2008), 86–92.
25. Rawdon Lee, A History and Description of the Modern Dogs of Great Britain and Ireland (Non-Sporting Division) (London: Horace Cox, 1894), 208–10.
26. Cooper and Fowler, Bulldogs and All About Them, 37.
27. “Underdog” originally referred to the loser in the fighting pit, a tragic figure pitied in a poem by David Barker, who wrote in the 1870s: “If they say I am wrong or am right/I shall always go in for the weaker dog/For the under dog in the fight.” David Barker, “The Under Dog in the Fight,” Poems by David Barker, with historical sketch by J. E. Godfrey (Bangor, ME: Samuel S. Smith and Son, 1876), 103.
28. L.B.A.: Leavitt Bulldog Association, http://www.leavittbulldogassociation.com.
29. Bob the baby bulldog never made it to his first birthday. The vet wasn’t sure which of his many ailments finally did him in. Bob’s two daddies were mad with grief, and against every law of educated consumer behavior and common sense, they went out and bought two more of the same.
CHAPTER TWO
1. John Mandeville et al., “Focusing on Breed Standards,” AKC Gazette, February 1984.
2. “Pembroke Welsh Corgi: Breed Standard,” American Kennel Club, http://www.akc.org.
3. Mandeville et al., “Focusing on Breed Standards.”
4. Richard Wolters, The Labrador Retriever: The History—the People (Los Angeles: Petersen Prints, 1981), 154.
5. “Labrador Retriever: Breed Standard,” American Kennel Club, http://www.akc.org.
6. Ibid.
7. “Pedigree Dogs Exposed,” directed by Jemima Harrison, BBC One, August 19, 2008.
8. Treasures of the Kennel Club: Paintings, Per
sonalities, Pedigrees and Pets (London: Kennel Club, 2000).
9. O. F. Vedder, “The War of the Bat and the Rose Ear,” AKC Gazette, November 30, 1924.
10. Ibid.
11. “French Bulldog Club,” New York Times, April 7, 1897.
12. Vedder, “The War of the Bat and the Rose Ear.”
13. “Dogs of High Renown,” New York Times, June 5, 1898.
14. James Watson, The Dog Book (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1906), 707.
15. “Dogs of High Renown.”
16. Vedder, “The War of the Bat and the Rose Ear.”
17. A.-K. Sundqvist et al., “Unequal Contribution of Sexes in the Origin of Dog Breeds,” Genetics 172, no. 2 (February 2006): 1121–28, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1456210/.
18. Mark Derr, “Collie or Pug? Study Finds the Genetic Code,” New York Times, May 21, 2004, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/21/us/collie-or-pug-study-finds-the-genetic-code.html.
19. Edward Ash, This Doggie Business (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1934), 43.
20. Mark Derr, “The Politics of Dogs,” Atlantic Monthly, March 1990, http://www.stirlingcollies.com/id133.html.
21. “A Dog’s Life,” Dateline (NBC), April 26, 2000, http://www.caps-web.org/.
22. Mary Pilon and Susanne Craig, “Safety Concerns Stoke Criticism of Kennel Club,” New York Times, February 9, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/sports/many-animal-lovers-now-see-american-kennel-club-as-an-outlier.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.
23. John Caius, Of Englishe Dogges (Charleston, SC: Nabu Press, 2012; orig. pub. 1576), 34.
24. Mark Derr, How the Dog Became the Dog (New York: Overlook, 2011), 157–58.
25. Robert K. Wayne, “Molecular Evolution of the Dog Family,” Trends in Genetics 9, no. 6 (June 1993): 218–24, doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0168-9525(93)90122-X.
26. One study ranked dogs by their degree of “cuteness” or lack of resemblance to wolves and then tested them for any correlation to wolflike behavior. Surprisingly, the puppylike golden retriever, with its wide, imploring eyes, domed infantile forehead, fluffy juvenile coat, and “soft” mouth, showed more wolf traits for conflict-related behavior than the German shepherd dog, deliberately designed to resemble a wolf. Deborah Goodwin et al., “Paedomorphosis Affects Agonistic Visual Signals of Domestic Dogs,” Animal Behavior 53 (1997): 297–304, http://members.home.nl/mfcjanssen/AnimBehav1997.pdf.
27. Annie Coath Dixey, The Lion Dog of Peking (New York: Dutton, 1931), 245.
28. “Get to Know the Golden Retriever,” American Kennel Club, http://www.akc.org.
29. Gordon Stables, “Breeding and Rearing for Pleasure, Prizes, and Profit,” in The Dog Owner’s Annual for 1896 (London: Dean and Son, 1896), 14.
30. Alan Beck and Aaron Katchner, Between Pets and People (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1996), 168–70; Stephen Jay Gould, “Mickey Mouse Meets Konrad Lorenz,” Natural History 88, no. 5 (May 1979): 30–36.
31. Jason Goldman, “Man’s New Best Friend? A Forgotten Russian Experiment in Fox Domestication,” Scientific American blog, September 6, 2010, http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/.
32. D. Phillip Sponenberg, “Livestock Guard Dogs: What Is a Breed, and Why Does It Matter?,” Akbash Sentinel (1998): 44, http://www.akbashdogsinternational.com.
33. Roger Caras, A Celebration of Dogs (New York: Times Books, 1982), 190.
34. William Burrows, “Queen Victoria and Our Collies,” AKC Gazette, July 31, 1924.
35. Derr, “Collie or Pug?”
36. Watson, The Dog Book, 612.
37. Jesse Gelders, “Science Remakes the Dog,” Popular Science Monthly, November 1936.
CHAPTER THREE
1. Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest (London: Leonard Smithers, 1899), 132.
2. W. M. Thackeray, The Book of Snobs (New York: D. Appleton, 1853), 54.
3. David Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (New York: Anchor, 1990), 300.
4. Ibid.
5. Carol Midgley, “The Order of the Elitist Anachronism,” Sunday Times (London), July 14, 2004, http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/article2037158.ece.
6. Robert Noel, College of Arms, interviews by author, June 22, 2009, and March 21, 2011.
7. Ibid.
8. Katie Thomas, “A Country Dog Charms the Big Show in the City,” New York Times, February 15, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/16/sports/16best.html.
9. Noel, interviews.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. “The Arms and Crest of Frederick Gavin Hardy,” http://www.college-of-arms.gov.uk.
13. Alan Beck and Aaron Katchner, Between Pets and People (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1996), 171.
14. Patrick Burns, “Pet Insurance Data Shows Mutts ARE Healthier!,” Terrierman’s Daily Dose, April 4, 2009, http://terriermandotcom.blogspot.com.
15. Louis Fallon, “American Dog Show History Began June 4, 1874,” Dog Press, http://www.thedogpress.com/ClubNews/History-of-Dog-Shows_Fallon-076.asp.
16. William Stifel, “Harbingers of Westminster,” AKC Gazette, February 2002.
17. David Hancock, dog historian, e-mail to author, May 4, 2012.
18. Michael Clayton, foxhound historian, e-mail to author, May 14, 2012.
19. John Marvin, “Great Dog Men of the Past,” AKC Gazette, March 1975.
20. René Merlen, De Canibus: Dog and Hound in Antiquity (London: Allen, 1971), 122.
21. Mark Derr, A Dog’s History of America (New York: North Point, 2004), 164, 336.
22. Michael Clayton, e-mail to author, May 15, 2012; John Marvin, “How the Earliest Show Standards Came About,” AKC Gazette, May 1967.
23. Gordon Stables, “Breeding and Rearing for Pleasure, Prizes, and Profit,” The Dog Owner’s Annual for 1896 (London: Dean and Son, 1896), 114.
24. Carson Ritchie, The British Dog (London: Robert Hale, 1981), 110.
25. Frank Jackson, Crufts: The Official History (London: Pelham, 1990), 14.
26. H. W. Lacy, “Whence Came That Dog of Boston,” AKC Gazette, January 1924.
27. Charles Henry Lane, Dog Shows and Doggy People (London: Hutchinson and Co., 1902), 264.
28. Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 54–55.
29. William Tegetmeier, Poultry for the Table and Market versus Fancy Fowls (London: Horace Cox, 1892), 27, 89, 15, 7.
30. Country Life in America, May–October 1915.
31. Arthur Jones, “New Frenchies Are Coming Back,” AKC Gazette, March 1, 1939.
32. Margaret Derry, Bred for Perfection: Shorthorn Cattle, Collies, and Arabian Horses Since 1800 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 16.
33. Ritvo, The Animal Estate, 74–75.
34. Tegetmeier, Poultry for the Table and Market versus Fancy Fowls, 16, 3, 6.
35. Edward Ash, This Doggie Business (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1934), 113.
36. Tegetmeier, Poultry for the Table and Market versus Fancy Fowls, 2.
37. Lane, Dog Shows and Doggy People, 270–410.
CHAPTER FOUR
1. “Forced Sterilization,” Anderson Cooper 360°, CNN, May 31, 2012, http://www.allthingsandersoncooper.com/2012/05/anderson-cooper-anderson-how-i-cheated.html; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bB95dA3gKTI.
2. Freeman Lloyd, “Many Dogs in Many Lands,” AKC Gazette, July 31, 1924.
3. “Welsh Springer Spaniel,” Dog Breed Health, http://www.dogbreedhealth.com/welsh-springer-spaniel/.
4. Gordon Stables, “Breeding and Rearing for Pleasure, Prizes, and Profit,” The Dog Owner’s Annual for 1896 (London: Dean and Son, 1896), 13.
5. Charles Davenport, The Trait Book, Eugenics Record Office, Bulletin No. 6 (Cold Spring Harbor, NY, 1912).
6. Ian MacInnes, “Mastiffs and Spaniels: Gender and Nation in the English Dog,” Textual Practice 17, no. 1 (2003): 21–40, doi: 10.1080/0950236032000050726.
7. “Exhibit on the Sense of Elegance in Fur Feeling,” Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Image Archive on the American Eugenics Movement, http://www.eugenicsarchive.org.
8. Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981).
9. Noah Webster, An American Dictionary of the English Language (New York: S. Converse, 1828).
10. “Shetland Sheepdog: Breed Standard,” American Kennel Club, http://www.akc.org.
11. Patrick Burns, “True Terriers,” Terrierman’s Daily Dose, November 25, 2011, http://terriermandotcom.blogspot.com.
12. David Hancock, The Heritage of the Dog (Boston: Nimrod, 1990), 253.
13. Kevin Stafford, The Welfare of Dogs (Netherlands: Springer, 2006), 64.
14. Hancock, The Heritage of the Dog, 185.
15. Freeman Lloyd, “What Is ‘Correct’ Conformation?,” AKC Gazette, July 1943.
16. Stuart Brown, “What Is a Breed Standard?,” AKC Gazette, November 1947.
17. C. A. Bryce, The Gentleman’s Dog, His Rearing, Training and Treating (Richmond, VA: Southern Clinic Print, 1909), iv.
18. Lloyd, “Many Dogs in Many Lands.” The expression “nigger in the woodpile” originated in the Deep South and referred to fugitive slaves in hiding.
19. Jane Brackman, “Downton Abbey Dog: Right Breed, Wrong Color,” Bark, April 5, 2012, http://thebark.com/content/downton-abbey-dog-right-breed-wrong-color.
20. Durham University, “Modern Dog Breeds Genetically Disconnected from Ancient Ancestors,” news release, Science Daily, May 21, 2012, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/05/120521163845.htm.
21. Raymond Coppinger and Richard Schneider, “Evolution of Working Dogs,” in The Domestic Dog: Its Evolution, Behaviour, and Interactions with People, ed. James Serpell (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), chap. 3.