by Kim Kavin
As an example of how misguided dog lovers have become about the meaning of breeds, Bradley points to Greyhounds. What are Greyhounds known for? Racing. So much so, in fact, that breeders won’t use Greyhounds as stock unless they’re eager to chase. It’s what scientists call an evolutionary bottleneck, meaning no Greyhound gets to pass on his or her genes unless that attribute is present.
Even with such rigorous selection, according to Bradley, the science shows Greyhounds today are eager to chase only slightly more than the average among all dog breeds. She’s seen this reality in her own living room, too, where she keeps two Greyhounds as pets and many others coming through as foster dogs. In terms of personalities, they’re no different than all the other dogs she’s ever known as a trainer.
“I’ve worked with thousands of dogs of every possible mixed and purebred description, and now I’m involved with the Greyhound rescue people,” she says. “I have some sense of the scope across the species. I just listen and don’t say anything when the Greyhound people tell me they’re the best.”
She adds, “I’ve never met any people [involved with any particular breed] who didn’t think their breed was special. The refrain is pretty much always, ‘They’re not like other dogs.’ I had dozens and dozens of foster Greyhounds, and I have to say, they seemed like dogs to me.”
Why, then, despite increasing bodies of scientific evidence, do so many dog lovers maintain with such fervor that theirs—whatever they choose—is the best kind of dog, or that purebreds in general are the best dogs money can buy?
“I think it’s because humans like pattern and prediction,” says Dr. Jane Brackman, a California-based expert on canine genetics and domestication. “In nature, things are random, but humans have a tendency to take random design and create meaning out of it. You’re talking about a very visceral level of humanness. You want to take the chaos of nature and create a design, something you’re controlling. I can only think that’s why people want purebred dogs.”
Interestingly, attempts to standardize how dogs look may actually be changing them more than anyone understands. Brackman’s studies include a look at the number of words that define each breed—the official standards of size, shape, and features that breeders use to distinguish, say, a Redbone Coonhound from a Treeing Walker Coonhound. In some cases, the definitions about how certain breeds should look have gotten much longer, and therefore more specific, which is how one breed can be split off into others. For instance, in the 1500s, a cynologist named Jonathan Caius defined a Spaniel using forty-seven words. By comparison, each of the thirteen Spaniels recognized as purebreds today by the AKC has a breed standard containing more than two thousand words, Brackman says. It’s like the difference between defining a chair in five words (something on which one sits) and a wing chair in nineteen words (something on which one sits that has wings mounted on its back and stretching down to the armrest). Adding words narrows the definition and can create a new style, or breed, of anything. The moniker Ascob Cocker Spaniel, for example, may sound somehow ancient and related to royalty, but it was created to stand for “any solid color other than black.”
As some of the definitions have changed, so have the interpretations of what the words mean, to the point that even the same exact breed standard could have meant one thing a century ago but a different thing today. “Some breed standards describe a dog as powerful,” Brackman explains. “The word hasn’t changed, but what the word means in relation to what is powerful today has. Consequently, dogs get bigger. So even in breeds that have standards that remain unchanged, change can occur nonetheless.”
Vague words in breed standards, too, can lead a breed to evolve from one thing into another. If a breed standard states, “the shorter muzzle is preferred,” then inevitably, breeders trying to win in the show ring will create dogs with shorter and shorter muzzles. The result is dogs whose heads are flattened to the point that they have trouble taking in air through their deformed snouts.
All the while, Brackman says, breeding to these standards to achieve any single physical thing often unintentionally leads to other things. “What geneticists have discovered in only the last decade is that in dogs (and probably other animals as well), many traits are prepackaged, not à la carte. For example, if you select for a broader head, you’ll get thicker legs as well.” In some cases, breeding for physical characteristics may mean affecting things like health and behavior, too. “When people see dogs, they see shape and temperament,” she adds. “In actuality, most genetic variants control traits we can’t see at all.”
Consider herding dogs, which comprise about ninety breeds today. Seventeen of them have a mutation that was, until recent times, unknown to even the most successful breeders. The mutation allows some newly invented medications to travel into the dog’s brain, causing illness or death. Breeders didn’t realize they were selecting for this mutation until veterinarians started giving dogs the modern drugs. The mutation was invisible and likely genetically coupled to something else that fit the “ideal” physical breed standard.
“It just hitchhiked in with other traits, or whatever prevented the problem was inadvertently thrown out with other traits people didn’t like,” Brackman says. “Even though the breed looks the same in 1900 as it does today, that doesn’t mean there haven’t been changes. Maybe we just can’t see them.”
Some mutations, she says, are tolerated because dog lovers feel they are a reasonable trade-off to get the desired look—but in other cases, continuing to buy some purebred dogs because of their style only makes the dogs themselves miserable.
“I’m a sucker for English Setters,” she says. “They have health issues like thyroid deficiency, allergies, and some dysplasias of both hip and elbow. My Setters and I can live with that. If other diseases affect your favorite breed causing severe difficulties, pain, and suffering, then the buyer/pet owners should do the right thing. Who decides when enough is enough? It’s the pet owner who bears the emotional loss and financial costs of veterinary care for unhealthy dogs. If a breed is suffering from genetic disease, don’t buy that breed.”
It’s going to take more than a hundred years for scientists to enjoy the same amount of time kennel clubs have had to convince dog lovers of their beliefs about breeds, and the notion of breeds will no doubt persist well into the next generation of dog buyers, at least. Many stereotypes are so deeply ingrained that dog lovers shake off contradicting evidence as an affront to common sense. Golden Retrievers have always been beloved, they think, without knowing that during the 1900s the breed’s name was changed from the plain-sounding “yellow” to make them more marketable. Labradors have always been sought after in all their forms, dog lovers believe today, without realizing that during the 1800s the yellow ones were killed at birth because black was the more popular color of the day. The Boston Terrier, dog lovers might argue, must have a historic New England lineage, when in reality, the dogs started out being promoted by a group calling itself the American Bull Terrier Club. The name of the breed was changed near the turn of the twentieth century to make American buyers believe the Boston Terrier was as fabled a breed as those whose names included well-known English places like West Highland, Yorkshire, and Staffordshire.
Given how long some stereotypes have had to bake into the brains of dog buyers everywhere, it’s going to be a long while before many will be able to acknowledge that they’re choosing breeds primarily because of physical attributes—and not in any measurable way because of temperament or health.
“It’s perfectly fine to have a personal preference, primarily visually,” Bradley says. “It’s a little like picking a boyfriend. First, you start by how they look and what appeals to you. The difficulty is when you start reading a whole lot more into it than that. I like chocolate and you like strawberry: that’s fine. Everybody has a right to have the kind of dog they want. That’s a perfectly reasonable expectation. The place where people get into trouble is when they attach behavioral expectations to that.
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Americans who love Border Collies brought lawyers to the fight about what constitutes a dog breed—about who gets to define and own the meaning of each brand. Donald McCaig dubbed the effort not just a skirmish but instead the “Dog Wars” in his memoir about the battle.
It happened twenty years ago, in 1995, when the AKC began to recognize Border Collies as a breed eligible for conformation dog shows like Westminster. Until that time, Border Collies had competed only in obedience and tracking trials as a “miscellaneous breed,” because for several centuries the dogs had been bred for skills, primarily the herding of sheep. They often didn’t even look like one another, which meant they didn’t fit neatly into the breed standards. Many Border Collie breeders and owners wanted them kept out of the show ring, horrified at the idea of their favorite dogs being bred to look alike and sold as Border Collies without possessing any of the traditional skills, and afraid that copycat breeders would soon fill large-scale puppy farms with lookalikes of whatever the breed standard required.
“Working Border Collies come in many sizes, colors, and appearances,” McCaig explains. “Historically, breeding for conformation destroys working abilities in a few generations. We didn’t want that to happen to the world’s most useful working stock dog.”
The AKC operates by designating a parent club to be the official standard-bearer for each breed. In 1994, when the AKC decided it wanted to include Border Collies in its conformation shows, it wrote letters to three different Border Collie clubs, asking if one would like to be designated the AKC parent club. The clubs were split in their responses, and in 1996, the AKC designated the Border Collie Society of America as the official parent club. The opposition, including McCaig, drew funds from a donation-filled Border Collie Defense Fund in a legal attempt to overturn the AKC recognition outright, or to require the AKC to register the show dogs as something other than Border Collies—to protect the breed name that had, for so long, been associated with behavior instead of looks. They used lawyers and the media, and they tried to get help from politicians. Ultimately, though, they failed. All three existing Border Collie clubs would not come together in the legal action, and the AKC registrations commenced while the infighting among the breeders continued, to the point that the legal case was fatally weakened.
The experience was like a newly carved stake being struck into the landscape that show breeders had been mining since the mid-1800s. It proved that even today, if a registry like the AKC can get just one group of breeders to buy into the existing paradigm and become a parent club, anointed much like the royalty of generations past, then the registry can continue to add new breeds to the books and the dog shows indefinitely.
“Unfortunately there are now two distinct breeds: the Border Collie and AKC Border Collie (aka Barbie Collie),” McCaig writes two decades after the loss. “A few Border Collies look like Barbie Collies, not many Barbie Collies can work livestock. The downside is that naïve puppy buyers might be taken in by the AKC breeder who knows nothing about stock work but claims his/her dogs ‘could work, if only . . .’”
The United States Border Collie Club continues to encourage owners to register their dogs not with the AKC, but instead with such groups as the American Border Collie Club—which is just one example of single-breed clubs that do not always agree with the actions of all-breed clubs like the AKC. One Border Collie breeder went so far as to have all puppy buyers sign a contract stating that if even one puppy were registered with the AKC, then legal damages of $10,000 would be due. The puppy buyer may have been stunned to learn that options exist for purebred registry beyond the AKC in America, but there are, in fact, many, including individual breed clubs as well as the all-breed ACA and APRI. Some breeders say the ACA and APRI were formed in direct opposition after the AKC raised its per-dog registration prices and, in one breeder’s words, “got snotty to deal with.”
The American registries don’t always agree with one another about breed standards, just as the AKC, the Kennel Club in England, and FCI don’t always agree at the international level. These differences have led to more threats of legal action as the years have gone on and the breeds have multiplied worldwide, with all kinds of breeders threatening to sue various clubs for various reasons, including to protect their share of any particular breed’s business.
In 1999, Labrador breeders went to US federal court and filed a class action lawsuit against the AKC over its changing of breed standards to favor one size of Labrador versus others. In 2005, FCI, meeting that year in Argentina, kept breeders in the emerging dog market of Japan happy by officially creating two Akita breeds: the American Akita and the Japanese Akita. In 2012, an American Coton de Tuléar breeder sued the AKC, trying to prevent registration for many of the same reasons the Border Collie people had cited years earlier. (She lost, and the Coton de Tuléar made its Westminster dog show debut in 2015.) In 2014, a Dutch citizen named Jack Vanderwyk with residences in France and the United Kingdom wrote an open letter to the Kennel Club protesting the way it registers Labrador Retrievers, threatening to take the matter to court if the British club continued to recognize standards being accepted by the AKC across the pond. Around that same time in 2014 in Canada, breeders of French Bulldogs were going mad about proposed changes to the breed standard by its national club, saying future French Bulldogs would look nothing like their forebears.
As more and more of these incidents get publicized, along with critiques about the health and welfare of show dogs bred solely for looks, the legitimacy of breeds and breeders in the most developed dog markets erodes. In the United States, for instance, McCaig says the power of the AKC has diminished in the years since the Border Collie dustup.
“The AKC is increasingly irrelevant,” he writes. “At the time, they were all powerful. The AKC, as breeders put it, could ‘put you out of dogs.’ They are less powerful and poorer today. Their registration figures have plummeted since the Dog Wars. Their number one problem today is conformation breeding practices often produce unsound dogs, which is becoming common knowledge. Instead of ‘AKC REG’ being a guarantee of quality, increasingly it’s seen as the opposite. The AKC can ‘recognize’ any breed they want, but some breeds (Jack Russell Terrier, English Shepherd, Border Collie) have formed successful single-breed registries.”
Even the AKC admits to challenges of perception in recent years and has begun a campaign to make the word breeder as beloved as it used to be—although instead of blaming the shifts in public attitudes on disgruntled breeders or new scientific studies, the kennel club instead cites animal welfare organizations as its primary problem. In the fall 2013 edition of Ruff Drafts, the newsletter of the Dog Writers Association of America, AKC Board of Directors Chairman Alan Kalter wrote: “There is no doubt that prejudice against breeders has impacted our breeders, our sport and the public’s ability to enjoy the unique experience of a purebred dog in their lives. Just twenty years ago, a purebred dog was the dog to have in your life. Twenty years ago, a responsible breeder was viewed as a respected resource. Twenty years ago there were virtually no important legislative efforts aimed at eradicating all dog breeding. What changed in those twenty years? The noble quest to give every dog a ‘forever’ home was co-opted by the animal-rights organizations as a method to raise funds for their mission to completely eliminate pet ownership.”
Kalter is right about the fact that animal welfare groups have made a dent in breeders’ business model, and he’s right that some animal rights activists have called for an outright end to owning dogs (more on those issues later), but the reality is that when it comes to eliminating pet ownership, there isn’t any real danger. About thirteen million people in the United States and Western Europe alone buy dogs every year, and demand is rising throughout many other parts of the world. Plenty of breeders are still hard at work selling existing breeds as usual—and trying to create even more new breeds to entice us all.
Could the German Blabrador be the next great breed, someday standing right a
longside the Pointers and Labradors and Bloodhounds at dog shows, and in such high demand that it goes for top dollar at the auction houses?
Ken Anderson sure hopes so. He and his wife, Abby, have spent fourteen years producing all kinds of puppies at their Sugarfork Kennels in Goodman, Missouri, and they have a breeding stock of about ninety dogs today. They take great pride in the dogs they sell to pet stores and direct to the public via the Internet, primarily to buyers from New York, New Jersey, Florida, and California. Over the years, they’ve been asked by telephone about a half dozen times whether they are a puppy mill, likely because of the volume of dogs they produce. Abby asks the callers what a puppy mill is, and she says most callers define it as a filthy place where the dogs are mistreated. She and Ken work hard not to fit that description, and she quite visibly frets about every puppy having a good and loving home. The Andersons are pro–spay and neuter, too, often having the surgery done themselves before sending the puppies to their new owners. “If they don’t want to breed the dog, then do the thing that’s responsible,” as Abby puts it. “I’m big on Planned Parenthood when it comes to the animals.”
The Andersons invite anyone who buys a puppy from them to visit their farm, and they regret that a lot of shoppers turn them down, opting instead to “click and ship” the puppies. Anyone who had taken up their offer to visit Sugarfork on a sunny afternoon in November 2013 would have seen the Andersons’ bigger breeds, like the Boxers and Dogues de Bordeaux and Bulldogs, romping inside enclosures nearly the size of ball fields while most of their smaller breeds, like the Brussels Griffons, Pugs, and Shih Tzus, were in stacked cages. Occasionally, a few of the dogs in the stacked section would growl and bark at one another through the enclosures, but Ken tended to them, making sure they couldn’t get near one another to cause any physical harm. All of the dogs looked clean and physically healthy, and most of the dogs seemed content, with a few of the larger dogs chasing one another around the pens as if at an off-leash dog park in center city Philadelphia or Los Angeles.