by Kim Kavin
When Disney released 102 Dalmatians in 2000, the nightmare started all over again. Dane’s usual intake of thirty or forty dogs shot up to over one hundred. The spikes weren’t quite as severe when the DVDs came out after that, but even to this day, when the movies play on television, her phone occasionally rings. Some of the puppies are dropped off by families in the daylight after they realize they’ve made a mistake, while others are dumped by the litter and left in darkness, most likely from opportunistic back yard breeders whose cash crop didn’t look enough like the movie Dalmatians to turn a profit.
“They’d drop them off in boxes. Based on the appearance, absolutely, it was because they didn’t look like the dog in the movie,” Dane recalls. “This one family came, I think the puppy’s name was Pepper, a very large, purebred, magnificent-looking male. They brought him and were jumping for joy and said, ‘Okay, we’re going out to lunch now, thank you, you just made our weekend.’ There was no education, no thought into the future of their lives and how they were going to care for the puppy.”
Dane has been involved in Dalmatian rescue for a quarter century, and she has seen nothing that floods animal shelters with her favorite breed like movies on the big screen. Producers in all visual media tend to use purebreds when including dogs as characters because if something happens to one, they can usually find or breed another one who looks similar enough to slide into the role. A Dalmatian has never won best in show at Westminster, so it’s impossible to say whether the crush of interest would be similar based on news coverage, but Disney reportedly grossed more than $320 million from 101 Dalmatians and more than $180 million from the sequel—hundreds of millions more than any dog show brings in, with far more people being influenced who may never watch a dog show at all.
“When a movie comes out like that and we get a lot of people who start breeding, they don’t necessarily have good intentions in mind,” Dane says. “People in South Florida were breeding in their back yards under horrible conditions. They’d breed anything that had spots. We were seeing inbred Dalmatians, fathers bred to daughters, that type of thing, but also a tremendous amount of Throwbacks, which are Pointer-type mixes. Anything that had a spot, they were breeding. It was all about making money and the supply meeting the demand.”
A video game, a direct-to-DVD animated sequel, and a live theater musical have since followed, and when the musical was touring, a dog trainer telephoned Dane to get some dogs to put on stage in Florida. The trainer had no idea that the mere existence of the theater production might have the collateral consequence of endangering a lot more dogs in the future.
“We were approached by the trainer from Orlando who was looking for this and that and wanted us to sign all of these releases,” she recalls. “I know a handful of the Dalmatian rescues in the country did that, but I just felt a disloyalty to my breed. I felt like I was aiding and abetting, encouraging the thing that I’ve been trying to curb for a number of years. I just couldn’t do it with a clear conscience.”
The real rub, Dane says of the movies, is that Disney included a storyline about a blue-eyed Dalmatian—which encouraged more than a few unscrupulous breeders to aim for that look and discard the rest. The same phenomenon struck a different breed during the late 1990s, when Taco Bell used a Chihuahua named Gidget in its runaway-craze commercials with the catchphrase “Yo quiero Taco Bell.” Just like the blue-eyed Dalmatian, Gidget wasn’t representative of the Chihuahua breed standard. She was too tall and too fat with a low-hanging rear end, not to mention an oddly shaped head and a stretched muzzle that made show dog judges cringe. Longtime and arguably responsible breeders wanted nothing to do with Chihuahuas who looked like her.
But buyers sure did. Gidget’s look, plastered all over televisions in ads for two-for-ninety-nine-cents tacos, became the thing to have. That included her tan fur, even though Chihuahuas come in lots of colors, including black, white, gold, and mixes with different splashes of hues. Breeders aiming for the long-published standard didn’t change what they were doing—and many of them argue, to this day, that there was no increase in Chihuahua popularity because AKC registrations did not climb—but spur-of-the-moment back yard breeders and some commercial breeders were more than happy to accommodate demand with puppies who were sold as purebreds even though they likely didn’t qualify for purebred papers. These more opportunistic breeders cashed in on litter after litter of dogs who had the look that was wanted, and some of them in the Midwestern United States talk fondly, even now, about what a great time it was for Chihuahua sales.
People involved in Chihuahua rescue do not have the same kindly recollections, because soon after the boom, they started seeing the Chihuahua abandonment numbers spike, just like Dalmatian numbers skyrocketed after the Disney movies. One Chihuahua rescuer in New Jersey said calls more than doubled over the previous year, all because of thirty-second television commercials. “Sure, it’s fun to see Chihuahuas on TV,” Annette Mellinger of the Chihuahua Club of Mid-Jersey told Philly.com, “but the only ones benefiting from the sudden popularity are the puppy mills and wholesalers who are distributing to stores.”
For the Jack Russell Terrier, the television sitcom Frasier was the flashpoint. It premiered in 1993 in the United States as a spinoff of the wildly popular Cheers and ran for eleven seasons, winning tens of millions of fans along with thirty-seven Emmy Awards and an audience far beyond US shores. British viewers in 2003 named Frasier Crane one of their favorite characters from the United States, second only to the cartoon dad Homer Simpson. Frasier is still in heavy rotation through syndication today. People can’t get enough of actors Kelsey Grammer and David Hyde Pierce, or their comic foil, a Jack Russell Terrier known on the show as Eddie.
In real life, his name was Moose—and he should have been held up as the poster child for successful rehoming of a challenging, willful, would-be abandoned purebred puppy. His original family in Florida struggled to housetrain him, stop him from chewing, quiet his barking, end his digging, prevent him from escaping, and end his climbing of trees (he’d go straight up them, as high as six feet). Then he chased a bunch of horses and killed a neighbor’s cat, and the family decided they couldn’t stand the behavior anymore. That’s how he ended up in the possession of a company that trains dogs for use on television and movie sets. They, too, found him incorrigible, often shredding things and standing on tables. Nevertheless, they turned him into such a household name that his photograph made the cover of Entertainment Weekly. The headline played into his image not as a dog with a tough temperament requiring the attention of professional trainers, but instead as a handsome stud: “He’s Hot. He’s Sexy. He’s Purebred.” The writers in the magazine’s creative department probably thought the cover blurb was hysterical.
Jack Russell Terrier breeders didn’t appreciate the joke. “As the show grew in popularity, so did the breed,” recalls Catherine Brown, who has bred Jack Russells since the mid-1980s. “The only good thing was that Kelsey Grammer’s character had a love-hate relationship with the dog. His disdain, that’s what kept things from being even worse.”
At the time Frasier went on the air, she says, there wasn’t a major Jack Russell rescue organization in America. There had never been a need for one. The small-scale breeders might get a call once in a while for help with finding a dog a new home, and they did so quietly because they could, with relative ease. Then the show went gangbusters, and the number of breeders joining the Jack Russell Terrier Club of America, she says, shot up from a few thousand to more than nine thousand. A Jack Russell Terrier could suddenly be had not for the usual price of $850 to $1,500, she says, but instead for $150 or $250 from the most opportunistic new breeders who would sell the pups to anyone for quick cash. Soon after, the number of people trying to get rid of Jack Russells they’d purchased on the cheap and on a lark exploded to the point that Brown had to install a dedicated answering machine on her telephone line.
“I was getting calls at midnight,” she remembers. “One guy wa
nted me to come in the middle of the night because he was in New York City and his dog was shedding. Truly. It went from eight dogs on the list to twenty-five, then fifty. When that happened, I said, ‘Hey, I can’t do this anymore.’ That’s when we became a 501(c)3” dog rescue charity.
Frasier was on the air for more than a decade, and Moose started to get old. Brown was among the breeders who received a photograph of him when trainers started seeking a stunt double. He was fairly representative of the breed, she says, but had ears too much like a hound, which is how he ended up being bred to create his own replacement. That dog’s name was Enzo, and most viewers didn’t notice his sliding into the program, but Moose sure did. They had to be kept apart. They rode in different sections of the car. They were walked separately. Otherwise, they’d fight—another fact that failed to make it into the public’s consciousness.
Some naysayers argue there’s no evidence of media-generated spikes in breed popularity, whether from news segments about dog show winners or popular movies and television shows, but today’s booms are reruns of the same storyline that has played out since long before most modern-day dog lovers were born. Today, people know the Disney Dalmatians and the Taco Bell Chihuahua and Frasier’s Jack Russell Terrier, but a dog named Rin Tin Tin was the first global example, about a century ago. He was a French-born German Shepherd who was saved from World War I and taught some cool tricks in his adopted home of America. In 1923, Rin Tin Tin scored his first starting role in a Warner Brothers film called Where the North Begins. It was the age of silent films, nearly twenty years before Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman starred in Casablanca. Rin Tin Tin’s name was featured right under the title in the movie’s promotional poster, where George Clooney’s might be today. Warner Brothers promoters urged theater owners to put crates full of puppies in their lobbies, to bring in even bigger crowds of dog lovers at the premieres, and Where the North Begins earned the equivalent of about $5.5 million today. The dog made not one or two sequels, but twenty-four more screen appearances that played in theaters far beyond America’s borders. He translated easily; all Warner Brothers had to do was change the pre-talkie film’s dialog frames from English to, say, German. To keep the gravy train going, Warner Brothers at one point paid Rin Tin Tin almost eight times as much as his human co-stars, a cool $6,000 per week, the equivalent of about $80,000 per week today.
And in 1925, the German Shepherd for the first time topped the Boston Terrier as America’s favorite purebred dog, according to US registrations. Britain saw a spike, too: In 1919, just fifty-four German Shepherds had been registered with the Kennel Club there. By 1926, it was more than eight thousand. No official statistics exist, of course, about the number of German Shepherd puppies bought from back yard breeders and never registered with kennel clubs, but if human nature indicates anything, it’s that there were plenty to be had. Rin Tin Tin’s celebrity, backed by the Warner Brothers marketing team, proved even stronger than national boundaries, and litter after litter of Shepherds rode on his coattails and into homes as Americans’ favored breed until 1936, more than a decade after his first major film and continuing several years after his death.
There is simply no arguing the power of the media in the dog industry worldwide today. It’s what people like Dane, Brown, and their fellow rescuers see. They’ve gotten to the point where they gear up for it and arrive at movie theaters on premiere nights, bracing themselves off to the side with a dog on a leash, trying against all hope to stem the inevitable tornado of demand followed by destruction that mass exposure to specific breeds creates.
“The AKC is not in the trenches like we are,” Dane says. “They weren’t walking through the shelters like we were and having to pick or choose. They weren’t getting dogs like Pepper thrown over their gates on a regular basis.”
In Britain, one trophy-winning dog who made headlines similarly to Banana Joe was a Pekingese officially named Yakee A Dangerous Liaison. His nickname was Danny, and he beat a staggering twenty thousand other dogs to win best in show at Crufts in 2003. But soon after Danny’s big victory, when his image was being flashed around the world as the dog of the moment, he became the subject of scuttlebutt everywhere from Savile Row in London to the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan. Hobnobbers were atwitter with gossip about the rumor that Danny, in order to take the grand prize, had undergone a facelift.
Cosmetic surgery is a huge no-no according to dog show rules set by the Kennel Club, which sanctions Crufts in Britain the same way the AKC sanctions Westminster in America. Ultimately, Danny was cleared of the accusation and allowed to keep his ribbon, and the Yakee kennel continued to win prizes with dogs just like him, taking best of breed honors in 2004 and 2005, and turning out one of Danny’s sons, Yakee If Only, who became the top-ranked dog in all of America in 2005. As the scandal faded into history, Pekingese lovers everywhere breathed a deep, satisfying sigh of relief.
The only one who couldn’t breathe easier was Danny. It turned out he had, indeed, undergone surgery, not to change his looks but instead to relieve an upper airway obstruction. Such health problems are common in dogs who, over the years, have been bred and inbred to produce faces that are more and more squashed and, in some cases, virtually flat—not at all like their ancestors, but highly appealing to modern show judges and buyers. Their skulls are what veterinarians call brachycephalic and are common not only in modern versions of the Pekingese, but also in many other sought-after breeds like Pugs and French Bulldogs.* Some of the dogs have been mutated to meet dog-show standards until there’s pretty much no snout left at all. Many people hear them chugging for oxygen and think, “It’s just how that type of dog breathes,” but that wasn’t the case until breeders altered and squished their skulls over time. The dogs who are celebrated today fall asleep sitting up. They snort and gasp all the livelong day. They can’t cool themselves the way other dogs can. Danny had a telltale sign of that last problem, even after surgery: anyone who looks closely at some of his winning photos from Crufts will see that he had to be placed on an ice pack while posing next to the trophy, so he wouldn’t overheat before the photographers were done making him a star, one who would now be in demand worldwide as a stud to breed more dogs just like him.
Danny’s story was one of several told in the one-hour documentary Pedigree Dogs Exposed, which had its debut on the BBC in the United Kingdom on August 19, 2008. The show was about how breeding dogs to win at conformation shows—purely for looks—has created “the greatest animal welfare scandal of our time.” It included heartbreaking footage of Cavalier King Charles Spaniels suffering from a genetic condition called syringomyelia, in which the desire to give them exaggerated brachycephalic facial features has left their skulls too small for their brains, causing them to writhe, scream, and roll in constant pain. The documentary also showed video of German Shepherds winning in show rings with backs so sloped and hind legs so shortened that critics called them half dog, half frog. Clips showed Boxers having genetically induced epileptic seizures, and a breeder defending the practice of culling—killing as a matter of practice—healthy, happy Rhodesian Ridgeback puppies who happened to be born without the cosmetic ridge of fur along their spine.
The point of Pedigree Dogs Exposed was that breed standards are artificial rules that sometimes defy nature and reward the wrong qualities, promoting inbreeding for looks and causing a lot of genetically induced agony for more than a few of the countless puppies bred from dogs held up as the best in the world. The show featured interviews with weeping owners who had bought into the purebred marketing, purchased expensive dogs with pedigree credentials, and then watched in horror as their beloved pooches suffered and died, no matter how much money was spent on veterinary fees. Several graphic scenes of medical footage punctuated the message in ways that likely gave some viewers nightmares.
When the hour-long program faded to black, for many dog-loving Britons, it felt as if time had momentarily stopped. While less than half the pet dogs in the United States ar
e believed to be purebreds, they make up as many as three-quarters of dogs living in homes in the United Kingdom. The realization that some breeding practices were in fact causing immense suffering to the dogs was staggering. On that night, from Piccadilly Circus to the shores of Southampton, the more than three million dog lovers who had watched the show sat back in their living room chairs, looked down at their beloved pets, and gulped. Hard.
“Media monsoon with a dash of typhoon-grade hysteria” is a reasonable description of what followed. Internationally famous dogs like Banana Joe and Danny soon had nothing on the documentary’s writer and editor, Jemima Harrison, who had tuned in that night from her thatched cottage in Wiltshire with a few friends and the handful of people who had helped to produce the program. “Just watching the response on social media was amazing,” she recalls today. “The phone started ringing before it was finished airing. Then it all went mad.”
The BBC, she says, had feared a legal injunction prior to the broadcast, so the press had gotten a look at Pedigree Dogs Exposed only the day before it aired. The next-day explosion of coverage, in addition to the public’s strong response, kept the issue of health problems in purebred dogs on the front pages in Britain for months. Someone left dog poop on the executive producer’s doorstep. Registries of Cavalier King Charles Spaniels—the screaming dogs with too-small skulls—plummeted. Harrison’s face was plastered everywhere as both a heroine to all canines and a villain casting unfair aspersions, depending on viewers’ loyalties. “Burn the witch!” was one of the kinder comments made about her. Some people were crudely colorful in finding ever more creative ways to call her a doggone bitch.