Just wait until the Dingo becomes a recognized show breed. The fancy will totally screw it up.
I find televised conformation shows both horrifying and extremely boring. It is extremely boring because of the banter. It is extremely horrifying because people are talking so glibly about animals that have a nature, that have an intelligence all their own. How can one reduce the totality of a dog strain into single standard? How can one justify breeding for fancy points, which aren’t even in the standard, when those fancy point actually harm the dog’s health and encumber its working ability?
This is why the dog fancy must be reformed. If the dog can no longer do its work with the current fads in the show ring, the standard must be changed. (Exceptions of course exist for dogs originally bred for blood sports.)
I think if we could get that attitude more instutionalized in the fancy, we would have far fewer problems with bad conformation issues. Further, these dog shows would make sense.
Most of these standards did start out as working dog standards, but they got perverted from their original purpose. You cannot tell me that the bulldog’s flattened face, misaligned jaw, big head, big chest, and narrow hips are of any use to the dog. A bulldog can no longer be used as a catch dog. If you tried to use it as a catch dog, it would probably die from heat stroke.
Robert Leighton wrote in 1910 in Dogs and All about Them, that bulldogs were very difficult to breed. He writes that “[g]reat mortality” exists in bulldog bitches when they are bred. When he was writing this, nearly 100 years ago, bulldog bitches could free whelp, but if they did, they did so with great risk to their bodies. Today, bull dogs do not free whelp. But they were well on their way to being ruined a century ago.
We have a lot to answer for when we look at what we've done to the bulldog.
If you want to see catch dogs work, click here. In Australia, pig catch dogs are of no particular breed, although they do strongly resemble some of the working strains of bulldog, like the American bulldog and the pit bull. They breed what works with what works, regardless of breed. These little freak-show bulldogs wouldn’t last five seconds with a feral pig or a tame one for that matter.
I thought of you when the Eukanuba show on Animal Planet aired a few days ago, when the expert AKC judge assured the token ‘newbie’ announcer that Flatcoats were not related to Golden Retrievers. =P
That’s rich!
I bet I could tell this fellow this story and he’d believe it:
Actually golden retrievers are descended from a rare reddish water wolf from the North of Scotland called a Kelpie, not to be confused with the Loch Ness Monster creature or the water horse or the dog called a Kelpie. They are separate species from all other dogs and that long hair on their front legs is used to trap fish, which is their main prey.