Should you feel guilty about owning a purebred dog?
It features Mark Derr, Ted Kerasote, Stanley Coren, and Francis Battista.
I’m with Ted Kerasote and Mark Derr and in part with Francis Battista (in case you were wondering).
The predictability issue is often bandied about, but if it’s a popular and overbred breed, that predictability is very poor. I’m not with Stanley Coren, who used to have a flat-coat. He also gets the cause and effect of this issue wrong. Dog breeds were not created for purposes. Rather, dog breeds were developed from dogs that were bred to do purposes. That’s fundamentally different from what Coren is saying.
I’m kind of with Francis Battista. This is a systemic problem. I think you get to the real issues of the system with what Mark Derr is discussing. However, I don’t think that the only purebred dog one can own is one that is rescued. There are breeders out there that are very ethical. If a breeder does rescue, carefully places the puppies, and requires that the puppies be returned if the owner can’t keep them, then I don’t see why anyone should feel guilty.
Mark Derr gets it all right when it comes to the socio-economic issues that underlie the dog fancy. Thorstein Veblen figured this stuff out years ago. Heck, he saw it happening. People would rather own dogs as objects, as icons. The animal itself matters little.
But Ted Kerasote also gets it right. I have written about the low genetic diversity in certain breeds, including the one he mentions in that post, and shelters do need to do more to ensure that the animals get placed. Those are real problems.
The point he gets very right is that some people allow people to choose their dogs. You must rescue! You must buy from a show breeder! (Because they are the only reputable ones!)
I’d just rather people choose a dog that fits their lifestyles and their personalities.
If you have a dog you like, you shouldn’t feel guilty about it.
However, we need to keep in mind there are major systemic problems that lead to careless breeding, paper worshiping, truncated genetic diversity, exploitative breeding and mass production, and major health problems.
It’s one of those problems when we look at things systemically. We can see the problems very easily. It’s like looking at a forest fire.
However, when we look at the individual level, things get a bit murky. Is it breedism that I prefer goldens to Labs? And retrievers to chows?
I just like a dog that is very easy to train. I also want a dog that isn’t aggressive towards people or other dogs. I’d prefer a more genetically diverse dog than the current golden retrievers we have today. But would I be okay with a golden/Lab cross?
These are good questions.
How much am I influenced by conspicuous consumption? I’d like to think not at all, but when you live in this country, you are very strongly socialized towards consumerism from a very early age.
This blog does mainly detached structural analysis.
It’s much easier to do.
However, I think we don’t do ourselves any favors by not looking at our own choices.
What do you think?
Why should breeders do rescue? That’s a special set of skills that has nothing to do with the skills that make a good breeder, save finding good homes. But selling a well bred puppy isn’t the same thing at all as selling a second hand pit bull and finding a good home for one is not the same as the other.
Breeders already have enough to do without being burdened with the entirety of responsibility and morality of dogs. This is lazy and stupid ethics, displacing the crime away from the perpetrators. It’s as stupid as blaming Toyota for drunk driving deaths.
Look to where the problem is, and if you’re not blinded by politically correct over-generalizations, you’ll see a whole lot of stupidity surrounding pit bulls.
Doing rescue doesn’t mean placing the dogs.
Just providing support for a rescue is enough.
To me, arguing that one should feel guilty about having a purebred dog instead of a shelter dog is like arguing that you should feel guilty about having bought a home because there are homeless people. “Purebred” in terms of meaning “has a studbook, is registered, studbook is closed” is one thing. I’ll note that in my own “breed” there is, in Europe, the possiblity of doing “appendix” breeding (dog of unknown pedigree, decendents accepted into studbook after three generations) and widespread “register them as they appear” in the “Dutch Malinois” FCI registry. So is the Belgian “shepherd” a purebred breed or not? (Belgium also opened up the registry after WWI and WWII). Certainly, IMO, the “open” nature of the registry in Europe has not appreciably made the dogs better performance dogs nor better in health than American dogs. The delta in protection work is largely due to the difference in training clubs, knowledge and acceptance of “protection trained” dogs more than genetics (the same genetic imports don’t do as well in the US). Is the Altdeutsche Schäferhund a purebred? Not in the sense of a closed studbook. But then, Australian Shepherds had a “hardship registry” until recently and Border Collies in several registries also did — yet it is quite possible to identify the dogs by behavior, DNA and yes, “look”. Variable as they are, BCs don’t look like Bouviers or Rottweilers. In sheep breeds, you mix and match –but there are also purebreds to mix and match FROM. And failures simply vanish. In dogs, you have conflicting desires. There’s no problem with breeding a “pretty” pet dog. There’s a problem with asserting it’s the same thing as a working field dog or that it is intrinsically “better”/ “improved”.
I liked Kerasote’s bit. He gets it. Coren and Derr, eh. Battista has no clue. As long as there is a big market for puppies, and people are stupid and don’t do any research before getting a puppy, there will be people who exploit the market. Period.
Derr gets in his other work. A Dog’s History of America really lays it down on the Animal Rights Movement and the Purebred Dog industry.
Coren is way off.
I don’t like the word “guilt”; I think it obscures the real question of the expectations people have of their dogs. The way they frame the issue sounds like something straight out of ‘Stuff White People Like’.
The thing about the predictability of pedigreed dogs is that the working dog traits being selected for tend to create really lousy pets. The shelters are full of six-month old Labs dumped by owners didn’t understand that yes, even “the perfect family dogs” require lots of training and exercise, and those cute puppy behaviors are considerably less cute in an 85-lb. body.
By definition, purebred dogs trend towards specifically-defined tails, mutts trend towards the median. There’s no benefit to placing a predictably high-drive, high-energy purebred in a household that has no time to care for it properly.
Then again, none of this really gets at the primary reason purebreds have such health problems, puppy mills are so rampant, and shelters put down so many dogs. Namely: people are idiots.