Barney, George W. Bush’s Scottish terrier, has died of lymphoma at the age of 12.
As soon as I heard that this Scottish terrier died, I knew it would be of some form of cancer. Scottish terriers have a lot of problems with cancer.
Scottish terriers don’t live very long on average. A 2005 survey of breed longevity by Great Scots Magazine found that Scottish terriers live only 10.15 years on average.
Barney was lucky to make it to 12.
A terrier should be living well into its teens, and I know of a least one Jack Russell from very diverse stock that is pushing past the 15 year mark.
Scottish terriers used to be among the healthiest dogs one could have, but like so many other breeds, the dog fancy’s distortions to its gene pool have not been good for it.
As I’ve mentioned in a previous post on another subject, my first dog was a little rat terrier that I inherited from my older brother. This particular dog was stolen from a traveling circus, and subsequently sold to my mother in about 1946. We had no idea how old she was when my mother bought her, but she knew all kinds of circus tricks (once my family stumble across a command that she would respond to) so was probably at least two years old.
When my brother outgrew her she became my dog, and finally had to be put away because of ill health (multiple tumors) in 1967. She had been with our family for more than twenty one years. As a child it was common for the families of friends of mine to have little nondescript terriers that often lived to be twenty years old or more.
I love Irish wolfhounds, but they, too, have health problems that shorten their expected life spans. So I have been crossing the Irish wolfhound with the Alaskan malamute in the hopes of creating a wolfhound-like dog that is healthier and longer-lived due to genetic diversity. My half wolfhound-half malamutes are beautiful and intelligent animals, and so far all appear extremely healthy, though the oldest litter is only three years old, so time will tell.
For last year’s litter I crossed Grizzly, a wonderful dog out of my first wolfhound-malamute litter who sleeps at the side of my bed every night, and won’t let me out of his sight if he can help it, and is the dog shown in my avatar, with Boudicca, my pure Irish wolfhound female. The pups from this litter are now just a little short of four months old, and range from light wheaten to black brindle in color and most look like pure Irish wolfhounds, though some look more like giant greyhounds with a little wiry hair. MacTavish, the black brindle male pup we’re keeping, looks just like a very nice pure Irish wolfhound, and it will be interesting to see what he looks like when mature; but I’m betting he could hold his own against pure wolfhounds in a show. I’m sure anyone who is attracted to the Irish wolfhound breed because of its regal looks would be just as happy with one of these crosses as with a pure bred dog, if “papers” weren’t important to them.
Only time will tell how the diverse genes from these two much different breeds will help with the health problems found in the wolfhound, but I don’t believe the crossing can hurt. That is as long as you’re not one of those people who seem to think the pure breed you favor stepped out of the forest and took its place at primitive mans’ side in its present form, rather than being developed from many diverse types of dogs.
Since it’s the genetic isolation of the pedigree system that is stranding so many breeds on a metaphorical island, and is causing the bottle-neck of genes in (most?) domestic dog breeds (breeders seem to advocate close inbreeding for their dogs, yet most people outlaw it in humans and bemoan it in endangered wild animals such as the cheetah), I believe that if kennel clubs allowed a breeding system such as is allowed with chickens and pigeons they could produce dogs that fall into their physical standards, yet are genetically much more healthy. If I have a breed of chickens that fall short of the desired physical traits listed in the standard for that breed, I can literally cross my show birds with any other breed of chicken I want, and whatever offspring from this cross (or their offspring in future generations) look like the standard calls for can be entered in a show and win first place (if they are the bird in the show that best exhibits the traits the standard calls for) with no thought to a pedigree. The emphasis is put on the individual bird and not on what its ancestors were.
Of course, there are a lot of culls in the chicken world; birds that look little like the standard calls for, so would never win a ribbon in a show. These birds either go to someone as a pet or into the kettle. If one were breeding dogs this way the animals that fell short of what they were supposed to look like would be the “pet quality” pups we see so much advertising about. By using this type of breeding system the show people could still have their show dogs, and healthier dogs would be much easier to breed by the addition of new genes to a depleted bloodline. This would work as well with Scottish terriers as with my Irish wolfhounds.
DAC
http://retrieverman.net/2010/12/13/misunderstanding-the-concept-of-inbreeding-tolerance/
Check out Jess’s post that is linked to here:
http://cynoanarchist.wordpress.com/2010/12/13/closed-registries-dogs-in-the-handbasket-to-hell-part-ii/
We have had a lot of discussion about this very issue on this blog and on the former chat room.
There are dog breeders who inbreed but make their bitches whelp outside in all conditions and allow nature to do the culling, so they do get rid of some defects in the gene pool over time.
But it’s not an ideal solution, and it doesn’t work forever.
At least with dogs it doesn’t.
I’d love to see more pictures of your dogs, they sound lovely.
Pai, anyone interested in seeing photos of my dogs can email me at (I’m a stone mason). I enjoy sharing photos of my dogs with others.
DAC
Hmm.. apparently my email address doesn’t come trough when I post it. Maybe its prohibited? Sorry if I’m breaking any rules.
Lets see if i can send it with a number between each letter. D1A2C3S4T5O6N7E8M9A9N
@G1M2A3I4L5.6C7O8M
Address is the letters and period only and in lower case.
DAC
I’m not saying this is the case with your memories at all before I cause an argument. But I do think the very common memory people seem to hold of when all dogs used to live well into their late teens/twenties in days gone by is a case of rose tinted nostalgia in many cases. People tend to forget the many dogs that were contemporary to the one that clocked up so many years but didn’t reach that kind of age as it doesn’t stick in the mind the same. Somehow, the exception turns itself into the rule in the fallible human subconscious.
Good luck with your lovely wolfhound malamute crosses. I do hope they all live long and healthy lives. What made you choose a malamute to cross in if you don’t mind me asking?
I`ve had Papillons since 1955. In all those years I only had one that lived to be 20. Mind you, quite a few to 18. My oldest at the moment is 16, a point at which I start to think of them as “aged”, because I expect them to get that far, My Irish friend had Freddie, an evil old dog who lived to be 28 – I think he made it on pure bad temper.
I keep records, but I do wonder about the “little terriers”, and how well their date of birth was remembered…or even known to the owner. If you have no reason to record a date of birth, it will soon become a matter of conjecture as to how old the dog is, when you realise years later that he is “getting on a bit”.
Elizabeth
Very old dogs were always the exception rather than the rule, and I’m not saying every terrier I knew was a Methuselah, but I know our Spotty was a full grown dog when she joined our family when my brother was five or six, and died when I was seventeen ( the last summer I spent on my sister’s farm in Connecticut). Since my brother is eleven years older than I am, that would mean Spotty had been with our family for at least 21 years when she was put away.
As any of you who have read my previous comments may have speculated by now, dogs have always been “my thing”, so even as a child I was much more aware of every dog in town than the average person; I even remember the names of most of the street dogs that were town characters when I was growing up. This might sound amazing except for the fact that I grew up in Vergennes, Vermont, touted as the smallest city in the USA, so there weren’t all that many street dogs running around.
I lived in Vergennes from the time of my birth in 1950, and we moved to a house on a hill on the outskirts of the city in 1958. From our house we could look down a very steep slope to the row of houses on the street below, across from which flowed the Otter Creek from the large falls in the city. One of the neighbors below us had a little wired-haired terrier type dog that was named Missy. Missy was an funny looking terrier-cross mutt colored like a beagle, but I primarily noted her because she had the odd habit of lifting both her hind feet off the ground when she urinated on an object. We moved from that house to a farm in Waltham in 1965, and Missy was still going strong, being at least seven years old by then. I graduated in 1969, when Missy was 11 (her owner’s son having graduated a year ahead of me), and since Missy’s owner lived so close to the river and city dock, and I spent quite a bit of time fishing in the years right after graduation, I often saw Missy wobbling around her owner’s yard and still pissing on plants while standing on her front feet.
In the late 70s I was helping a friend take their boat out of the river and looked across the street and saw a very aged Missy walking arthritically around her owners yard (thought, I no longer saw her do her handstand-pee thing,) and distinctly remember thinking, “Christ, she’s over twenty years old.” without going into any deep math.
One of my aged aunts had a little terrier type dog that used to sit on the window sill of her house as inactive as stuffed toy. One of my first memories is of standing there as little more than a toddler and trying unsuccessfully to get some sort of reaction out of that old dog. Later in my teens I remember visiting my aunt and being amazed that that dog was still sitting in that window (though in truth, perhaps my aunt actually did have it stuffed after it died. I’d given up trying to evoke a reaction out of that dog years before, and never really checked). Though I’m not sure just how old that dog was when it died (I vaguely remember my mother mentioning that it had died sitting in that window), I know I knew that dog as a practically immobile old dog for better than twelve years.
I could dredge several more such anecdotal examples out of my memory, but the most solid evidence I have was my first four years after high school working as the assistant of the local veterinarian, and being on hand for the final moments of several little dogs that had made it past their twentieth birthday, a fact proven by the vaccination records in the Vet’s office that I had access too, and was in fact in charge of pulling from the old fashion files every time a dog was brought into the office while I was on duty (that is, all day Monday through Friday and Saturday mornings).
So to put it short, I had a pretty good handle on what was going on in Vergennes and the surrounding towns “dog-wise”, and my noting several little dogs (terriers? I would suggest they were at least part) who made it past the venerated age of twenty was not just idle speculation on my part.
As far as my Irish wolfhound – Alaskan malamute breeding program goes, I chose malamute to cross with wolfhound because i have always found them to be a healthy and hardy breed; plus I wanted to introduce genes that hadn’t been combined in the same animal for thousands of years if possible. I also wanted to produce cross-bred dogs that I found aesthetically pleasing; animals i would personally like the looks of. I also believed the two distinct phenotypes would blend well to produce a very athletic dog; I was correct in that assumption.
DAC
I was just like you as a child and knew every dog in the vicinity back in the 70s. I was dog mad (still am). Your post is exactly what I mean about the oldies sticking in your memory. I’m the same with all the dogs I know that got to their upper teens and beyond. There are many dogs I have forgotten because they don’t have something unusual that sticks in my mind about them. And I’ve known quite a few via the boarding kennels and my friends who breed and show dogs. All things considered, do you think you’ve come across more or less dogs reaching that age now as opposed to previously? I’ve found the amount I know to be pretty steady, though I’ve come across both pedigrees and mongrels from small to medium sized rather than one particular type.
It sounds like a good combination to me. The dog in your profile looks lovely. Thank goodness there are people like you crossbreeding with an eye to genetic health rather than their wallet and stupid names.
Thanks, I like the way my dogs look and behave, and think of them as an improved small addition to the dog population in general. At times I do have second thoughts about bringing even more dogs into the world, but I feel that if people like me don’t strive to breed healthier dogs, eventually only the puppy mills and show breeders will be producing dogs (if the spay and neuter programs eventually work), and doing so with much different goals than I have. But there are positive and negative points to any breeding program, and while it’s true that the world does not need more dogs, in my own defense I can only say I go to any extreme possible to ensure none of the few puppies I produce ever end up in a bad home or a pound. The pounds are overburdened and the people who run them overworked, and I make sure none of the animals I produce ever become a part of that growing problem.
As far as comparing the dogs of my childhood with the dogs of today goes; I’m still very much a “Dog Person”, maybe even “Dog Mad” like you, but I don’t have as much contact with the general dog population as I did when I was a kid and had my nose stuck into every alley, back yard and clump of woods in our town. I once knew where every woodchuck hole, hive of wild honey bees, big anthill and crow nest was, and where every (old) dog in town lived. But I don’t get around like that anymore; and I just don’t know what’s happening with the local dog population like I once did.
I also no longer work for the local veterinarian. He and I had a close relationship even after I last worked full-time for him in 1974. I helped out at his office on a regular basis until he retired, but he died many years ago, so I no longer have contact with close to every dog in town, and don’t know when they’ve reach the final stage of life.
I forgot to mention earlier (I’d almost forgot it myself), but for a couple years while I worked for the Vet, I was also the Dog Warden for the city. I finally quit that position because too many of the dogs I brought in were being euthanized (I could only bring a limited number home to rehome myself), and I wanted no part of that. That position not only required I know all the dogs around, but even if their owners had paid their dog license or not.
I now live back in the woods at the foot of Buck Mountain in Waltham, Vermont, and prefer to spend time with my family and dogs rather than the general human population (I probably could be considered something of a recluse), so the things I know about local old dogs now are basically the anecdotal stuff everyone else hears, so I have no way of comparing the percentage of old dogs in the 60s to the percentage of old dogs today.
As far as the terriers being an older-lived group of dogs than any other; I can only say that when I was a child any small dog with a wiry or smooth spotted coat (if it wasn’t a beagle) was classified as a “terrier”, with no real thought on what any particular dog’s pedigree might actually be: no one cared.
So basically I can’t really say if local dogs are living as old as they once did, or if all the old dogs I once knew were actually terriers, and any speculation on my part would just be conjecture.
DAC
Were I starting with dogs again I think I would experimentally crossbreed like the local hearing dog centre does. That said, my wheatens often lasted to 14 plus. and our shih tzus are said to average longer despite being brachecephalic achondroplastic dwarfs – except we haven’t had any that long to know, yet.
I had a dog that lived from 1991 too 2008. But small, a mutt that looked like an apso, althought it certainly had no lhasa apso.
Here you can see the pic http://i8.photobucket.com/albums/a49/tennislurker/pky.jpg
I think it isn’t that rare for little mutt dogs to live over 15 years.
My first Sheltie made it to 16 (from a hobby breeder) and my second I got from a rescue at 7 years old–he was with me for 10 years. #3 just seemed to age faster than the first two and only made it to 15 (rescue, originally from a crappy puppy mill, developed hemangiosarcoma). I have a very healthy 11 year old Sheltie right now who I expect will get to at least 16, but I think his half brother might not be as long-lived–just a feeling. I also have Italian Greyhounds, and I am told it’s not unusual for them to live into their late teens.
Quality of life is as important to me as length, and I don’t believe in taking extreme measures to keep them alive. The first two clearly signaled to me when they were ready to go. The third was around 15 when we discovered he had hemangiosarcoma, with tumors on his liver and spleen. If he was a younger dog, I might have tried to treat it, but my vet and I agreed that the best thing was to keep him comfortable for the couple of months he had left. He ate hot dogs (and anything else that tempted him) in his last days, because, you know, why not?