One of the great shibboleths in the dog world is that there is a creature known as the “responsible breeder.”
Each person has a definition about what one is, but for many years, the biggest defining point was the adherence to blood purity cult. Usually this would be mixed in with all the delusions of preservation, as well as the delusion of improvement.*
The unfortunate thing is none of these things have much to do with the real world.
In the real world, crossbreeding isn’t evil. It’s innovation.
Take this nice post by Suzanne Phillips over at the Hoof &Paw blog.
In her part of Oregon, it’s not unusual for someone to breed this:
Photo from Suzanne Phillips.
This dog is a German short-haired pointer/Labrador retriever cross. It’s basically a purposely-bred cross that mixes the ruggedly versatile German HPR wit the always popular, hard driving Labrador. Suzanne mentions that when a friend of hers bred such a cross people drove from hundreds of miles to pick up one.
Such is the reputation of this cross.
She mentions another variant of the cross in the post as well. This time the retriever in question is a Chesapeake, but she has been bred to a German shorthair.
Photo from Suzanne Phillips.
It’s hard for anyone in that old way of thinking to say that these were not well-bred animals.
Chesapeakes, Labs, and German shorthairs are all very useful animals. Not a single one of them was created through maintaining closed registries until very recently.
And even now, many people who want a useful dog don’t pay much attention to the old blood purity rules.
That’s because these blood purity rules are way outside of the average person’s experience with dogs. Almost no one owns a dog that is very tightly bred, and virtually everyone in the public would be repulsed by the idea.
Many people talk about the reason why the American Kennel Club is in such terrible financial straight. Animal rights activist get the blame. The puppy mill paper mills get their share, too.
But I think the real problem is that the American Kennel Club, though it is headquartered in the United States and always has been, is really a foreign institution.
Its values were imported from Great Britain at the height of its imperialist glory. As strange as it sounds today, most Americans were very anti-British during most the nineteenth century. Britain had burned down our capital. It allowed the Confederacy to have the delusion that it was on the side of their rebellion. It was also a major competitor in the Northwest. Plus, tons of Americans were Irish famine refugees.
As America grew wealthier, wealthy and upper middle class Americans began to emulate the British Empire. Some of the first retriever trials in America were held on Long Island. Labradors were the breed of choice, and they were run almost exactly as they were in the mother country.
Meanwhile, American market duck hunters were blasting away with punt guns and heavy shotguns at vast flocks waterfowl. Their hardy “Chesapeake duck dogs,” water spaniels, and retrieving setters were earning their money. The backwoods market hunters were treeing grouse and turkeys with curs and feists. And very few of these people gave a rat’s behind about the pedigree of the dog.
In fact, most Americans didn’t care for this nonsense at all. The most common dog in much of the country was the generalist farm collie, usually called “a shepherd,” which did some light herding work and hunted everything it was asked to.
None of these dog were maintained within a concept of a “fancy.” There might be shows for foxhounds, coonhounds, and beagles, but every single dog in those shows was also a performance hound. And none of these dogs was kept in a true closed registry, and even now, pack hounds are still crossed on a routine basis.
But they are outside the AKC, and they are also outside the UKC.
Americans bred dogs to perform. In the early days of settlement, vast numbers of dogs couldn’t be imported from Europe. Our dog culture became based upon what can survive and what could do multiple tasks well.
The British dog culture was about specialization and arbitrarily classifying things based upon color and coat and size.
It became well-established among “learned circles” that American dogs, like our livestock, were in desperate need of improvement. From the 1870’s onward, there has been attempt to bring America the glories of canine improvement through closed registry breeding.
And it’s been a colossal failure.
It came closest to success in the middle to late part of the twentieth century, when the burgeoning middle class that had grown up out of the Second World War began to own purebred dogs as status symbol. It’s at this time that my own family got their first AKC dog, a registered rough collie named “Cam.” Cam produced more than a few litters of collie-foxhounds, which were then quite in demand in West Virginia as varmint dogs.
I’ve noticed that when most laypeople watch dog shows, they only want their favorite breeds to win. They want to see the golden retriever go BIS at Westminster. They don’t care about the rare breeds. They are curiosities, novelties to be looked as if one were looking artifacts in a museum.
And that may be too charitable for some breeds.
I’m sure the untrained eye sees many of the really exaggerated dogs as creatures best belong in a freak show.
And of course, one really can’t argue with them.
Many progressive people rightly complain about how Americans have never adopted certain European ideals, but the notion of a national kennel registry to tell us how to breed dogs is one I’m glad we’ve never fully accepted.
So long as a dog fancy remains this insular, very foreign, and reactionary clique, the American people are going to ignore what these people say.
And buy gun dogs like these.
And doodles.
And Texas heelers.
After all, this culture produces good dogs.
And the dog fancy continues to produce freaks– many of which are unhealthy and very hard to care for.
This is how market economies work. There is failure, and there is success. The dog fancy has been a failure in the United States– and our dogs stand a much better chance because of it.
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*There will be a post on this at some point,
Good historical background post, Scottie. Bostons were fighting dogs before the “fancy” got them and turned them into freaks.
I own a Catahoula Bulldog pup (a Catahoula and American Bulldog cross [mine is a 50/50] originally bred for hog hunting and generalist farm work), and he is a lovely, fun, intelligent dog. He’s also functional and hardy with a good attitude. I bought him from a breeder who breeds for working dogs, and he is exactly the dog I wanted.
I would personally like to see the fancy go, and if it doesn’t go, then I would like to see a complete change of their breeding practices.
The “fancy” in the USA has turned long legged curving double coat of working Hungarian Kuvaszok into soft straight coated chubby polar bearish show dogs.
An instinctive and irrational dislike of “mongrelisation” was prevalent here in Britain (mother of the empire) back in the 1940’s, whether of animals or humans, let’s not forget that. I can personally recall when a teenager living on the road where I lived had her baby forcibly removed by the local authority, reportedly not because of the mother’s age but because the father had been a “coloured” American serviceman. The grandparents just stood by and accepted it. There was no local or national outcry against this policy, that’s the horrible thing. People then would automatically agree that mixed marriages were bad per se “because you had to think of the children.” Of course no one really thought of the children of mixed race and they were seldom if ever made available for adoption. Easy to extrapolate from that mindset to the prejudice going on right up to today against the “crossbreeding” of dogs.
I recall one of my early reading books having the title “Little Black Sambo” it was a standard publication read by every five or six year old in the land.
I have that book still–had it when I was a kid–and EXCEPT for the names (Sambo, Mumbo the mother, Jumbo the father) I can’t figure out what’s so racist about it. Maybe I will have to go back and read it again. IIRC, the drawing of Mumbo was a classic “mammy”, but Sambo and Jumbo were more Indian than African, and Sambo wins in the end (the tigers run around the tree so fast they turn in to ghee, which Sambo collects and has on his pancakes). I remember being most fascinated with the concept of “tiger ghee” and wanted it on MY pancakes.
In retrievers, Sambo, Darky, and N*gger are very common names in pedigrees.
Sambo comes from some Portuguese racist term that was used in Brazil and Angola.
There was a Sambo bred into the Golden Retriever early on gift of Sir Harry Meux…He was bred to Topsy (1873, Tweed x Cowslip)
tigers running around the tree turning into ghee, yes I remember that, thanks for the memory. Maybe that wasn’t the best example of perceived racism for me to recall but my other recollection was, I think.
before retrieverman points it out, the inclusion of tigers does set the story in India of course. LOL
It’s not just you who consider it racist–but I did re-read it over the weekend, and then just had a look at the Wikipedia page for it–and it appears that it was more the drawings than the actual content:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Little_Black_Sambo
“The fancy” is an easy target, as the bad examples are so often so blatant. and deserving of approbium. However, those bad examples should not be taken to represent the entirety of purebred dogs.
Having been active in the dog world for some six decades, I can certainly attest that there are (and always have been) numbers of people working for soundness, health, good temperament and working ability in their purebred dogs. People whose dogs serve as Guide dogs, Assistance dogs, SAR (Search and Rescue) dogs, scenting specialists, upland and waterfowl hunting dogs and more, as well as in all forms of dog performance competition.
Let us remember also that it is organizations devoted to purebred dogs which have funded a great number of studies and research for the benefit of all dogs. Many of the parent breed clubs have charitable foundations for this purpose. For instance, the Golden Retriever Foundation has helped to fund several research projects on cancer, which ultimately will be of benefit to dogs of any and all breeds, and dogs of no particular breed. Even the much-criticized AKC has donated millions of dollars through the Canine Health Foundation.
“And even now, many people who want a useful dog don’t pay much attention to the old blood purity rules.”
This is why 50% of dogs in America are not purebred. People got along fine without the AKC for thousands of years, and they still are getting along fine without them.
I abhor the Westminster. Dogs are more than surface looks. I own two Maltese (being an old lady) and you’d never guess from the silky mops they shown at Westminster are intelligent and acing animals with minds of their own. They are interesting. They plot and scheme to get what they want. At 79, I’ve had a myriad of dogs from mutts to purebreds, but none was interesting because of its looks. It’s their minds and behaviors that make them worthwhile. Yes, when we lived in the country, we had dogs that hunted, but, personally, I never got pleasure from killing creatures who want to live as much as humans do. See my blog, http://dogsandwolves-smartoldlady.blogspot.com
or my face books page “Amazing dogs-yours and mine.”
Some typos in my comment
“they shown” should be “they showed.” “acing animal” was intended to be “caring animals.”
Scottie, Forgot about your site for a while, but love the post. People who give their dogs a “job” from hunting, to obedience, to simply being a companion that is well mannered while moving and breathing freely do more for the long term viability of good stock than ultra-competitive conformation breeders do.
While many reflexively disagree, I also recommend that working dog owners that have even the most basic sense of responsibility, hold off on sterilizing their dogs until they get to know their dogs virtues and vices. Stable temperaments, bidability, and good hips may be scarce someday soon.
Also ask your vet how urinary incontinence rates differ between spayed and non-spayed females. They will likely bullshit you, but the answers are easy to find.
I think the link between British Imperialism and the AKC and badly bred pedigree dogs is an interesting angle and might be necessary to get the AKC all but killed off but I think it could be a spurious one nevertheless.
Dog showing is popular across the globe the same dogs the same problems the same organisations who register them. Many of these countries if not most of these in fact never saw a red coat in the entire history of their being. Not only that but most of the ex-British colonies (which is what America was) are in Africa where dog showing is virtually zero and breeding livestock doesn’t follow the closed registry blue print either.
There was certainly a time when no one gave a “rats arse” about a dogs pedigree in the British isles either. When most dogs were working dogs bar a few house dogs whose main purpose was to delight. This is not unique to America’s history or anyone else’s.
Many many reasons but mass migration to cities figures heavily, the rise of suburbia be it from closure laws to work opportunities, great depressions, easier way of living and etc all found dogs with basically no jobs other than to be admired. Disposable income meant dogs became popular as pets. And so the dog “fancy” really took off and no where with quite as much gusto as in and coinciding with the rise of the United States.
America is not l’exception as evil as empire building was and I might add remains, indeed forms of imperialism seem positively alive and kicking [wink]
Yes certainly I see a different future for America to what it has been. One maybe not quite so entirely bound by white Anglosaxon ideals perhaps given the rise of the Hispanics and black vote but people being people will still need their status symbols they will maybe just be different.
Labradoodles today will be the pedigree mutts of tomorrow mark my words. (:
It’s not popular in the United States at all. Hardly anyone shows dogs and most people don’t care.
Dog showing in America and breeding with closed registries is/was possibly as popular as it is/was anywhere, more so given its size alone and levels of disposable income compared to some.
What is true is dog showing came perhaps a little later to America than it did to the old country. Most things did. “America”, “The united states” after all is only two hundred odd years old.
The history of dogs in the UK is incredibly well documented. In fact there is record of “hunting dogs” being exported from that Island dating to 63-21BC, that’s remarkably before the prophet Christ was born. No the Kennel Club wasn’t around the first dog show was only in 1859. That’s many hundreds and hundreds of years later.
In all those hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and more hundreds of years etc there were no closed registries. In only 727 AD the death of St Hubert, Bishop of Liege who during his life time developed his hunting hounds, the Black St Hubert and the White St Hubert…..prototype blood hounds! People were coursing “grey” hound type dogs in c800AD no registeries at all.
Yes the history of dog breeding in the USA is a short one but did follow in more recent times the British model for dog showing, however the AKC was only started in 1889 that’s 106 give or take years after Britain lost that colony. All its own doing Im afraid (:
Dog shows in the UK and America were typically urban activities accessible to people of all classes not just land owners with piles in the countryside, popular with spectators and exhibitors.
As American as it gets considering the lack of feudalism, aristocracy and class system in the new World.
KC or even the AKC not of our time? Maybe. Might seem pointless to keep recording the demise of so many breeds? But if many are to have their way these breeds will be reinvented by opening registries. Back to the begining? Too late? I don’t know.
You mention a topic that many of us ponder… How would the AKC go about opening the registries if it went that direction? Does it dictate what percentage breed purity a dog needs to be to be called a particular breed? Does it become the breeding police as far as what dogs are allowed to be bred into any particular breed? Didn’t they open the registry for the health of the Dalmatian a few years back and then revoke those cross bred dogs? …I might be wrong about that, it is what I remember but I haven’t followed that breed very closely…
A. Follow the example of some of the horse registries, with an “appendix” registry for cross-breds. After 3 or 4 generations backcrossed to the original breed, can be registered as purebred. That’s how the KC (UK) used to do it with interbred retrievers.
B. a fairly recent change in policy enables Dalmatians descended from the pointer outcross to now be registered with AKC. Basenjis also have, with AKC permission, utilized native African stock in order to help alleviate some genetic problems.
AKC does not give permission to open the studbooks. The parent club decides that. The Saluki Club of America voted to accept the Society for the Perpetuation of the Desert Bred Saluki as a domestic registry. SPDBS registers country of origin dogs. The Basenji club voted to reopen their studbook.
It would be entirely possible for a breed club to vote to open their stud book permanently, and come up with their own appendix registry like the UK ‘b’ registry.
The Dal club BOD initially accepted the registration of Stocklore Stipples (who was pointed) and another dog descended from the original Pointer cross. Some of the membership threw a fit and both registrations were rescinded. Under the conditions of the ‘new’ acceptance of the Backcross Dals for AKC registration, all dogs must go back to Stocklore Stipples and they must have one copy of the normal wild type uric acid gene. I believe the time for registration is also limited.
I didn’t even consider that Jess, but he breed clubs do set their own breed standards so it makes sense. Seems to me to be wise for all to accept a certain amount of open registry to better the health of the breeds. Seems like a big undertaking that requires group effort.
It is interesting. Im only familiar with warm blood horse registries (stud books) in Europe as far as horses go. They are extremely successful and their registries are permanently open. Anything that is deemed useful to the breed is performance tested and appraised and from these results it’s given the green light or not. There is constant inflow from other registries as a horse can be given the green light in many countries breed stud books. Other breeds from even closed registries are constantly being introduced like the thoroughbred or any other particularly fine functional animal that measures up with sporting prowess suitable for the registries and a particular sport be it dressage show-Jumping or eventing. These registeries are consantly on the look out for improvement be it bone, function or movement. Health as a result is almost a given.
Warmbloods are not a typically extreme uniform type animal as a result either . Most Stud books do have definite types except perhaps for the Dutch one which has relied heavily on sire imports from German, French stud books and etc and quite early on. They have also almost all but lost the foundation mares or breed of their registry to turn back on. Of course this has not stopped them from being a resounding commercial success and marketing is certainly one of their strong points.
Rarebreed horse registries are a different story and quite honestly can be successful although some seem to be battling the same problems of overcoming the untouchable “blood’ issue. The thoroughbred while not rare is in trouble having perhapse only survived so long as a result of performance selection rather than to a standard. Some are a lost cause. But following along the lines of what M.R.S says perfectly acceptable.
I think there is no reason why dog breeding shouldn’t follow suit of warmblood registries more or less. Yes there are many more breeds. The AKC would be all but pointless save perhaps for being a data base. It would all happen at club level. Assuming international clubs for particular breeds could be functional (not an easy task even at national level).
Deconstruction could maybe be the only way forward. All breed shows other than for pure exhibition purposes as in the days of yore would be a thing of the past? Dog standards just a guideline not the gospel?
Other breeds and unregistered dogs of the breed could be introduced along similar lines. The club registries could be open at all times. Science would play a part but quite honestly only to a limited degree, the rest is hardly rocket science but common sense. No reward for strictly standard but reward for health vigour and functionality and tested for such.
Breeders who disagree could choose to not be involved. No one is forced to secure a healthy future for their breed, those dogs if they don’t disappear could even be useful. I know which dog from which breeding I would prefer.
Along the lines of some of the existing working dog clubs. We all know what a Jack Russell is even if it has some dachshund or some staffie in there, it’s a lovely little Jack Russell 8-10-12 inches who cares choose your type, or Border collie or lurcher or lap dog……why not a Norwich terrier type or a Standard poodle too?
I understand the retisence. The only registered pedigree dog I have soft spot for not that I have had one since 1976 is the Borzoi. But if it means the Borzoi continues and to thrive because irish wolf hounds have been used or grey hounds and and or Im happy so is the dog. Nothing lost nothing gained. In fact the only thing lost is ill health and loss of functionality.