Natural History

This is a pachon Navarro, one of two breeds that are called “Spanish pointers.”

This breed has had this trait for centuries, and yes, it’s an actual working breed.

We’ve been selecting for weird traits in dogs long before we ever thought of showing them.

We love novelty, and this is one the things dogs have to accept when they joined up with our kind.

We don’t care too much about smells– unless they are really rank.

But we do care about what things look like.

A few days ago, I watched a video where a duck farmer was selecting which ducks from his flock were going to be culled. He had two breeds of domestic mallard, the Rouen, which is like a larger version of the wild duck, and the Pekin, which is the classic big white duck.

The two breeds had crossed, producing ducks with unusual spotting, and because the farmer was looking for more hybrid vigor than the pure Rouen strain he had, the pure Rouens got culled, as did any crossbreeds with more banal spotting.

He wasn’t selecting for color, but the weirdness of color made him hesitate about killing them. Their weird spots will be passed onto the next generation, and those ducklings with that coloration will be the ones most likely to survive to pass on their offspring.

Our attraction to weirdness creates strange selection pressures in our domestic animals. In dogs, this attraction can be pretty banal, as it is with this double-nosed pointer.

However, as we’ve seen time and again, we’ve done a lot of harm with our attraction for novelty.

The bulldog that cannot whelp or mate without veterinary assistance and double merle collie with no eyes are both what happens when our desire to select for novelty runs amok.

We need to understand that our nature has to be controlled.

Otherwise, our selection pressures will lead to more misery.