The Emperor's Striptease

Until about 2006, the American Kennel Club published its registration statistics every year -- how many dogs of each breed registered, the comparable number from the previous year, each breed's relative position in popularity rankings, and the overall number of individual dogs registered.

Once the interwebz had evolved, those statistics were easy to find, handy to access on the AKC's site -- and announced with fanfare and fatuous press releases every January -- "Labrador Retriever is America's Top Dog Fourth Year in a Row -- Yorkshire Terrier Closing In."

But starting in 1992, the statistics tell a more interesting story than the timeless drama of poodles vs. Rottweilers.

From what is itself an outlying peak of over 1.5 million registrations in 1992, the numbers went into an immediate tailspin -- not a slow, steady decline, not an accelerating curve, but an impressive nosedive. By 2002, AKC registered fewer than a million new dogs -- over a one-third reduction in registrations over the course of a decade.

One institutional response to this extraordinary development was to circle the wagons and stop putting those registration statistics out where people like me could see them. That will fix it!

According to the AVMA, in 2001 Americans owned 61,572,000 dogs. 36% of American households included one or more dogs. By 2007, 37% of US households owned 72,114,000 dogs. And the average number of dogs per dog-owning household increased from 1.6 to 1.7.

Dog ownership rates increased slightly over that six year period, the human population increased, the number of households increased, and the total number of owned dogs jumped by over ten million animals! During the same period, AKC annual purebred registrations dropped -- as I've just learned, by 300,000.

No wonder they've circled the wagons.

But, you say, wouldn't a well-run business try to find out why they were losing market share, and then do what they needed to do to change that?

Of course it would. We'll get back to that.

I was surprised to find that the AKC recently allowed a gross account of its registration statistics to be published here.

No surprise, the tailspin has not abated.



(And yes, I tried to embed these figures here -- fair use -- and they won't go. I found a workaround to display the gif images. I get the distinct impression of an organization that is still desperately trying to control the message.)

In 2008, the AKC registered the same number of dogs it did in 1965 -- the year I was born. Even more dramatic, when the data controls for the size of human population -- number of dogs registered with AKC / human population -- the potential revenue loss shitstorm from 1992 to 2008 is more on the order of 62%.


Now, the article from the ag-industry astroturf organization NAIA would have us believe that the reasons the AKC's registrations are dropping are:

• New laws and regulations that target breeders
• Imports of purebred puppies*
• 30 years of bad publicity about breeders

Reality: none of the above.

AKC isn't drowning. It's in quicksand. It jumped in by itself. All of its witless struggles just send it deeper. And as it screams abuse and curses at its former subjects, fewer and fewer of them are feeling inclined to throw it a rope and get pulled in themselves.

The real reasons for the drop in registrations have something to do with general cultural trends and consumer behavior, and quite a lot to do with the behavior of the AKC itself, past and present. These factors interact with one another, form feedback loops, weave into a full picture and become effectively impossible to parse out into separate threads. Nevertheless, I'll give it the old college try.

Top Ten Reasons the AKC's Registration Revenues are Down the Shitter

10. Televised Dog Shows

Does watching the Miss USA pageant on television make you want to run right out and buy a JonBenet Ramsay Junior Pageant Whore-Baby kit for your daughter?

Really?

Yeah, I didn't think so.

Westminster and other televised dog shows do nothing to encourage regular dog owners to become "dog fanciers." While they are moderately popular with viewers -- so are reality TV shows featuring freaks, misfits, drama queens and assorted object lessons.

As your teacher tried to tell you, They aren't laughing with you, they are laughing at you.

The viewers -- mostly dog lovers -- who watch for the weird dog haircuts, unfortunate handler fashion decisions, strange misshapen breeds, and tiny dogs with absurd names that weigh more than they do, are not gaining a higher opinion of the ACK, dog shows, and dog fanciers. The whole exercise in artificial glamor and hype for the cameras makes that world seem even more remote and bizarre.

9. Shelter Adoption

The last two decades have seen a revolution in attitudes towards dogs in animal shelters. Dogs that were formerly killed are now adopted as pets.

None of those dogs are producing purebred offspring to be registered. All of them are occupying a growing, but still finite number of slots in family homes.

There's a special place in my own black little heart for breeders who bitch about rescue because rescue adoptions deprive them of puppy sales. (Yes, really, I've had breeders complain to me about this, as if they would find a sympathetic ear.)

A registry that pisses and moans about essentially the same thing is no better.

8. Puppymills

Consumers began to become aware of the puppymill/pet store connection in the 1970's; awareness continued to grow through the eighties and nineties. The pet stores went on the defensive, with marketing spin that all their puppies came from USDA-registered breeders. (Read: puppymills.) "We buy our puppies from local breeders, not puppymills." Etc. The puppymill marketers and consumer consciousness have been in a sort of arms race of spin versus cognition for over 30 years, but in general, ordinary dog owners and would-be dog owners are aware that puppymills are bad and cruel and to be avoided.

Sadly, many dog buyers discover the provenance of their dog after the fact, when they are standing in a vet's office with a sick or psycho puppy and folder containing the receipt from Petland, a useless warranty, and the puppy's possibly fraudulent AKC "papers."

The postwar marketing scam that had duped American consumers into believing that "AKC-registered" was synonymous with "quality dog" was unraveling.

The AKC was not only willing to register pups that had passed from massive mill to wholesaler to retailer to unwitting pet buyer, it actively courted those revenues. Even when the little sales units weren't individually registered by their ultimate buyers, the AKC took a cut every time the beastie changed hands -- much more lucrative than a hobby or show breeder who sold a puppy just once to a pet buyer. Without the massive revenues of the puppymill industry to subsidize the swank Madison Avenue HQ and glittery dog shows, ACK would have been forced to scale back or require its vassal fanciers to bear the actual cost of their hobby.

Related post: At Least, Don't Buy This

7. Puppymill Registries

Ironically, the biggest hit on AKC registrations came as a direct result of ACK's single arguably good deed.

If the central function of an animal registry is to keep an accurate account of the pedigrees of the animals registered, the AKC was failing because of its long-standing policy of rubberstamping whatever the puppymills reported. It was an open secret that the sale of "papers" for breeding stock and the sale of the animals themselves were two independent and unrelated transactions in puppymill land. If a production unit breeder dog died, its papers were still a lucrative property. This was not limited to simple fraud about identity. Especially in the case of expensive and delicate small breeds, it becomes convenient to cross the breeds, with a small sire caged with some bigger-breed bitches in order to maximize litter size and survivability. No one knows how many Petland "Maltese" are the offspring of a bichon mother and a Maltese father, but by the time the switcheroo becomes apparent, they are in little danger of being returned to the store -- if the owners ever figure it out at all.

The AKC's core constituency -- dog fanciers whose hobby is competing in dog pageants -- was understandably miffed about the open secret that their core values of pedigree accuracy and breed "purity" were overwhelmingly compromised.

In response, the AKC instituted their frequently used sires program, requiring that males that engendered more than a certain number of litters (it is now six, or three in one year, though I believe the initial thresholds were higher) be DNA typed.

The puppymill industry's reaction was to vote with their feet, and create their own papermills with cheaper fees and no questions asked. Not only do the ACA, APRI, CKC, et. al. issue bogus pedigrees for their core constituency, but they are happy to keep on doing so for the mill-puppy buyers turned backyard breeders whose classified ads are the last thing keeping dead-tree newspapers out of bankruptcy.

So now, most puppies bought at pet stores are not AKC-registered, and fewer and fewer of the pups sold by casual breeders and local direct-to-consumer puppymills are. Yesterday's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette pet classifieds included 58 ads for pups registered with AKC, as against 37 that mentioned no registry, 23 for cross-breds (almost all deliberate "designer dog" crosses) and 18 that mentioned "other" registries -- puppymill industry registries. However, most of the ads for deliberate crossbreds and many of the ones for ACA, WWKC, and other papermill-registered pups bore the field marks of direct-to-consumer mills -- websites, takes Visa, multiple litters listed in one ad -- so the number of pups sold per ad in that category is indubitably higher than the single litters listed.

No question, the Frequently Used Sire Program and concurrent crackdown on records violators -- steps the AKC took to assure its delegates and core customers that it was doing job they pay it to do -- severely cut into the profits. And there is probably no way for them to take it back without digging the hole deeper. Not that they aren't capable.

6. The Return to Normalcy

The practice of sending money to a stranger and accepting in return a sheet of paper that repeats the information you sent along with the money is a curious one, and it only goes back a little over a hundred years in this country. It was initially an indulgence of wealthy fanciers, and remained exclusively so for decades.

The wealthy fanciers also set the habit of paying someone to tell them what they could and could not do with their dogs -- the Government of Dogs proclaimed that there would be no race-mixing, that thus and such color or shape or fur texture was anathema, that ears must be amputated for this dog, but never for that one -- and their subjects jostled one another aside to be the first to obey. (Still cheaper than hiring a dominatrix or Frank Lloyd Wright, and the welts and structural defects are on the dog, not you.)

It wasn't until after the Second World War that very many ordinary middle-class people were convinced that they needed a "pedigree dog." (And there were never more than six AKC registered dogs per year per one thousand Americans, even at the outlying peak of registrations.)

The practice of registering dogs with, and paying obeisance to, an organization that is designed to indulge the hobby of a tiny proportion of dog owners, is a historical blip in the culture. Choosing not to register, not to follow "the rules," is more in keeping with the way that Americans -- humans -- have always kept pet and working dogs.

Rather than ask why Americans no longer register their pets with the AKC, we might seriously ask how it is that they were persuaded to do so, for no apparent benefit to themselves or their animals, for nearly fifty years.

5. Michael Lemonick and Mark Derr

In the March 1990 issue, The Atlantic published the first mainstream media critique of the institution of fancy breeding of dogs. Mark Derr laid out the harm to animal welfare and human needs that follows from selection for physical uniformity, closed studbooks, and exaggerated type in "The Politics of Dogs." (Not available online without paying $$ to The Atlantic.)

More than a decade later, Time's Michael Lemonick laid it all out again in the cover story "A Terrible Beauty."

While most mainstream media coverage of doggy matters remains firmly in the realm of fluff and fatuousity, the horse has left the barn. Even the shallowest treatment of show dogs and "The Fancy" now typically includes some mention of the evils of rewarding only for beauty, inbreeding, ignoring health and temperament. Sure the journalettes have no idea what they are talking about, and get it mostly wrong, but there is some obligatory embedded backlash nevertheless. The reading public is reminded that AKC papers "are best used to housebreak the puppy" at regular intervals.

The popular perception that purebred dogs are inbred (largely true) and that mixed breed dogs are healthier (also on average true) has fueled the market for gormlessly crossbred "designer dogs." While consumers misunderstand the precise nature of the problem, and have definitely fallen for a marketing scam with the "solution," they are to some extent on the right track.

4. Gen X, Y and Z

We don't need your stinkin' certificate to tell us we got a dog, dude!

Oddly enough it was Boomers -- yeah, you're all revolutionaries, sure you are -- who obediently sent in the check for their pets' papers in unprecedented numbers.

That swan dive starting in '92? Right around the time my generation started settling down and getting their own dogs. (Yes, I am 44 years old. That is Generation X. Seriously. Few tats, no piercings. Lotta Gulf War veterans. Look it up.)

3. People Like Me, You, and This Here Lamppost

I used to encourage my clients to send in their dogs' registrations, just in case they might want to go into the obedience ring one day.

I haven't done that in years.

Now, when a client asks, I discourage them from sending in the money. The boys on Madison Avenue don't need your fifteen dollars. Spend it on a nice leash. If they want to know about the pedigree, their breeder should have already provided it. If the breeder won't give a pedigree, that's about all we need to know about that breeder.

I talk about the shortcomings of the ACK -- including a lot of the ones listed here -- to all sorts of people, not just dog hobbyists who seek out a blog like this.

It boils down to advancing the idea that the AKC offers no value for money spent, and is actually bad for dogs.

Viruses spread. Most of you regular readers have spread this one.


2. The Dog Wars

Once upon a time, the gentlemen of independent means from the Westminster KC who actually call the shots at Madison Avenue HQ had some pretty strict criteria for "recognizing" a breed.

A club of fanciers had to come hat-in-hand to the back door, present a studbook that established the unassailable "purity" of their breed, and sing a cool island song to melt their hot hearts, or whatever, in the hopes of being granted permission to send money to the AKC in exchange for a piece of paper that tells them what they already know -- and especially, being included in the honor of having someone who knows nothing about their dogs tell them which ones are wonderful and which are shite.

There were even a fair number of disappointed office seekers. My own breed was dismissed from the servant's entrance for being inadequately pure and insufficiently "standard," some time in the 1950's.

Whew! That was close!

This changed in the early 1990's. 1992, I think it was, when AKC announced that it would "recognize" the Australian shepherd.

Except, the Aussie owners' club had no interest in being so honored. It was doing just fine by itself, with a registry, pageant shows (there was their mistake -- a topic for another day), and open-to-all obedience and working trials.

But AKC was in an acquisitive mood. It cobbled together a little group of Aussie owners who wanted to enter the big pageants, declared them the official club, and to Hell with the studbook -- they'd just take your word for it on the pedigree.

Most of the Aussie people I knew at the time took a fatalistic view -- they didn't like it, but basically rolled over and peed themselves. "I guess I have to double-register, or else lose puppy sales. They're going to close the studbook." (Edit: I do not mean to imply that all Aussie owners went this way; I was just shocked and disappointed about the ones I knew at the time, who all did.)

And they were off.

Next in the sights was the border collie.

Their owners did not roll over and pee themselves.

They "lost," in that they could not prevent the ACK from appropriating the name "border collie" for their transvestite show dogs, nor from capturing the registrations of dogs from working breeding whose owners were addicted to the rush of kicking ass at agility and obedience trials.

But the thing about a little guy who gets beaten by a bully -- all he really has to do is give the thug a bloody nose, and he's won. Better yet if a whole crowd of people watches the fight. It not only clearly reveals the bully for what he is, it plants the seeds of resistance in all of the spectators' minds.

The ABCA continues to register over 20,000 border collies a year -- more than ten times as many as the AKC. Most of those latter are "captured" agility and obedience dogs, and many of those are dual-registered.

The AKC's "standard" version of the "border collie" is widely referred to as the "Barbie collie," and recognized for the pale imitation that it is.

Nowadays, when the AKC announces that it is fixing to "recognize" a working breed, it is universally (and accurately) assumed that this is a hostile acquisitive action fronted by a tiny hollow shell group of wannabes who do not work their dogs.

The involuntary quality of recent annexation is even true of companion breeds, such as the Coton de Tulear, Cavalier King Charles spaniel, and Leonberger.

The boards of "rare breed" clubs no longer present themselves at the service entrance and tug their forelocks while handing over the sacred studbook for scrutiny. Yet AKC keeps trying to make up for lost registration revenues from the Labrador and fox terrier columns by grabbing up rare breeds and declaring them "recognized."

It leaves a foul taste in the mouths of even the most die-hard pageant fanciers. Some object only to the untrustworthy pedigrees and opportunities for fraud. But most see how shabbily their Overlord treats those who don't get with its program.

1. Institutional Arrogance

The AKC cannot make up its mind whether it is a Most Anciente and Exclusive Order that has charged itself with governing a small, fanatical, and timorously obedient cadre of social-climbing dog-pageant addicts, or the divinely-ordained Government of Dogs in all of America.

One identity is primarily insular and snobbish. The other is primarily totalitarian and expansionist. They commingle gracelessly into something resembling a Stalinist Switzerland.

Virtually every disastrous decision the organization has made traces back to one of these two identities, or to the grating disharmony between them. But both identities are grounded in over a century that fanciers spent cultivating institutional arrogance -- starting in the dark-wood-and-leather smoking rooms (No Girlz Alowd!) where men who needn't work for a living decided How It Was Going to Be over cigars and sherry.

Arrogance underlies the presumption that "just a registry" has the right to tell the owners of dogs of every breed which dogs are worthy and which impermissible, whom they may breed to, from where they may import an animal.

It defines the conceit that what is important, exciting, and worthy about a dog of any breed is what can be seen in a few seconds by a man in a penguin suit or a matron in sequins who has never owned a dog of that breed, never worked one, never seen one work.

It is indispensable in maintaining the unsupportable faith that purebred dogs are exempt from the principles of genetics that apply to all living beings, and that the answer to the disaster of the closed-registry systematic inbreeding "experiment" is more of the same purge-and-purify insanity.

It drives the see-want-take impulse behind almost twenty years of hostile takeovers of breeds and the imperious treatment of the unconsenting human beings who own the actual dogs and the ephemeral creature that is "the breed."

It governs the institution's imperious dealings with its core constituents as embodied in its own delegates -- and even the previous presumption that their puppymiller gravy train would roll over and keep sending the munneyz when the paper-peddlers no longer winked at the wholesale fraud and unconscionable animal abuse that has paid for so many silver cups and Landseers.

It underlies the transparently grabby attempt to take credit for the achievements of working dogs. ("To qualify, the purebred dog must be AKC registered or an AKC recognized breed ...")

If the AKC wasn't fueled, steered, and simultaneously blinded by its own stupefying arrogance, not only would it avoid the consequences of its own oblivious decisions, it would be much less susceptible to the loss of respect and revenue that has been driven by cultural evolution.

_________

* Total about 70,000 young pups in 2006. No hard figures given for prior years. So no way of knowing a baseline (say, 1992) figure for puppy imports. Some of these pups -- I think a lot -- are English and French bulldogs bred in Russia or other Eastern European countries. That's a new phenomenon; most of these pups aren't going to be AKC registered. Some will be German shepherds and other working-breed dogs born in Germany and imported by private American buyers or pretty much legitimate brokers. Many of those will be registered with the AKC -- probably many more than are native-born GSDs for the neighborhood pet market. That import market has been around for a long time. Some are dogs bred by fanciers or working breeders in Canada and Mexico, sold to private pet and show and working buyers in the US -- again, a well-established practice along those porous borders. Just as likely to be AKC registered as a comparable native-born pup. Some are like this guy. Definitely registered.

I don't think there's any damned way that 70,000 imported pups, many of which ultimately are registered with the AKC (which presumably knows the exact number), and which may or may not represent an increase in imports, account for much of the > half a million fewer dogs registered in 2008 v. 1992.

It Has Never Been About the Dogs

The Grey Lady writes about the M-word in dog pageants.

Karma points for the scare quotes around the word "pets."

US Today gives Frei his podium for the party line that dogs who live in crates with professional handlers are "just like your pet at home." Just like JonBenet Ramsay was just a regular little girl playing dress-up.

Srsly, could this dog want to be where he is any less? (Video -- I did not embed because of obnoxious continuous stream ads.) Hey Frei, slap his head back towards you and the newstwinkie again, show us how much you love him. Yeah, he runs wild on a ranch in Texas. Or lives in Missouri, with another "owner." Or in Illinois. Or at Frei's apartment in NYC. Depends on which member of his "ownership team" or handler or PR shill is holding forth on how he's just like your pet at home.

Three more recently working breeds get a stake through their hearts this year. The AP acts as the ACK's press agent on this one.

I will not be watching, unless Perfesser Chaos decides that it is time to get a flat-screen teevee; he knows he can count on my foot going through the tube of the old one when the GSDs and border collies take the stage. Or the obese Labs. Or the lumbering goldens. Or any other visually apparent atrocity against dogdom.

All that is gold does not glitter

Retrieverman is mad.

Retrieverman thinks that anyone else who loves the golden retriever breed should be mad, too.

You betcha.

My first dog was a proper golden retriever. Sassy, lithe and athletic, and would have chewed off her own foot before she bit anyone. Shannon was born in 1974; pre-Liberty. Ante-deluge.

I've been saying it for years.

You got a Rottweiler that is biting people, you got a training problem.

You got a golden retriever that is biting people, you got a genetic problem.

And folks, we have got ourselves one doozy of a genetic problem.

Retrieverman postulates that breeding for "calm" goldens has caused them to become biters. I am unconvinced. Calm dogs of other breeds are not psycho biters. And the dumb blond show dogs he dislikes are not, to my eye, "calm." Lumbering, yes. Squinty-eyed, sure. But being too fat and hairy and possibly hypothyroid to enjoy life is not the same as "calm."

Here's a theory I heard from a veterinarian about ten years ago. She bred golden retrievers herself. No, I do not remember her name. Dammit.

She told me that in the highly competitive golden retriever show ring, certain things were rewarded consistently:

Big.
Blonde.
Hairy.
Up on its toes.

Every dog in every ring was the first three, to the point where they were effectively identical. What she meant by the last was, judges were selecting dogs that were "on" -- stiff and alert, head and tail up, projecting what passes for "charisma" in the pageant world.

What that meant in terms of the dogs that were beating the competition was that -- they were dogs that wanted to beat the competition. Into a bloody screaming ragdoll. They were dogs who were highly aroused and on edge in the presence of people and other dogs.

Select rigorously for "winners" who are pissed off just looking at a stranger or another dog, make more just like 'em, continue for ten or fifteen generations, what you gonna get?

Last time I checked, the golden retriever standard for temperament did not read: Stiff, tense, and snarky towards humans and dogs; resource-guarding, dominance aggression, and psychotic attacks on neighborhood children are highly desirable characteristics.

But a quick review of my files for the last five years or so reveals something really extraordinary.

Well over half of the purebred golden retrievers I've worked with in recent years, privately or in class, come to me with a serious aggression problem.

I've handled a couple of pups, one of which was alarmingly lethargic, and one nice adolescent who needed manners. A young male who seemed to have both cognitive and affective deficits, but was certainly nonviolent. Oh, and there was the "golden retriever" puppy that I did a single consult for, much of which consisted of trying to convince the owner that the puppymiller had, indeed, sold her a husky. (Pointy erect ears - - check. Red-and-white plush fur -- check. Mask -- check. Curly tail -- check. This is not a hard call, ma'am.)

The only breed with a higher proportion of genuinely aggressive individuals in my training practice (I exclude breeds with an n<3) style="font-style: italic;">in my entire career, have been biters. The one that didn't bite had OCD. Cocker mixes -- also biters.

I see a smaller proportion of German shepherds, Rottweilers, Jack Russell terriers, and Dobermans that are aggressive. Much smaller.

I have never worked with an aggressive "pit bull." And I'm known as a pit-friendly trainer, so I see a fair number of them. Mostly for destructive chewing and general manners.

Back to goldens. Scariest dog I ever trained, most dangerous, longest rap sheet: golden retriever.

I've only told three clients flat out to put the dog down, that it is too dangerous to share surface space on this planet with the rest of us. This dog was the first.

Let me preface this by saying, if I encountered the same situation today, I would call CYS and report the parents. And this is the case that prompted me to use a sternly-worded contract for all aggression cases, and charge a lot more, and require the money up-front.

Anyway, this golden had a bite rap sheet into the double digits when the owners called me. He specialized in nailing neighborhood kids who came over to play with the owners' children. Owners had never been sued, and I still don't grok that. The owners' own children feared and disliked the dog. (There's your sign.)

Dog tried to kill me at the first session. Oh, did I mention he also had seizure disorder? But he had to be well-bred, objected the owner, "His breeder was a minister's wife!"

Every session, the female owner would announce, in the face of overwhelming contradictory evidence, that the dog was "100% better than last time." Then I'd repeat my lecture to the owner about not giving the dog free access to leg o' toddler, since none of my management requirements were in place, then the dog would spend an hour thinking about how much he'd like to kill me if he could get the damned collar and leash off.

My final CTJ conversation with the client, which was also when I fired her, was over the phone. It went something like this:

Me: Your dog has not improved one bit with training. You don't seem to be willing to do any homework or change a single thing about the way you manage him. He's a very dangerous animal, and you have two young children over whom you also have no control. You need to put this dog down.

Client: Don't you know of a farm in the countr ...

Me: No. You are not hearing me. This is a very dangerous animal. He is escalating his attacks. In my opinion he is not neurologically normal. I know that your vet has told you exactly the same thing I am telling you. This dog is not safe to have around people, period.

Client: You don't think he'd bite my kids, do you? (This sentence verbatim. Exactly what she said.)

Me: (What I should have said) You delusional self-absorbed hateful bitch! It's fine for this psycho dog that you refuse to control to chomp down on other people's kids as long as yours are unperforated?! What the hell is wrong with you? Did the same bad nanny drop you and the dog on your heads?

Me: (What I actually said, more or less) Yes. Yes he is going to bite your kids. And he will bite them much more badly than he's bitten all the other kids, and your husband, and his other victims. Your kids are going to be bitten, and they already know it.

What happened was this.

The owners never spoke to me again, and never spoke to the vet (who had told them exactly the same thing after exhausting the medical angles) again.

They moved away. But, as it turned out, not very far.

About a year later, I was meeting with a new client who had a rather challenging Samoyed puppy, one that was getting pushy and dominant at quite a young age.

As I outlined the responsibilities that come with having such a mentally powerful dog, I mentioned the moral and legal liability in a neighborhood such as hers, which was crawling with free-range children.

And the client started telling me about the family that had moved into the neighborhood that year, and their dog had bolted out the front door and bitten a kid who was playing in the street, unprovoked.

This time, the parents of the victim reported the bite, and called the police, got a lawyer, and generally raised a stink.

And while the dog's owners were objecting that the dog was perfectly fine, and had never done anything like this before, and was a golden retriever for chrissakes...

I interupted her story. Named the dog. Yes -- that was the dog's name -- how did you know? Named the former client -- yes, that's them.

"Which of their kids did he bite?"

The boy. Didn't bite him. Mauled him. Then they killed the dog. Never made the papers. After all, everyone knows that golden retrievers are great family dogs.

(FWIW, the owner of the Sammy was a great client, did a wonderful job with her pup, and he's long since grown into a dignified, lovely companion.)

Now this is a great story of owner enabling and denial. But the fact is, owner neglect did not make this dog dangerous; it just supplied him with a bottomless bucket of tender juicy white meat while he indulged his abominable genetics with aberrant experience.

And this is not, by any means, the only one.

Here's a modest proposal to fix this before it becomes -- as I suspect the American cocker already is -- unfixable:

• Any golden retriever that lifts a hostile lip at a human being loses its gonads. Every. Single. Time.
• Any golden retriever that starts fights with other dogs loses its gonads. Every. Single. Time.
• No golden retriever gets to use its gonads before age four (bitches) or six (dogs).

No exceptions. Don't care if the cur won Westminster. Don't care if it's a field trial champion, either. No swimming in the gene pool for mean goldens. Problem solved.

At Least, Don't Buy This

Friday is Buy Nothing Day.

We will be, depending on weather, cutting firewood, sighting in rifles, walking the dogs. Probably restocking our SAR packs against the likely rifle-season lost hunter deployment(s). Certainly eating leftovers.

I'd intended to leave this topic until then, but oh the bitter irony if you all read it on Saturday, still hung-over from a frenzied mall binge that included the worst possible impulse purchase that does not leave you with a case of the clap. I was goaded to post earlier by this entry over at the Pet Connection. Bring it, Gina, bring it!

Please send to your most impetuous friends and family. You know which ones.

(Notice that, of the
2835 "needs" listed by this notorious puppymill retailer, all of them are material in nature and coincidentally available for purchase on their shelves at easily double the big-box or online price, right next to the live product in the deli case. Is there someone out there with a strong enough stomach to walk into the mall with a clipboard and tote up the damage?)

'Tis the season in which puppymills make their profits. What consumers do in the next month determines whether Amos and Ada fire up the puggle factory for spring production, or cut their losses and go back to making oak furniture and rhubarb preserves. You decide whether March sees the opening of a shiny new GNC in that mall slot, or another year of shivering Yorki-poos behind glass.

The retail puppymill industry depends on two rather different kinds of consumers to keep the misery factory's gears greased. Without both, it will not survive. Without understanding both, advocates for animals -- shelter and rescue workers, ethical breeders, trainers, vets, and other professionals -- can't combat the retail puppymill's marketing strategies.

The "traditional" puppymill retail customer is the see - want - buy consumer. There's a reason the stores put the doggie in the window, and keep the price tags on the QT. (Hint: If the shop-worn, gangly, potbellied puppy has a sign on the cage promising $200 OFF, you do not want to know "off what?")

In other words, the traditional puppymill customer is ignorant, and lacks impulse control.

Ignorant of what?

First, the customer is ignorant of what a puppy is worth -- not "worth" as in "He's my best friend and I wouldn't take any money in the world for him," but the market value of a comparable pup.

One can buy an indifferently-bred Labrador with no registration papers or worthless papermill papers for about a hundred bucks in this market. "AKC registered," about $250.

One current ad in the local paper offers microchipped, health-guaranteed Lab pups from OFA'd, CERF'd parents for $400.

The recently-opened Petland in Pittsburgh has a three-month-old yellow-colored male Labrador for sale right now: $899. I called. The clerk (she sounded super-kyoot) volunteered the color, but not the gender, of the pup. (As we all know, there are three distinct breeds involved here: the blacklab, the yellowlab, and the choklitlab.) I did not ask about OFA and CERF. I can't keep a poker-face that well, even over the phone.

900 bills is a fair price for the carefully-raised offspring of two health-tested Labs proven in field trials or hunt tests. Also about the going rate for puppies from two pageant champions. Wanna bet that's what they are selling?

So the puppy-in-the-window buyer is getting robbed on a pure commodity-value basis, and he's mostly ignorant about that.

He's also ignorant about dogs in general, and the social constructs surrounding them: What kind of paperwork means something, and what kind is just another unnecessary tree death. What is and is not a "pure" breed, and what that does and does not mean for the pup's value as a companion. What a healthy, thrifty, sound, mentally stable puppy looks and acts like. What constitutes a useful "guarantee" on a pup's health. The developmental needs of puppies, and how those are met. The importance of genetics -- best observed in the physical persons of the parents -- in determining a pup's potential to be a good pet. The importance of assessing and matching temperament to the family situation.

One wrinkle on this kind of buyer is the customer who has been conditioned by relentless consumptionist propaganda to equate breed with brand. After all -- if I buy a new Honda-brand model of automobile, it's going to be cosmetically and functionally identical to any other new Honda-brand same-model automobile. That label is predictive of certain things, and both my personal experience of the label and the Consumer Reports generalization are useful guides in whether to buy one or go with another brand.

This is not true of dogs. There is no German shepherd brand dog. There is no poodle brand dog. One cannot conclude that because the neighbor's dog Gretchen was so kewl and lived to be fifteen, that a "German shepherd" puppy from the pet store will perform similarly. And just because Pierre liked to bite fingers doesn't mean they all will. Neither does a seemingly safe generalization -- "golden retrievers make great family dogs" -- mean that any golden retriever from any source is going to be an acceptable, much less "great," family dog.

Cosmetically "identical" (to the unpracticed eye) does not equate to functional similarity. Black, tan, pointy ears does not make Strongheart.

This "branding" misconception is especially dominant with fad breeds and fad mongrels that are, or are marketed as, "rare," and can override any judgment someone might ordinarily have about the pricing or provenance. "I must have a purebred Shiba Inu, and this one in the pet store is the only one I can get right now. They'll take a credit card, I can pay the $3000 over the next year!" The overhyped breed or "designer dog" becomes a panic buy, on par with a new Wii, a living Cabbage Patch doll. (Remember the shar pei bubble of the 80's?)

Third, the traditional storefront impulse buyer is ignorant about the puppymill industry. He may have vaguely heard of such things and even remember them being associated with pet stores just like the one he's standing in now. But the sign says that the puppies come from "USDA-licensed breeders." That's good, right? This puppy has a government stamp of approval, like a steak. And Tammi and Cindee, the super-kyoot clerks, seem to just looove the puppies, and it's all clean glass and chrome, with this thing on the wall that squirts cinnamon scent into the air every two minutes.

What can I say? We can only repeat, over and over again: If it is for sale in a pet store, it came from a puppymill. If it came from a puppymill (and it did, it did -- do you get this? -- it did), its genetics are highly suspect, its early environment was impoverished, it has been stressed and exposed to communicable disease before its immune system developed, it is at ultra-high risk of becoming a dog with serious, unfixable health and behavior problems, and you will get no help or sympathy from the seller when it does. You are buying an expensive heartbreak for yourself and your family. Furthermore, you -- you personally -- are perpetuating animal cruelty that would make you puke if you saw it, heard it, smelled it. You and your Visa card have sentenced this puppy's mother, father, and their now-inevitable successors in the puppy production line to continued lives of unremitting misery.

Do not believe the lies of the super-kyoot clerk. This puppy did not come from a "reputable breeder." (Except in the sense that "reputation" used to carry when my mother was in high school.) No reputable, ethical, caring, competent, knowledgeable breeder ever sells a puppy through a pet store, broker, or any third party to persons unknown. Never. Never ever. The person or corporation who owns this puppy's unfortunate mother does not give a rat's ass about his mother, the puppy, or any part of you that is not backed by Citibank.

And a clean, sanitized, concrete-and-stainless, passed-USDA-inspection "commercial kennel" is still a puppymill. (If a breeding kennel is large enough to be USDA-licensed -- it is a puppymill.) Regular use of bleach is not indicative of love for, knowledge of, or commitment to, the
production unitsbreeding animals caged there, nor for their
productspuppies or the unseen
suckersbuyers.

Okay, so we combat the traditional pet-shop purchaser's big mistake by filling the gaps in his knowledge, in the not-unreasonable hopes that it will lead to impulse control when he's confronted by the puppy in the window -- and possibly the wails of the children. I don't care whether he's moved by an appeal to his humanity, or because he takes umbrage at being robbed, or because he (rightly) fears that the shivering little pup in the back corner of the cage will become a Big Liability in terms of vet bills, a decade of carpet-cleaning, or emergency room visits for the kiddies. I just wanna keep the Mastercard under wraps and stop the production line back in Missouri (Iowa, Holmes County, Lancaster, basement in Brooklyn).

One would think that exposure to all this information, all these warnings, would be enough to stop any but the most willful and precipitous "consumer" of dog-as-product. After all, any self-interested person will want to avoid getting ripped off, and any compassionate person will want to avoid causing suffering. Right?

That's where the second class of puppymill customer comes in.

These people also suffer from a failure of impulse control. But their ill-advised purchases are paradoxically motivated by knowledge of the puppymill industry's cruelty. They are the self-proclaimed "rescuers" of the doggie in the window. If you ask them, it is "compassion" that motivates them, and "self-interest" is just dirty.

The more photos of mangy emaciated bitches standing in filth this nice lady* sees, the more she hears about miserable lives of the young pups who are the industry's products, the more overwrought she becomes about the cruelty, the more danger she is in.

Because she is going to walk into Petland ("Just to get goldfish food."), see the most miserable, wretched, defective little product in the deli case, and ask to hold her.

And then she's going to start the rationalization process that she will later present to her incensed husband, her eye-rolling vet, her disapproving sister, the trainer whose head is cracking repeatedly against the wall, the neighbor who volunteers fifteen hours a week at the shelter: "I had to save her from that place. I couldn't leave her there. We bonded instantly."

Indeed, in the past five years or so, this category of puppymill customer may have become the dominant one, and further, they have become perversely empowered; while previously a woman would answer my question about "Where did you get the puppy?" with a simpering "I know it was wrong, but ..." preface to the story about the impulse buy at the mall, now it is more and more common to get a self-congratulatory "We rescued her from Petland!"

The first time I heard this, I imagined that the young lady and her boyfriend had donned black turtlenecks and rappelled down an airshaft to snatch puppies in the dead of night. Alas, no. The "rescue" was accomplished with the aid of Mastercard, in a manner so much resembling a routine and profitable-to-the-store purchase that one might be forgiven for regarding it as such.

This pet store buyer does not respond to appeals to either emotion or reason. Self-interest does not serve, because the buyer is wrapped up in her imagined role as the dog's savior -- so the more messed-up the dog is, the higher the medical bills, the wackier and more destructive the behavior, the happier the "rescuer" is -- the more validated she is in her elevated status. And one of the more self-indulgent delusions of her manufactured reality is validated: "No one else would have given this puppy a good home. Everyone but me who walks into a pet store and buys a puppy is a bad, selfish person doing it for terrible reasons, and they would have all been mean to her."

This buyer also maintains a divided consciousness, or is cognitively unable to supersede a concrete experience (cute puppy in my arms) with an intangible reality (my actions perpetuate the systematic abuse of her mother, father, and their now-inevitable replacements on the production line, guarantee that her retail cage will be filled tomorrow by another victim, and reward their abusers handsomely). This puppy, right here, needs me to "rescue" her; those "other" dogs somewhere else are not real, they are just theoretical dogs that I can't touch and can't look at me to beg for help.

Of course, much of this is emotionally dishonest, guilty cover for an underlying see - want -buy impulse. Nobody walks into a puppy retailer honestly believing that she will not see any puppies; one can buy every kind of pet supply at non-puppy-selling outlets nowadays, and cheaper, too. And it's remarkable how often the puppy that she asks to hold just happens to be of a
brandbreed or designer mix she has been coveting, one perhaps not readily available in appealing eight-week-old form at the local shelter. What were the chances that they'd have a cavi-poo right there in the window?! Indeed.

It took me a while in my work as a dog trainer to realize that this second kind of puppymill buyer existed -- that those of us who know dogs and want the best for them and their humans are not combating simple ignorance or uncomplicated callousness. I've long encountered unproductive savior-complex emotions in the owners of dogs that came from pounds, shelters, or (real or imagined) bad previous owners; for the dogs' sakes, I try to wean these owners from dependence on a self-image as a selfless rescuer, and a version of the dog as a lifetime helpless victim. But it was a surprise to find these same destructive personal stories behind the failing relationships that started with a very expensive retail credit card transaction.

It took me quite a bit longer to realize that the puppymill industry is aware of these buyers, understands their emotional motivations, knows that it depends on them, and markets accordingly. Holy shit, Batman!

Well duh. All it takes is a savvy corporate marketing director to stand in a busy store for an hour in December and listen to the family conversations. Petland had this figured out years before Thicky O'Thickson the Dog Trainer grokked it. And it has as much to do with competing with their own suppliers' internet direct sales as it does with grabbing market share from both shelters and decent breeders.

Because the direct-sales from internet puppymills cannot benefit from the immediacy of a (perceived to be) suffering little pup. Internet puppymillers have to pretend to be ethical breeders (and some are getting pretty good at aping the forms) because nobody in Miami Paypals a grand for a NKC-registered Sheltie that is in a wire cage in Nebraska in order to "save her."

The Petland marketers know that they are walking a fairly thin line. They must be clean and pleasant enough that people will walk in. But clinical and "mean-looking" enough that the pups project pathos. The deli case hits that note perfectly. Cold glass, steel, aqua fiberglass -- and maybe one little colorful squeaky toy in there with the morkie pup, a sort of garnish on his desolation. Perfect.



Here's another thing the Petland marketers know about the "rescue" buyers: they are the ones who will buy the sick, overaged, shopworn pups that are "marked down" -- without the markdown being big enough to make the transaction unprofitable.

And the final thing that Petland marketers know about these Martyr Mommies: They are recidivist buyers. While an ignorant buyer will only return for a second pet-store puppy if he is extremely lucky (gets that really good 'un the first time -- and they do exist) and/or exceedingly dull, callous, and incurious (Paris Hilton, say), the buyer with the well-developed Savior Complex will do it again, no matter how much heartbreak she bought the first (second, third) time. It's not the dog she's buying -- it's her self-perception as a wonderful human who helps poor little animals (and just happens to help poor little animals that are currently trendy and exactly the color she likes best.)

How do those of us who care about animals, understand the systemic nature of their commercial abuse, and work with the owners of all kinds of dogs combat this powerful psychological drive to buy?

First, I try to wean owners from a dependence on "poor-baby" emotions directed towards their dogs, from whatever source. No matter how broken the beast, he's more mature, more capable, and possesses more potential for dignity than this owner wants to allow. I do this mostly by showing how well the dog learns and responds in the absence of coddling. I show them their dog's capacity for achievement.

I also lightly talk up, and heavily demonstrate, the pleasures of owning an animal that comes with no "issues," and the wonderful relationships one can develop with a thoughtful breeder who is there for the life of his or her dogs.

I always try to direct the impulse to "save" towards dogs in pounds, shelters, and rescues -- especially those that I know will screen appropriately and try to make a good match.

And finally, I cut them off.

Yep.

It would be callous of me to deny education and behavioral help to a puppymill puppy and his overwhelmed owner. I absolutely do work with pet-shop products both privately and in group classes (after the pup is no longer at elevated risk of passing on puppymill diseases to the group).

I even have some special written material for clients that addresses the specific behavior issues that beset puppymill pups -- housetraining, socialization issues, genetic shyness, etc.

I do this once.

The training handout on Your Puppymill Puppy ends with this paragraph:

If, in the future, you choose to purchase another puppy from a pet store or puppymiller, First Friend will not provide private training or classes for you. We will not be associated with any financial support of this cruel and exploitive industry. When the time comes, we are happy to help you select another puppy or dog from a source that does not profit from misery, whether you choose to buy from an ethical breeder or adopt from a shelter or rescue.

I have had many clients consult me first for behavior issues presented by a puppymill puppy; years later, they are the most likely to call me for help selecting another dog, and I've had the pleasure of training many second or successor pups that came from shelters or ethical breeders.

I have no way of knowing how many puppymill pup owners became pet store recidivists and never called me up or tried to enroll in class because they remembered this warning. Not many, I think. At some level, I don't care. I am not their dog trainer.

Now, what if every trainer, every veterinarian, every groomer, every boarding kennel operator -- every professional who cleans up after the messes caused by Petland, Hunte, Lambriar and their suppliers -- did the same?

You get one free pass for ignorance. Now I have educated you. If you choose to ignore reality, or not to care about suffering you can't see, I choose not to help you.

What if there were no vets who would work for puppymill owners -- no health certificates for flying pups?

How long before the puppymills shut down then?


* I have no doubt that there are men who buy from pet stores with this exact motivation. I don't remember ever meeting one. It is primarily a chick thing.

Standard Issue

This Pekingese is not only "correct" for his breed standard and superior to other Pekingese, he's a better dog than all the others whose owners were vying for that silver cup.

Is he even recognizable as a dog?

Is he a fully-functional animal? Can he mate, move independently, perfuse his tissues with oxygen, thermoregulate?

The thread, on a non-dog discussion forum, was about cutting off tails and ears on dogs to meet "breed standards."

Oh yeah -- that one isn't going to start some wars.

Much passion back-and-forth among the factually, grammatically and punctuationally challenged. (No dearie, the plural of puppy is not "puppy's.")

On the pro-amputation side, we had individuals whose logic boiled down to "We wouldn't always have done it this way if the people who wrote "the standard" weren't wiser and in every way better than ourselves. It is not for the likes of us to question the intentions of the Ancient and Most Sacred Standard Givers."

On the anti-amputation side, there were occasional degenerations into colorful imaginary imagery featuring rivers of blood and wailing puppies.

But I was most interested in this dire warning from a "we've always done it this way" partisan:

Traditional reasons are that, tradition. Standards were made by the people who created the breeds and they stated their reasons for doing so. Standards include appearance and function.

I didn't write the standards and I wasn't there, those are some of the reasons given.

I happen to appreciate their efforts. I see little point in mocking them for living in their times and doing what they thought best.

Without them, we wouldn't have those breeds. When people start breeding outside a standard to suit themselves, you stop having identifiable purebred dogs. Eventually you can't tell purebred from mutt, or byb junk.

Now I can't attribute this opinion to its author, since the author uses only a screen name. No matter. It's a perfectly representative, utterly unoriginal, agglomeration of the misinformation, ancestor-worship, and unexamined prejudices that hobble the brains of dog owners. Let's look at them in order.

First, the misapprehension that the people who "created" breeds were the ones who wrote standards for them.

Poppycock. The people who created almost every breed, extinct and extant, were people who needed or wanted a dog for a particular job. Some of these acts of creation took place over thousands of years; others were seen through in a single human lifetime. Breed creation was, and is, the act of genetic selection for a purpose. The number of breeds (real breeds, not latter-day marketing whimsy) whose "creators" penned a written "standard" can be counted in single digits, and is limited to a short window of late 19th and early 20th century canine eugenics.

No, for the most part, "standards" were the inventions of the Victorian poseurs who, breed-by-breed, hijacked useful gene pools of working dogs, set up artificial walls around those gene pools, and charged forward under the misapprehension that one could reverse-engineer function by starting with a scrap of dog-show scripture ('umbly penned by yours trulies) and reasoning backwards: If the dog resembled the Platonic Form of the Breed as codified by the gentlemen in the dinner jackets, then it logically must be superior at performing the work that its "unrefined" ancestors had actually managed. No need to actually test it out on that work -- that would be so, you know, common.

The dogmen and dogwomen who developed breeds -- and I include the lapdogs in this story, for they too have their work -- selected animals who fulfilled a function; a size and shape that was more or less consistent followed from the demands of that work. The Mrs. Grundys who later wrote Platonic descriptions of the "ideal" cosmetic form for that kind of dog (refigured into closed-gene-pool "breeds") had nothing to do with the hard task of selection that had made the dogs useful and unique in the first place.

The coda to that erroneous belief is that, of course, standards change -- and not when the fiery finger of the Almighty recarves them in new granite. Committees of humans get together and change them to suit themselves. Each new committee is made up of zealots who are further removed in time and space from the working function of the breed. (Or, in the case of the United Kennel Club, perhaps an anonymous company employee who has never seen an example of the breed in question.) The 2008 standard frequently bears little resemblance to the 1920 standard. And like any scripture, the words could stay the same in a written standard and the interpretation morph so drastically that the dogs themselves are unrecognizable. Nowhere in any past or present GSD standard, in any country or registry, do the standard-writers call for a dog with

Hind feet planted in a different county than front feet. Hocks wobbly and both cowed and sickled in the extreme. Pasterns approach the horizontal plane. Dog has difficulty standing without assistance, and difficulty in transitioning from a stand to a walk. Gait is wobbly and unstable, conveying the clear impression of an animal that will be nonambulatory by middle age, and is incapable of sustained motion at any age. Dog shows clinical signs of connective-tissue disorder.

Unlike the anonymous breed standard fundamentalist, I actually have been a member of a standards revision committee for a dog breed with a long history. The standard that resulted is not a "show standard" because the Club that promulgates it does not sponsor nor approve of pageants for judging the dogs. IMO, it came out the far end of the committee process with far too much structural resemblance to a kennel-club-style show standard, rather than a practical description of what one of these dogs should be like; next round, I have hopes that these shortcomings can be corrected. In particular, reference to "disqualifications" are made for dogs with defective temperaments, misplaced or missing gonads, and an autosomal dominant color that does not appear in the breed, but is common in a related breed.

"Disqualification" from what, I asked? They can't be excused from a nonexistent pageant ring, and the registry is certainly not sending inspectors around to every farm in order to decide whether a dog is "reserved" (good) or "vicious" (DQ). Nevertheless, that meaningless language was retained.

We conducted our discussions via email. There were some heated disagreements. Some were settled by compromise, others by one side of the disagreement predominating. The discussions are archived (somewhere) in case anyone in the future wants to explore "legislative intent" for some reason.

My one verbatim contribution to the physical description of the dog is this sentence:

Variation in ear set is common and of trivial significance.

I have no problem with anyone arguing with me, disagreeing with me, or even mocking me for "living in my time," over the above sentence. If you have evidence that variations in ear set are of monumental significance in the lives and work of English shepherd dogs, please, do share.

Because that sentence, and the entire standard, is a document put together by human beings, each with his or her own perspective, expertise, prejudices, character flaws, and strength of will.

In the case of our ES standard, the limitations of the document come with an automatic check on the damage they can do to the breed genome: Because there is no selection for pageant wins, and no market for "champion sired" puppies, there are no institutional rewards or punishments for "not meeting the standard." I've never heard of anyone having trouble placing cute piebald pups, or pups from parents larger or smaller than the "standard" range, for example. While the breed community might collectively frown on someone who deliberately selects for 90 pound or 30 pound ES in a breeding program, individual dogs of those sizes are not viewed with disdain. Pups from parents without hip clearances, on the other hand, can be a hard sell. (In my opinion, not hard enough, but that's another topic.)

Finally, there's the Levitican obsession with being able to determine the breed of any given dog by appearance. Implied is the common sentiment: If any idiot off the street can't recognize it as a Sardinian Snarklehound at a glance, then the Fabric of The Universe will begin to ravel -- Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling! ... Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes ... The dead rising from the grave ... Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together ... mass hysteria!

What's up with that? Why is it so important? What does it have to do with what a "breed" is?

A breed is a population of animals that are selected to perform the same function. The "any idiot can tell" cosmetics are -- or should be, in a world not designed to cater to idiots -- entirely secondary to the breed's ability to consistently produce individuals that perform that function.

The notion that anyone off the street should be able to unerringly assign an animal to its breed just by looking is grounded in the worldview that what is important about a dog is not just what it looks like, but particular cosmetic aspects of appearance, what are called "fancy points." The dog should look like a Platonic specimen of its specific breed first, then it should give the appearance of the tuxedo guy's version of a sound and functional animal, and waaaaay down the list, maybe it ought to actually be healthy and sound. (Which cannot be assessed in any meaningful way through the only assessment system the "fancy" provides, the dogs-on-a-string five-second "exam" by a hard-core "fancier.")

So a Dalmatian is now defined by his spots, not by his function as an endurance athlete and companion to horses. In the AKC Dalmatian standard, 236 words are devoted to the correct coloring; 81 to gait; twelve to temperament, none to working ability. The Australian shepherd, predominantly a working dog as little as 20 years ago, has 58 words devoted to the correct color of his nose*, 39 on temperament, again, none to working function. Lip service? Barely even that!

I could go on.

It's strange that people who are fanatically obsessed with the minutia of "fancying" very specific breeds of animals -- such that, like all fanatics, they create a maniacally closed insider culture of jargon and shibboleths -- are equally obsessed with the most trivial cosmetic factors, the ones that distinguish those animals from other breeds, or (gasp!) the impure.

Eventually you can't tell purebred from mutt, or byb junk.

One would think that they would want to keep the mastery of classification a further mystery, one that requires their special expertise.

But then, that would require them to possess special expertise, wouldn't it?

Special expertise that is hard-won by living with, working, observing, training, raising, breeding and handling scores of members of a breed. Learning their minds. Letting them learn yours. Takes years, decades to become an expert in one breed of real dogs.

And that just won't do, will it, when one "judge" must determine the "best dog" from a dozen individuals sorted out from hundreds of breeds. So he can determine that a waddling, farting, dysplastic English bulldog is a better dog than a shaking, seizing Belgian shepherd.

And it certainly won't do when one is trying to sell one's "well-bred" cull puppies -- the ones that don't have exactly the right fancy points at seven weeks of age, and so will not crush the competition in a few months' time -- as "pet quality." Because that "pet buyer" is going to insist that his $1500-on-a-sterilization-contract Danish Diving Terrier pup look just like the one he saw on the teevee, winning at Westminster. He does not want or need a dog that dives for danish, which is good, because those "well-bred" pups are terrified of water and allergic to pastry. The one he gets has a small white spot on his chest, which is what makes it different from the show winner. But that's okay, because it has much in common with that winner -- same coat, same crooked legs, same oddly-domed head, same epilepsy, bleeding disorder, same progressive congenital blindness.

If you come to my farm, I'll excuse you for believing at first that Pip is a border collie, that Moe is a barbie collie who has been abusing steroids, that Rosie is a Sheltie mix, that Sophia has a Malinois in the woodpile somewhere. That's what they kind of look like, and you have been conditioned -- as have we all -- to assign dogs to brand names based on what they look like. Even a toddler can identify a Dalmatian -- same kid who recognizes the McDonald's logo without hesitation.

But if you tell me that Pip is "byb junk" because her ears are too high, that Rosie is unworthy of contributing to the gene pool because she's smaller than "standard" size, that Moe should have been bred because he is so bloody handsome, and that we were right to spay Sophia because she is under-angulated -- well, Moe is accomplished at showing you the door.

____________

*Including the caveat that it is a serious fault for an Aussie to have a nose that is 26% pink. Italics in the original. Oh well, at least the pink-nosed dog is not formally disqualified like the one with a dot of white on his back. But also unlike the dog without a tooth in his head, the unilaterally deaf merle -- which are either okay with the AKC Aussie fanciers, or not worthy of mention.