What caused the sudden spike in AKC registrations in 1991 and 1992?
I cannot for the life of me think of anything that happened during those two years to account for it.
It seems too big -- and the sample far too large -- to write it off as a "blip."
By 1995 the spike had "corrected" to near 1990 levels.
Bueller? Anyone?
Showing posts with label dog fancy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dog fancy. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
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.
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 aproduction 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.
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.
(
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
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.
Monday, March 1, 2010
Dispatches from the Before Time
I recently jumped at an opportunity to acquire a well-worn, slightly water damaged, mildly smelly time capsule that has, however, miraculously retained all of its plates for 163 years.
The Dog, by William Youatt.
Mine is the 1847 American edition, edited and with additions by E.J. Lewis, M.D.
You don't have to save your pennies for an antiquarian keepsake to read it; it's available as a modern reprint, and online for free.
Mr. Youatt was a British veterinarian of wide renown who published on many species, but had a particular interest in, and love for, dogs.
He wrote this opus more than a decade before the first British dog show.
The overview of British dog breeds includes no reference to any "standards" or litany of "important" show winners and sires of show winners.
Yet there they were -- sheepdogs, cur dogs, lapdogs, esquimaux dogs, Newfoundlands and beagles, poodles and The Alpine Spaniel or Bernardine Dog.
Somehow human beings managed to develop and maintain distinct breeds without the authoritative oversight of a kennel club. No overlord to petition for, grant, or withhold permission!
Now one of the things that is explained to me from time to time is that all objections anyone has to anything on animal welfare grounds are a plot hatched last Tuesday by PeTA.
So I periodically learn, for example, that Ingrid Newkirk invented both the word puppymill and its imaginary business model some time in the 1990's. Nevermind that I can remember first encountering the term and the reality in a dog fancier magazine some years before I first encountered pubes.
One of the most adamant recurring lessons goes like this:
If I can't cut off my dog's ears and tail to suit my whimsy, then I don't really own him. They'll be coming to take him away any minute.
It is mandated in the Breed Standard because that is what is correct for the breed.
Having its roots in the Historic Vital Function Of The Breed and in The Inerrant Authority Of The Dead Breed Founders.
Only a whiny little dog-ignorant sentimental Bambi-loving vegan twinkie raises an objection to this practice, which is not cruel or painful at all.
Real Dogmen know that The Standard represents not only Knowledge Moste Anciente and Wyse, but the unanimous consensus of all the Founding Breedfathers and the Leading Men of The Day.
Men like Youatt, natch:
Ever see an ear-cropped pug?
Cropping of the Ears. -- I had some doubt, whether I ought not to omit the mention of this cruel practice. Mr. Blaine very properly says, that "it is one that does not honour the inventor, for nature gives nothing in vain ... That must, therefore, be a false taste, that has taught us to prefer a curtailed organ to a perfect one, without gaining any convenience by the operation." He adds, and it is my only excuse for saying one word about the matter, that "custom being now fixed, directions are proper for its performance."
The owner of the dog commences with maiming him while a puppy. He finds fault with the ears that nature has given him, and they are rounded or cut into various shapes, according to his whim or caprice. It is a cruel operation. A great deal of pain is inflicted by it, and it is often a long time before the edge of the wound will heal: a fortnight or three weeks at least will elapse ere the animal is free from pain.
...
Mr. Blaine very naturally observes that, "it is not a little surprising that this cruel custom is so frequently, or almost invariably, practiced on pug dogs, whose ears, if left alone to nature, are particularly handsome and hang very gracefully. It is hardly to be conceived how the pug's head -- which is not naturally beautiful except in the eyes of a perverted taste -- is improved by suffering his ears to remain."
Me neither. Add that to the list of things for which I am deeply thankful.
Guess that particular arm of custom was not entirely fixed. I don't know whether pinna amputation never made it into the sacred texts, or was later removed.
Lucky pugs. Left without a functioning respiratory system by mandate of their "standard" and those who serve it, they have at least been permitted to retain their ears.
Dobermans, schnauzers, pit bulldogs, boxers, Boston terriers, Danes, miniature pinschers -- not so lucky.
A practice that would likely have faded away on its own accord in all but a few cases (fighting pit bulldogs, some LGDs) was codified, regularized, and made either mandatory or effectively so because kennel clubs and the dog fanciers' breed clubs were looking out for the "purity" and cosmetic uniformity of the gene pools they captured from the original landraces.
163 years after Youatt, is it too much to ask that fanciers of show dogs who do no work acknowledge the butt obvious truth that the leading dog vets of the mid-19th century could spot and name gratuitous cruelty grounded in idle vanity very well, thank you?
Or does Peter Singer have a secret time machine?
Sunday, February 14, 2010
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.
Friday, January 22, 2010
Now We See The Violence Inherent In the System
In a move that reveals recently unprecedented clarity of self-interest and public relations goals, the American Kennel Club has just announced that it will now permit the impure-of-blood to pay their fees and compete against those anointed by the right paperwork, in contests of obedience and agility.
Most AKC critics are applauding this decision as actually virtuous and good for dogs and their owners. Here's why I'm not joining them.
A couple years ago, ACK started sending up weather balloons about the feasibility of permitting filthy mongrels to compete in performance events.
AKC has always controlled virtually all the venues for formal obedience competition and titling in the US. Only properly-documented ACK-registered "purebreds" were eligible to compete in this red-headed stepchild of "The Sport of Purebred Dogs."
When I took my golden retriever -- an obviously purebred, field-line bitch -- to community obedience classes in the mid-70's, she could not prepare for any formal competitions because she came from the pound. No "papers." The instructor was kind but matter-of-fact in explaining this inflexible reality to the skinny kid who rode her bike* to class, dog galloping beside. Shannon's more accomplished son, who looked purebred, was not, and was also ineligible.
So there we were, alone at the fairgrounds and park, practicing retrieving over jumps and scent discrimination, just because.
In the 80's, they instituted a scheme called the "indefinite listing privilege," (renamed "Purebred Alternative Listing" two years ago) in which the owners of undocumented dogs that looked like a particular AKC-registered breed might pay a fee and send in some photos and proof that their putative purebred was surgically sterilized, and be permitted to slip in alongside the pedigreed elite in the pursuit of obedience and tracking titles.
Many a mongrel became a "Labrador" or "poodle" by virtue of a clever camera angle or strategic haircut, and once the Government of Dogs (G.O.D.) had so declared it, who was to say it was not so? And on the ground, who the hell cared? Obedience competitors are practical sorts, for the most part. The only complaint about an ILP I've ever heard seemed to have to do with someone winning too much, and with the pageant matrons of the breed club getting wind of it. That one provoked a special rule.
Meanwhile, an organization called the American Mixed-Breed Obedience Registry got going in the early 80's. They worked out a deal whereby mongrels could enter local "fun"** matches, the handler and judge could treat the run as if it were a trial and be scored accordingly, and AMBOR would issue titles.
Yeah, second-class citizenship -- but citizenship of a sort, even if not granted by the G.O.D.. Later AMBOR and the privately-owned commercial registry called the United Kennel Club worked out a deal that allowed mixed dogs into UKC obedience trials on an equal footing with UCK-registered -- with one caveat. The mixed-breed dogs had to be sterilized.
Keep watching that last clause, because it becomes important.
One big disadvantage of hitching up with the UKC was that there aren't a lot of UKC trials in most parts of the country. The owner of an AKC-registered dog or an AKC-anointed "ILP" dog could trial every weekend with moderate travel in most parts of the US. Nowhere was that true for those with dogs whose only venues were UKC shows. The advantage was that everyone in the class was really competing, so it was harder for snobs to denigrate the curs' achievements as just affirmative action grade-inflation.
Meanwhile, through the 90's, new, innovative dog sports not under the aegis of the G.O.D. were catching on -- flyball, agility, freestyle and rally obedience -- and venerable working tests/sports -- stockdog trials, schutzhund, earthdog trials -- were becoming more prominent. These events were, for the most part, sponsored and controlled by entities that did not limit entrants or prizes based on breed or registration or "purity." In the new sports, mixed-breed dogs were common and unremarked. In some cases, competitors started to deliberately cross-breed in order to develop competitive animals. Interest in entering dog beauty pageants was waning (even as more and more were televised and glamorized), and consumers started getting wise to the bad deal that "champion bloodlines" meant when they went looking for a pet. ACK registrations were in a clearly unrecoverable tailspin, due in part to the rise of the new puppymill registries, and in part to the indifference of pet owners who quite rightly could not be bothered to send AKC money in exchange for worthless paper. In a panicked attempt to keep the registrations rolling in, the AKC was grabbing "new" breeds right and left, against the increasingly righteous and organized resistance of their breed stewards.
Is it any wonder that the AKC also cast its lidless red eye on these new, and newly prominent, sports -- sports that had developed and flourished under a system of fair, equitable, open-to-all competition? Earthdog, agility, rally obedience, "herding" and lure coursing were soon appropriated, with varying degrees of success. In the wake of public interest in SAR dogs after the Oklahoma City bombing, a new variable-surface tracking title was, before the screaming from the public safety community, witlessly promoted as a search and rescue certification! ("The level of physical difficulty should be such that it will permit all AKC breeds and handlers of any age to participate.")
In the case of, for example, agility trials, clubs and venues that had previously hosted open-to-all, level-playing-field trials sanctioned by USDAA or NADAC in conjunction with their large dog shows and obedience trials now found themselves forbidden to do so.
In 1993, my SAR unit was asked to provide demos and a booth for an AKC dog show in Massachusetts. We'd done the same at an even bigger "cluster" of shows for some years -- a cluster that included an ARBA pageant and open-to-all agility. Good PR and education, sometimes a recruiting success, and a moderate fund-raiser.
But the hosting AKC club of this other show had one stipulation. Only search and rescue dogs that were AKC purebreds were invited to demonstrate or attend. The pit bull (gasp!) and the mixed breeds and their low-life handlers were not wanted. Not Our Sort, you know.
I was the unit's contact person for setting up this demonstration. My regular readers can probably fill in the wording and tone of my response for themselves.
The following year, AKC-sanctioned agility trials -- for registered purebreds only -- replaced those held by the USDAA or NADAC at AKC show and obedience-trial venues.
That's the mindset we are dealing with here, folks. It may have learned to keep its David Duke opinions about canine race under wraps a little better in the past decade and a half, but believe me, inside the country club, when the help is out of earshot, nothing has changed.
So fast-forward to around 2007, when the AKC started floating those weather balloons about the mutts. Eventually it belched out a survey directed at the members of the "Purebred Fancy" and the owners of impure performance dogs, asking under what conditions each group would find it acceptable for mixed dogs to compete in agility, obedience, rally, and tracking trials.
What they came up with, in an attempt to have/eat cake, was separate water fountains.
Mixed dogs could not earn the same exalted titles as the pure. They could never compete head-to-head for placements with the pure. They could not advance to AKC invitationals or the Nationals. They could not be entered into trials where a beauty pageant was being conducted at the same venue, else they might infect the Aryan dogs in much the same way that a rusty heap can profane a new Beemer just by parking next to it. And of course, they had to be sterilized.
Reaction from the owners of mixed-breed performance dogs -- particularly those that are tearing up the USDAA and NADAC agility courses around the country -- apparently sounded like this.
It appears that the reaction from the clubs that actually run the trials and shows from which ACK takes a cut for its "sanction" was also less than enthusiastic.
Prompting thisnew development frantic backpeddle:
As long as the mongrels are sterilized!
The "Canine Partners" program is also open to "purebred" dogs of non-AKC breeds.
As long as the infidel dogs are sterilized!
Ruh roh, Raggy.
Of great note, the AKC's new-ish method of breed-takeover-by-attrition, the "Foundation Stock Service," comes into play here. Because if you own a dog of an FSS-listed breed, you can't access performance events through the "Canine Partners" scheme. You have to register it through the FSS -- the dog, and it's sweet, juicy pedigree.
Make no mistake that the AKC's latest policy move has nothing to do with what is good for dogs, what is good for dog breeds, or what is good for dog owners.
It is good forGeneral Motors the AKC, period.
One aim is to destroy the largest of the level-playing-field, open-to-all competitive venues entirely. USDAA and NADAC compete with ACK for entry fees, publicity, and credibility, and they have to die. Same for APDT rally trials. What started when their trials (and the mutts that entered them) were banned from the same grounds as the dog shows is now meant to finish with the appropriation of all the entrants.
Another aim is to short-stop deliberate cross-breeding for performance and the development of new breeds for new roles. The G.O.D. that howls in protest whenever a mandatory sterilization law threatens to impact their revenues institutes the exact same policy against a subset of their "customers."
A third aim, largely dependent on the destruction of the independent sporting organizations, is to appropriate non-AKC breeds into the FSS, and thence on to full "recognition" as proper show dogs. So they can be improved, natch. And to keep those registration dollahs coming in.
There is no way for the owner of a non-AKC purebred dog to compete with him in AKC events unless the dog is sterilized. With the swamping of alternative venues, the ACK can increase the pressure on independent breed clubs to fold and be assimilated into the FSS, in order to maintain some access to events that can serve as thresholds for soundness and ability, and an engaging hobby for the owners of dogs who don't have real work to do.
The AKC spent nearly a century imagining itself to be the G.O.D. in the United States, and having that presumption continually reinforced by its toadies in The Fancy. Those it considers its rightful subjects have overwhelmingly been sniggering at its nudity or ignoring its existence and getting on with their lives with dogs without benefit of its rule for decades.
Since bringing down the hammer of "purity" backfired last time -- causing the puppymills to take their registration money and go home -- the putative G.O.D. is pursuing another favorite tactic of the failing tyrant -- expansionist warfare.
Fourth, the money from the individual enrollees could be significant. The fee for enrolling a mudblood dog or non-AKC breed as a "Canine Partner" is $15 more than standard registration. An extra ten-spot if you want to give him a particularly long and fancy name. Interesting differential, given that the AKC (we're just a registry, we keep the pedigree records) is not charged with the task of recording the pedigrees of these animals, nor will those pedigrees continue into the future.
More confusion. Although wolf hybrids of any percentage are strictly verboten from enrollment in the "Canine Partners" scheme, by the curious and physics-challenged requirement that the animal be "... not a wolf or the immediate progeny of a wolf-dog crossbreeding, in the past or in the future" the FSS happily enrolls these wolf-dogs as a "breed."
What it all adds up to is a grab for more power over American dogs and their owners, and especially the breeding of dogs and the development of breeds, presented in PR-friendly way. It's especially targeted at getting control of working dogs -- those breeds and types whose owners and breeders are most likely to seek outside validation of their dogs' trainability and athleticism. ACK has been trying for decades to take credit for working dogs, and accelerated their efforts after 9-11 in the smarmiest way.
What better way to associate oneself with the achievements of others than by killing off any alternative sources of external validation?
___________________________
*Purple. Hi-rise handlebars. Flowered banana seat. Plastic basket on the front. Yes, those are bell-bottoms caught in the chain. But no sissy-bar. Not a Stingray, either, what, were we the friggin' Rockefellers?
** Those not "sanctioned" by the AKC, and meant for people to practice before entering a sanctioned match or trial. Often hosted by obedience clubs, sometimes by training centers.
Most AKC critics are applauding this decision as actually virtuous and good for dogs and their owners. Here's why I'm not joining them.
A couple years ago, ACK started sending up weather balloons about the feasibility of permitting filthy mongrels to compete in performance events.
AKC has always controlled virtually all the venues for formal obedience competition and titling in the US. Only properly-documented ACK-registered "purebreds" were eligible to compete in this red-headed stepchild of "The Sport of Purebred Dogs."
When I took my golden retriever -- an obviously purebred, field-line bitch -- to community obedience classes in the mid-70's, she could not prepare for any formal competitions because she came from the pound. No "papers." The instructor was kind but matter-of-fact in explaining this inflexible reality to the skinny kid who rode her bike* to class, dog galloping beside. Shannon's more accomplished son, who looked purebred, was not, and was also ineligible.
So there we were, alone at the fairgrounds and park, practicing retrieving over jumps and scent discrimination, just because.
In the 80's, they instituted a scheme called the "indefinite listing privilege," (renamed "Purebred Alternative Listing" two years ago) in which the owners of undocumented dogs that looked like a particular AKC-registered breed might pay a fee and send in some photos and proof that their putative purebred was surgically sterilized, and be permitted to slip in alongside the pedigreed elite in the pursuit of obedience and tracking titles.
Many a mongrel became a "Labrador" or "poodle" by virtue of a clever camera angle or strategic haircut, and once the Government of Dogs (G.O.D.) had so declared it, who was to say it was not so? And on the ground, who the hell cared? Obedience competitors are practical sorts, for the most part. The only complaint about an ILP I've ever heard seemed to have to do with someone winning too much, and with the pageant matrons of the breed club getting wind of it. That one provoked a special rule.
Meanwhile, an organization called the American Mixed-Breed Obedience Registry got going in the early 80's. They worked out a deal whereby mongrels could enter local "fun"** matches, the handler and judge could treat the run as if it were a trial and be scored accordingly, and AMBOR would issue titles.
Yeah, second-class citizenship -- but citizenship of a sort, even if not granted by the G.O.D.. Later AMBOR and the privately-owned commercial registry called the United Kennel Club worked out a deal that allowed mixed dogs into UKC obedience trials on an equal footing with UCK-registered -- with one caveat. The mixed-breed dogs had to be sterilized.
Keep watching that last clause, because it becomes important.
One big disadvantage of hitching up with the UKC was that there aren't a lot of UKC trials in most parts of the country. The owner of an AKC-registered dog or an AKC-anointed "ILP" dog could trial every weekend with moderate travel in most parts of the US. Nowhere was that true for those with dogs whose only venues were UKC shows. The advantage was that everyone in the class was really competing, so it was harder for snobs to denigrate the curs' achievements as just affirmative action grade-inflation.
Meanwhile, through the 90's, new, innovative dog sports not under the aegis of the G.O.D. were catching on -- flyball, agility, freestyle and rally obedience -- and venerable working tests/sports -- stockdog trials, schutzhund, earthdog trials -- were becoming more prominent. These events were, for the most part, sponsored and controlled by entities that did not limit entrants or prizes based on breed or registration or "purity." In the new sports, mixed-breed dogs were common and unremarked. In some cases, competitors started to deliberately cross-breed in order to develop competitive animals. Interest in entering dog beauty pageants was waning (even as more and more were televised and glamorized), and consumers started getting wise to the bad deal that "champion bloodlines" meant when they went looking for a pet. ACK registrations were in a clearly unrecoverable tailspin, due in part to the rise of the new puppymill registries, and in part to the indifference of pet owners who quite rightly could not be bothered to send AKC money in exchange for worthless paper. In a panicked attempt to keep the registrations rolling in, the AKC was grabbing "new" breeds right and left, against the increasingly righteous and organized resistance of their breed stewards.
Is it any wonder that the AKC also cast its lidless red eye on these new, and newly prominent, sports -- sports that had developed and flourished under a system of fair, equitable, open-to-all competition? Earthdog, agility, rally obedience, "herding" and lure coursing were soon appropriated, with varying degrees of success. In the wake of public interest in SAR dogs after the Oklahoma City bombing, a new variable-surface tracking title was, before the screaming from the public safety community, witlessly promoted as a search and rescue certification! ("The level of physical difficulty should be such that it will permit all AKC breeds and handlers of any age to participate.")
In the case of, for example, agility trials, clubs and venues that had previously hosted open-to-all, level-playing-field trials sanctioned by USDAA or NADAC in conjunction with their large dog shows and obedience trials now found themselves forbidden to do so.
In 1993, my SAR unit was asked to provide demos and a booth for an AKC dog show in Massachusetts. We'd done the same at an even bigger "cluster" of shows for some years -- a cluster that included an ARBA pageant and open-to-all agility. Good PR and education, sometimes a recruiting success, and a moderate fund-raiser.
But the hosting AKC club of this other show had one stipulation. Only search and rescue dogs that were AKC purebreds were invited to demonstrate or attend. The pit bull (gasp!) and the mixed breeds and their low-life handlers were not wanted. Not Our Sort, you know.
I was the unit's contact person for setting up this demonstration. My regular readers can probably fill in the wording and tone of my response for themselves.
The following year, AKC-sanctioned agility trials -- for registered purebreds only -- replaced those held by the USDAA or NADAC at AKC show and obedience-trial venues.
That's the mindset we are dealing with here, folks. It may have learned to keep its David Duke opinions about canine race under wraps a little better in the past decade and a half, but believe me, inside the country club, when the help is out of earshot, nothing has changed.
So fast-forward to around 2007, when the AKC started floating those weather balloons about the mutts. Eventually it belched out a survey directed at the members of the "Purebred Fancy" and the owners of impure performance dogs, asking under what conditions each group would find it acceptable for mixed dogs to compete in agility, obedience, rally, and tracking trials.
What they came up with, in an attempt to have/eat cake, was separate water fountains.
Mixed dogs could not earn the same exalted titles as the pure. They could never compete head-to-head for placements with the pure. They could not advance to AKC invitationals or the Nationals. They could not be entered into trials where a beauty pageant was being conducted at the same venue, else they might infect the Aryan dogs in much the same way that a rusty heap can profane a new Beemer just by parking next to it. And of course, they had to be sterilized.
Reaction from the owners of mixed-breed performance dogs -- particularly those that are tearing up the USDAA and NADAC agility courses around the country -- apparently sounded like this.
It appears that the reaction from the clubs that actually run the trials and shows from which ACK takes a cut for its "sanction" was also less than enthusiastic.
Prompting this
While each club's participation in the AKC Canine Partners program will remain voluntary, clubs may now choose to allow mixed breed participation at any AKC Agility, Obedience or Rally event. Mixed breeds will compete in the same classes and earn the same titles as their purebred counterparts.So, individual clubs may now ban the impure, but the G.O.D. is no longer mandating apartheid.
As long as the mongrels are sterilized!
The "Canine Partners" program is also open to "purebred" dogs of non-AKC breeds.
As long as the infidel dogs are sterilized!
Ruh roh, Raggy.
Of great note, the AKC's new-ish method of breed-takeover-by-attrition, the "Foundation Stock Service," comes into play here. Because if you own a dog of an FSS-listed breed, you can't access performance events through the "Canine Partners" scheme. You have to register it through the FSS -- the dog, and it's sweet, juicy pedigree.
Make no mistake that the AKC's latest policy move has nothing to do with what is good for dogs, what is good for dog breeds, or what is good for dog owners.
It is good for
One aim is to destroy the largest of the level-playing-field, open-to-all competitive venues entirely. USDAA and NADAC compete with ACK for entry fees, publicity, and credibility, and they have to die. Same for APDT rally trials. What started when their trials (and the mutts that entered them) were banned from the same grounds as the dog shows is now meant to finish with the appropriation of all the entrants.
Another aim is to short-stop deliberate cross-breeding for performance and the development of new breeds for new roles. The G.O.D. that howls in protest whenever a mandatory sterilization law threatens to impact their revenues institutes the exact same policy against a subset of their "customers."
A third aim, largely dependent on the destruction of the independent sporting organizations, is to appropriate non-AKC breeds into the FSS, and thence on to full "recognition" as proper show dogs. So they can be improved, natch. And to keep those registration dollahs coming in.
There is no way for the owner of a non-AKC purebred dog to compete with him in AKC events unless the dog is sterilized. With the swamping of alternative venues, the ACK can increase the pressure on independent breed clubs to fold and be assimilated into the FSS, in order to maintain some access to events that can serve as thresholds for soundness and ability, and an engaging hobby for the owners of dogs who don't have real work to do.
The AKC spent nearly a century imagining itself to be the G.O.D. in the United States, and having that presumption continually reinforced by its toadies in The Fancy. Those it considers its rightful subjects have overwhelmingly been sniggering at its nudity or ignoring its existence and getting on with their lives with dogs without benefit of its rule for decades.
Since bringing down the hammer of "purity" backfired last time -- causing the puppymills to take their registration money and go home -- the putative G.O.D. is pursuing another favorite tactic of the failing tyrant -- expansionist warfare.
Fourth, the money from the individual enrollees could be significant. The fee for enrolling a mudblood dog or non-AKC breed as a "Canine Partner" is $15 more than standard registration. An extra ten-spot if you want to give him a particularly long and fancy name. Interesting differential, given that the AKC (we're just a registry, we keep the pedigree records) is not charged with the task of recording the pedigrees of these animals, nor will those pedigrees continue into the future.
More confusion. Although wolf hybrids of any percentage are strictly verboten from enrollment in the "Canine Partners" scheme, by the curious and physics-challenged requirement that the animal be "... not a wolf or the immediate progeny of a wolf-dog crossbreeding, in the past or in the future" the FSS happily enrolls these wolf-dogs as a "breed."
What it all adds up to is a grab for more power over American dogs and their owners, and especially the breeding of dogs and the development of breeds, presented in PR-friendly way. It's especially targeted at getting control of working dogs -- those breeds and types whose owners and breeders are most likely to seek outside validation of their dogs' trainability and athleticism. ACK has been trying for decades to take credit for working dogs, and accelerated their efforts after 9-11 in the smarmiest way.
What better way to associate oneself with the achievements of others than by killing off any alternative sources of external validation?
___________________________
*Purple. Hi-rise handlebars. Flowered banana seat. Plastic basket on the front. Yes, those are bell-bottoms caught in the chain. But no sissy-bar. Not a Stingray, either, what, were we the friggin' Rockefellers?
** Those not "sanctioned" by the AKC, and meant for people to practice before entering a sanctioned match or trial. Often hosted by obedience clubs, sometimes by training centers.
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
There were few takers
H/T to commenter "straybaby" over at the Pet Connection for this article about veterans and homeless dogs.
Hooray!
One of my obscure antiquarian book treasures is this:
History of Dogs for Defense
by Fairfax Downey
Part historical record, part public relations campaign, and part excruciating period piece. Mr. Downey's attempt to affect a breezy gee whiz style provides cringe-inducing passages about "Japs" and "Nips" and lots of references to the dogs as "chum" and "pal" in stilted fictionalized dialogue. The style it most evokes is that of the miserable self-serving hack Albert Payson Terhune.
Nevertheless, it is an original source, and valuable even in the face of a possibly unreliable author. It is sometimes difficult to parse out the difference between a normal absence of foresight and an appalling lack of self-awareness on Mr. Downey's part.
Downey did not grok, for example, that his account of dogs (or more properly, dog ownership) as therapy for "shell shocked" veterans would be one of the saddest things I have ever read:
These Dogs for Convalescents as they came to be called were in effect a revival in a new form of the casualty or ambulance dog, used fairly extensively in the First World War though little in the Second. On the battlefield they ahd searched out the wounded and led parties back to their aid. Now these dogs helped wounded men find themselves. And they led their masters back to health as surely as Seeing Eye dogs guided blind veterans.
Soon after the advent of "Fritz" the Air Forces hospital and its pleasant grounds, formerly a boarding-school, began to resemble a kennel club show, an obedience class in more or less continuous session, and a K-9 training camp. Dogs were everywhere. For a time those that were house-broken were allowed to sleep at the foot of their masters' beds in the wards, but the situation reached a point where it was more than the staff could cope with, and kennels were required.
"Fritz" had created demand. Mrs. Preston and fellow-enthusiasts managed supply. Most calls were for Spaniels, German Shepherds, Boxers, Doberman Pinschers, Fox Terriers (both wirehaired and smooth), Boston Terriers, Collies, Setters, Pointers, Airedales, Scotties, Dalmatians, Beagles, and Retrievers. Aside from breed, patients almost always asked that their dog be a veteran of the K-9 Corps or purebred.
Insistence on purebreds was based on the wounded men's pride in the dogs' appearance, their adaptability to training, and on eagerness for pets to make a good showing in the dog show and exhibitions which commenced to be staged as part of the program. When mongrels were offered or a basket of foundling puppies was left at the gate, there were few takers.
There it is, right there. The post-war conversion of dog from working partner and companion into consumer product and brand-name ego surrogate.
Mrs. Preston, the helpful dog "fancier" who ran dog shows and brought in an AKC judge to appraise the "quality" of the wounded soldiers' kennel-bound pedigree pets -- we can thank Mrs. Preston for jump-starting the degradation of American middle-class dogs into brand-name consumer satisfaction.
Men who had given nearly all, and who had watched their friends die, to fight Nazis and Nazi ideology, now encouraged to cultivate pride in the purity of their living property, and pride in winning a contest of appearances. Taught by The Fancy as part of their government-run therapy what makes a "better" dog. Rassehund uber alles.
What decades of genetic damage and cultural delusions might have been avoided in 1944 if someone had been there to take the veterans coon hunting instead? If fair and open contests of obedience and function had channeled the soldiers' competitive urges?
Might compassion have combated consumerism in post-war America if the men had been encouraged to rehabilitate dogs who needed them, rather than demand dogs with the appearance they had been conditioned to want?
Sixty-five years later, thanks to Pets2Vets, the basket of foundling puppies finally has some takers.
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Pedigree Dogs Exposed: US
The BBC documentary Pedigree Dogs Exposed will air tomorrow -- Thursday, December 10 -- on BBC America. 8 pm Eastern, 7 pm Central.
Check now to see if your cable or satellite system carries BBC America. Set your recording implements! This is not one to miss.
I believe this may be the "international edition" mentioned by filmmaker Jemima Harrison. If so, we may see our friend Dr. John Burchard.
In Britain, the airing of this documentary elicited lawsuits, shrieks, and recriminations from the Dog Fancy and its bureaucratic superstructure.
But it also backed them into a very tight corner, and has forced reform that would have never occurred otherwise.
The US Fancy Establishment, primarily embodied in the American Kennel Club, is larger, more contaminated by the puppymill industry, and even more arrogant than the British Kennel Club.
Will they attempt reform? Or continue to circle the wagons in the face of registration revenues that have been shooting down the crapper for over a decade?
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Blog Remix: Gaiting Away from Omelas
With a clamor of bells that set the swallows soaring, the Festival of Summer came to the city Omelas, bright-towered by the sea. The rigging of the boats in harbor sparkled with flags. In the streets between houses with red roofs and painted walls, between old moss-grown gardens and under avenues of trees, past great parks and public buildings, processions moved. Some were decorous: old people in long stiff robes of mauve and grey, grave master workmen, quiet, merry women carrying their babies and chatting as they walked. In other streets the music beat faster, a shimmering of gong and tambourine, and the people went dancing, the procession was a dance. Children dodged in and out, their high calls rising like the swallows' crossing flights over the music and the singing.
The room is about three paces long and two wide: a mere broom closet or disused tool room. In the room a child is sitting. It could be a boy or a girl. It looks about six, but actually is nearly ten. It is feeble-minded. Perhaps it was born defective, or perhaps it has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and neglect. It picks its nose and occasionally fumbles vaguely with its toes or genitals, as it sits hunched in the corner farthest from the bucket and the two mops. It is afraid of the mops. It finds them horrible. It shuts its eyes, but it knows the mops are still standing there; and the door is locked; and nobody will come. The door is always locked; and nobody ever comes, except that sometimes--the child has no understanding of time or interval--sometimes the door rattles terribly and opens, and a person, or several people, are there. One of them may come in and kick the child to make it stand up. The others never come close, but peer in at it with frightened, disgusted eyes. The food bowl and the water jug are hastily filled, the door is locked, the eyes disappear.
These people go out into the street, and walk down the street alone. They keep walking, and walk straight out of the city of Omelas, through the beautiful gates. They keep walking across the farmlands of Omelas. Each one goes alone, youth or girl, man or woman. Night falls; the traveler must pass down village streets, between the houses with yellow-lit windows, and on out into the darkness of the fields. Each alone, they go west or north, towards the mountains. They go on. They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Pedigree
H/T to Patrick over at Terrierman for this post about the AKC's streamlined merchandise-handling software for puppy-mill retailers.
Seems that I remember a few years ago, the AKC hacks backed down in the face of a torch-and-pitchfork mob of breed club delegates who objected to a speshul marketing program designed to keep puppymill products on the AKC rolls, the better to profit from the money-for-paper scam that pays those Madison Avenue salaries.
What they did, of course, was just transfer the scheme to an administrative hidey-hole and quietly go forward with their attempt to re-capture market share from the puppymillers' new, no-questions-asked "registries."
Reading the PDF instructions for Petland clerks on how to instantly register "inventory" with the AKC -- a nice cut of additional revenue for the retailer, and the only way Ron Menaker is going to make his boat payment -- I was struck by this clause under "Adding a Dog to the Store."
Dogs can also be added to the general inventory by the AKC based on the AKC’s assessment of the dog’s pedigree. The store will fax pedigrees for non-AKC dogs to the AKC and the AKC staff determines if the dog is eligible for AKC registration within two business days. Eligible dogs are automatically uploaded to the inventory.Wow.
Just, wow.
The one thing that AKC could reserve for its dubious bragging rights was a claim of "purity" and "pedigree integrity."
What this meant in paperwork terms was, if an owner neglected to properly register his dog or bitch within the allotted time, if he lost the registration paperwork, or for any reason all the i's weren't dotted and the t's crossed, that dog's offspring could never be registered. Nevermind that the dog was clearly purebred, that the owner had the dog's pedigree, might even own the dam himself. Did not matter.
And puppies from unregistered parents in most breeds could not command anything like the price for registered pups.
Which is, you know, deranged. Regardless, this created a powerful incentive for owners snap to it and fill out the paperwork and send their money to Madison Avenue each and every generation.
This obedience to unelected authority has always been very important to the dog fancy set. A "reputable" breeder has his paperwork in order. A dirtbag BYB doesn't send in his registration fees.
But a puppymiller did -- until the "industry" discovered that they could make things much easier and cheaper for themselves by creating their own "flexible" no-questions-asked money-for-paper schemes.
Now I'm pretty sure that an ordinary pet owner who has a "pedigree" for his purebred dog, but no litter registration slip, is still hosed.
But apparently a pup from unregistered parents can now "qualify" almost instantly for AKC registration -- for inclusion in the "pure" gene pool of whatever breed. Just so long as it came from a puppymill and is being sold at retail from the deli case at a mall near you.
No DNA testing. No photographs. No review by experts from the breed club. No investigation into the paperwork irregularities. No punitive fees for the special case.
Because getting a cut of the profits from the living "inventory" is going to goose the bottom line this week way more than being a stickler for record-keeping is.
As for next week -- well, I guess that depends upon who finds out and what they do about it, doesn't it?
How do you dog-fancier breed-club snobs feel about the Missouri-born inventory getting an instant administrative upgrade to "pure" and "AKC-registered?"
If contemplating each puppy's mother languishing her whole life in a wire-floored crate so that the registration fees for her lifetime production output can help support your dog show habit has no goddamn effect on your conscience.
If you don't give a rat's ass about the health and behavior of these little units of inventory once they are bought and installed into your neighbor's home as "members of the family."
If you meekly accept that you are being held to a higher standard of record-keeping than Helga the Kansas puppy farmer.
Can you at least give a shit that your precious "purity" -- the last thing that your Overlord In Dogs has to offer you -- is being tossed away on the say-so of Tammi at Petland and some faceless clerk in Raleigh?
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Blood Boiling
A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast.
Proverbs 12:10
YesBiscuit posted this story about a mother and son who left dogs in their vehicle on a hot day. The dogs died, and the two were arrested and charged with animal cruelty.
Were these people negligent? Did they demonstrate terrible judgment? Should the state punish them for the cruelty they carelessly inflicted on their dead pets?
Of course. Stupid is no excuse.
Were they intentionally cruel?
Doubtful.
But while I was off working with doggy friends this week, came this story.
Reader's Digest version: Show dog handler, who is being paid by the owners of said show dogs to take them places where they can win the ribbons and points and placements that prove that they are better than all the other dogs who don't have those things, leaves seven large, mostly hairy, dogs in a van overnight. Confined in crates. On a day when it reached 90 degrees by 9 am.
By 9:30 in the morning, six of them were dead.
The times do not add up. What happened to the three hours between when the woman claims she found the dogs in distress and when she arrived at the veterinarian?
Sweet dreams, sleepytime princess.
If "the garage was too hot" what about her friggin' house? Where she was sleeping? Where are these
Now, if a couple of ignorant Phish-following transients become criminal scum when their dogs suffer and die from being left briefly in a vehicle that is their only home, what is a paid dog-show handler who is too lazy to provide proper husbandry to animals that are in her power? A canine professional who cares for her own needs for eight hours before considering the animals that are caged and helpless in her vehicle?
I guess we'll find out.
Someone who takes money to "care" for animals needs to be held to a higher standard of husbandry than a down-and-out pet owner. This young woman grew up in the world of "the fancy" and vehicles crammed with crated dogs. The facts about heat stroke in canines cannot have been obscure to her.
Update: Charges filed.
Monday, January 26, 2009
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.
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Whitney on Pip's Ancestors
The army jeep of farm dogs: cheap, compact, low-maintenance, versatile, no-frills. It will not be improved by morphing it into a Lincoln Navigator.
However, Whitney is one of the few general writers on dogs who acknowledged the corporeal reality of Pip's ancestors in the early-to-mid 20th century. He also had a high opinion of their virtues.
Pity he never bothered to discover that they were a breed -- or breeds -- with pedigrees, a couple-three registries, and thoughtful selection. The English shepherd is virtually unchanged from before Whitney's day, and has a registration history that goes back to the 1930's. The Australian shepherd is closely related, and the gene pools did not definitively diverge until mid-century.
Granted, most ES were not registered in Whitney's day; there are still good family lines of unregistered ES today, maintained by farmers who cannot see the logic in exchanging money for a paper that tells them what they already know.
Here's my latest discovery, from How to Select, Train, and Breed Your Dog, first published in 1950:
American Shepherd
Back in the colonial days, the settlers brought with them many fine dogs, most of them of the collie or shepherd type. Some refuse to call these dogs a breed, yet they have been, as a type, the American dog. As shepherd dogs they are not quite the equal of the marvelous border collie because the latter is the product of the most stringent selection for sheep herding without too much consideration of temperament. The border collies live away from human habitation much of the time and have not been bred for general farm use.
But the American dog has been a constant human companion as well as the farm shepherd and guard dog. Many have been used as hunters. In an illuminating article in Field and Stream, B.B. Titus describes how he used to train these general purpose dogs to hunt raccoons at night and squirrels in the day as well as to herd cows. Many of the dogs were real shepherds.
If you travel anywhere in the U.S.A. you will find, when you get away from the cities, so many more shepherds than any other breed. You'll wonder why they aren't registered in the A.K.C. Can you imagine what would have happened if as many of these dogs were observed by Americans traveling in, let us say, Argentina? Why they would have "given it a breed" long ago, formed a great club, and imported them by the thousand.
We've got the story, the breed -- a marvelous breed it is -- and we have the uses for it. In ability, it stood at the top of American war dogs. It is one of the few breeds bred for general intelligence. No exaggeration is needed.
This is the dog that can be trusted to guard children day or night. He will bark when the horse has colic or one of the cows calves. He can herd the cows home, let his master know if one is missing, and with some power hard to explain, even force a ew whose lamb has died to adopt an orphan. He is often the farm boy's hunting companion, and when "Old Shep" passes on, the family often holds a funeral. You'll find many a wooden slab in a field near a farmhouse with "Old Shep" scrawled on it, and you'll know his family was all choked up at the loss.
Yet, while a so-called sheep-herding dog named the Komondor from Hungary is registered in the A.K.C. the American shepherd hasn't even an official breed name.
Thank doG for small favors. In the same text, Whitney decries the ruination of the cocker spaniel by "a clique of breeders who, with the sanction of the A.K.C., arranged it so that only cockers with huge, woolly clipped coats had a Chinaman's chance of winning. That did it. Down went the breed in popularity because so few persons wanted such a dog."
"What was the real American cocker like? ... The proper cocker didn't know its teeth were made to bite ... The dog hungered for human companionship, was never shy, and did not piddle when surprised or happy."
But, you know, it was a sad thing that fanciers had not "recognized" the "American shepherd" and sought to similarly improve it by 1950.
58 years later, and still dodging fancier bullets.
The Aussie -- that western branch of the farm shepherd/farm collie family tree -- was the subject of a hostile takeover by the AKC in 1993. It was soon joined by other kidnapped gene pools -- the border collie, JRT, Beauceron, Cavalier King Charles spaniel, Havanese, Leonberger -- am I forgetting anyone? Only fifteen years later, the massive, fluffy, merle show dogs are utterly unable to work livestock -- and their fanciers sniff dismissively at the increasingly hard-to-find wiry, keen little cattle-workers, who are, you know, probably crossbreds.
Monday, October 13, 2008
No Show
The most thoughtful of the people who are not embarrassed to call themselves "fanciers" of dogs -- and even "in The Fancy" or "part of The Fancy" -- meet critiques of the disastrous institution called a "dog show" with a sort of half-hearted, but still stubborn, defense:
We drove over 900 miles this weekend, and came home with no championship points, no ribbons, no "legs," no silver loving cup.
Near as I can tell, nobody here is disappointed. Rosie is disgruntled, but she is always disgruntled -- everything vexes her.
Pip and Rosie got long-overdue new collars for the occasion -- burgundy for Pip, leopard-pattern for Rosie -- but they were rarely snapped to leashes, which were never used to string them around in a circle or restrain them for "inspection."
I did give Rosie a bath on Thursday night. This had nothing to do with enhancing her pretty white ruff to catch the eye of judge, and everything to do with whatever reeking black foulness it was that she rolled in Thursday afternoon. Pip's pre-trip grooming was limited to our usual evening burr-picking session.
Not one of the fifty-plus English shepherd owners who gathered at a horse farm in western North Carolina had occasion to whisper to another about the fix that "put up" the obviously inferior dog of a third one.
No one screamed "loose dog."
No vendor sold stacks of t-shirts reading "The winning dog was professionally handled ... and so was the judge." (Real shirt. Saw them selling like Eskimo pies in Hell at a show in 2003.)
Nobody jumped in the car early and headed home after losing in the "first round."
No one paid a fee to cover the overhead on Madison Avenue offices or a new tux for the judge.
There was no gatekeeper verifying that each dog's paperwork was in order.
Nobody got disqualified.
If anyone was being paid to be there, I didn't hear of it.
What did happen was this ...
A large group of owners, and wannabe owners, of a rare kind of dog came together on a glorious fall Saturday.
A large group of dogs of a rare kind wandered about, most of them off-leash most of the time, socialized, played, threw a few snits, went swimming, fetched sticks and frisbees, barked, flirted, checked in with their owners, and sometimes shadowed them with the commitment of one of Pullman's daemons.
Humans looked at dogs and inquired about who was the Momma and the Poppa, and did that stolid fellow still possess a full pair of cojones, and what about them hip scores?
A representative of the ALBC spoke to us about our shared project of heritage breed conservation.
Puppies were passed from lap to lap for cuddling and spoiling.
Pedigrees were passed from hand to hand for scrutiny and discussion.
We had a raffle, and bought books and things, to benefit breed rescue. Rescue and the breed club are not at odds, with one party screaming "neuter them all" and the other sniping about unbalanced humaniacs. The boards overlap. Breeders are active in rescue. I am one of them.
Online friends got to meet in person, and old acquaintances were renewed. Club members from Texas, Vermont, Idaho and Montana had come.
Breeders got a good look at pups they had sold, all growed up.
We included part-bred dogs and their owners as a matter of course. (Imagine the welcome extended to a "shepherd mix" at, say, a GSDCA specialty show.)
We watched agility competitors demonstrate their craft; the regular dogs also played with the jumps and tunnels.
We commented on how great it was for our guys to to relax and socialize with other dogs and humans who "get them."
We remembered those who had left our community this year, canine and human, and shared our sense of loss.
We ate wonderful potluck food.
We took pictures.
We talked dogs.
We gathered up our folding chairs and serving bowls and drove home, each and every one of us with the grand prize: The same great dog we had brought with us.
Well, yes, so many of those people are terrible, win at all cost, and the judging is all political, and so many unsound dogs with bad temperaments get championships, and working ability is not respected there ... but this is where we breed fanciers get together. This is where we see other dogs of our breeds, and pick out mates, and sell puppies, and 'educate the public' about our breed. And it's where I get to see my friends 'in the breed' -- it's my social life. And the dogs get socialized, the chaos is good for the puppies to learn. And it's the breed club through AKC dog shows that educates us breeders about genetic defects and health problems and how to breed better dogs. Plus, how else would a puppy buyer find out about the good breeders out there instead of just go to a pet shop?
We drove over 900 miles this weekend, and came home with no championship points, no ribbons, no "legs," no silver loving cup.
Near as I can tell, nobody here is disappointed. Rosie is disgruntled, but she is always disgruntled -- everything vexes her.
Pip and Rosie got long-overdue new collars for the occasion -- burgundy for Pip, leopard-pattern for Rosie -- but they were rarely snapped to leashes, which were never used to string them around in a circle or restrain them for "inspection."
I did give Rosie a bath on Thursday night. This had nothing to do with enhancing her pretty white ruff to catch the eye of judge, and everything to do with whatever reeking black foulness it was that she rolled in Thursday afternoon. Pip's pre-trip grooming was limited to our usual evening burr-picking session.
Not one of the fifty-plus English shepherd owners who gathered at a horse farm in western North Carolina had occasion to whisper to another about the fix that "put up" the obviously inferior dog of a third one.
No one screamed "loose dog."
No vendor sold stacks of t-shirts reading "The winning dog was professionally handled ... and so was the judge." (Real shirt. Saw them selling like Eskimo pies in Hell at a show in 2003.)
Nobody jumped in the car early and headed home after losing in the "first round."
No one paid a fee to cover the overhead on Madison Avenue offices or a new tux for the judge.
There was no gatekeeper verifying that each dog's paperwork was in order.
Nobody got disqualified.
If anyone was being paid to be there, I didn't hear of it.
What did happen was this ...
A large group of owners, and wannabe owners, of a rare kind of dog came together on a glorious fall Saturday.
A large group of dogs of a rare kind wandered about, most of them off-leash most of the time, socialized, played, threw a few snits, went swimming, fetched sticks and frisbees, barked, flirted, checked in with their owners, and sometimes shadowed them with the commitment of one of Pullman's daemons.
Humans looked at dogs and inquired about who was the Momma and the Poppa, and did that stolid fellow still possess a full pair of cojones, and what about them hip scores?
A representative of the ALBC spoke to us about our shared project of heritage breed conservation.
Puppies were passed from lap to lap for cuddling and spoiling.
Pedigrees were passed from hand to hand for scrutiny and discussion.
We had a raffle, and bought books and things, to benefit breed rescue. Rescue and the breed club are not at odds, with one party screaming "neuter them all" and the other sniping about unbalanced humaniacs. The boards overlap. Breeders are active in rescue. I am one of them.
Online friends got to meet in person, and old acquaintances were renewed. Club members from Texas, Vermont, Idaho and Montana had come.
Breeders got a good look at pups they had sold, all growed up.
We included part-bred dogs and their owners as a matter of course. (Imagine the welcome extended to a "shepherd mix" at, say, a GSDCA specialty show.)
We watched agility competitors demonstrate their craft; the regular dogs also played with the jumps and tunnels.
We commented on how great it was for our guys to to relax and socialize with other dogs and humans who "get them."
We remembered those who had left our community this year, canine and human, and shared our sense of loss.
We ate wonderful potluck food.
We took pictures.
We talked dogs.
We gathered up our folding chairs and serving bowls and drove home, each and every one of us with the grand prize: The same great dog we had brought with us.
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