Ten Tips to Finding the Right Dog

Illustration by Kevin Brockbank for the Oct 2010 issue of Dogs Today.


Terrierman’s Tips to Finding
The Right Dog from a Good Breeder

One of the reasons dogs are in such a mess is that consumers who buy dogs are almost completely uninformed when they start the process.

The advice given is always the same: "buy the right dog from a good breeder."

But what does that mean? The right dog? Right for what?

In fact, most people do not live lives very well-suited to dogs. Unlike a bicycle or a shotgun, a dog cannot be tucked into a storage closet, and forgotten. A dog requires attention several times a day, every day, rain or shine, vacation or not. Is your life really that stable? Is anyone’s these days?

And a good breeder? What’s that? No one ever says.

So where to start? Consider these ten tips as a starting place for anyone looking to get “the right dog” from a “good breeder.”


1. Remember that a dog is not a hat to be tried on and discarded.
A dog is a life-long commitment, and it must mesh well with your life as you live it, not as you wish it to be. In short, do not get a dog that needs a lot of daily exercise if you are a couch potato, and do not expect a dog to do well if it is crated eight hours a day while you are at work. Highly-motivated working dogs rarely make good pets, as few owners are able to give them the exercise, work and emotional release they need. If you are young, and your living arrangements and finances are unstable, skip a dog entirely and get a cat -- they won't mind long periods alone, and are much cheaper to care for.

2. Get your priorities in order.
If your first inclination when purchasing a dog is to buy an all-breed book and begin flipping through the pages, you are already making a mistake. The goal of all-breed books is to fill your mind with a romantic ideal of a brand-name dog. The danger in doing this is that once you get this picture locked in your head, you have already "chosen your breed," which means you have rejected healthy non-pedigree dogs without even considering them. It also means you have probably chosen a canine registry. With breed and "registration papers" occupying the first and second slots in your priority list, gender and coat color typically fill slots three and four. That means health and temperament fall to level five and six. No wonder so many people end up with unhealthy dogs! Remember that all-breed books are the dog market equivalent of a sales brochure; they offer lovely pictures and descriptive puffery, but they are not Consumers Report or Which magazine. You would not buy a car based on a sales brochure. Why are you buying a dog this way?

3. Kennel Club paper does not mean quality; it often means defect.
All-breed books are often full of nonsense, copied from one to another, and none tell you very much about health problems and temperament challenges. If you flip through an all-breed book, for example, you may fall in love with the Golden Retriever, but the book will not tell you that 40 to 60 percent of these dogs come down with cancer, or what it will cost to treat that cancer. If you insist on a pedigree dog, take the time to really study the diseases and genetic problems associated with each breed. Look at real longevity data, and ask a veterinarian what it will cost to fix a pair of wrecked hips, to treat chronic heart disease, or to remove a dog’s eye if it has a luxating lens.

4. Realize that breed clubs are trade associations.
The main function of breed clubs is to create and rationalize an artificial market for show dogs bred in a closed registry system. The second function of a breed club is to serve as a marketing hub for puppies sold to a public who are told that breed club affiliation is the first sign of a “good” breeder. In fact, breed club membership is little more than an indication that a breeder has the patience to suffer through breed club politics. Most breed clubs require no health or performance testing of any kind, and offer up only weak ethical guidelines related to the age and frequency of mating. Many good breeders can be found in breed clubs, but breed club membership alone tells you nothing.

5. Be prepared to wait, and be prepared to say no.
Go slow! Study up on breeds and types. Read with a very skeptical eye. Above all, steel your heart and your resolve before you set out to look at dogs in the flesh. If you cannot drive two hours into the countryside, walk into someone's living room to see a mass of wriggling puppies, have tea with them, and walk out without buying a dog, you are not emotionally ready to make a sensible purchase. You are a mark, not a serious consumer. If you must take your spouse and children with you to look at puppies, be sure to agree beforehand that you will drive away without making a purchase no matter what. You can change your mind and come back later, but only after everyone has sat down at a table and talked it all out. Remember that when you set off to buy a dog, you are not looking to make a new friend; you are looking to buy a healthy dog that will be with you for years to come.

6. Accept that dog breeders often have a casual relationship with the truth.
If a breeder says the sire and dam of your prospective pup has been health-tested, ask to see those test scores and know what the results really mean. If they say the sire and dam have worked well in the field, ask for photographic evidence of that work. Remember that dog dealers are not more ethical than car dealers. Dog breeders hope the dog they sell you works out, but if it doesn't, that's your problem, not theirs!

7. Look for danger signs.
If a breeder will not show you the kennels, walk away. If they will not show you the sire and dam (or at least provide contact information for the owner of the sire), go elsewhere. If you ask about health problems in the breed, and they seek to minimize them or say they have never tested their breeding stock because they have "never had a problem," hold on to your wallet and really think hard. If you are looking for a working dog, but the breeder does not work their own dogs, you are at the wrong kennel. If you examine a five-generation pedigree, and the same dog appears more than once, ask yourself if you really want an inbred dog?

8. Disenthrall yourself from puppies and consider dogs that have been "run on."
All breeders hold back a small percentage of their best prospects to see how they develop, with the eye to keeping them for breeding purposes themselves. These dogs, which have been "run on" for five or six months to see how they develop, are often available due to kennel crowding and the smallest of faults that have nothing to do with substance. There is often real gold to be found here, and it generally comes with several added bonuses: semi-adult dogs that have had all their shots, can control their bowels, and may have rudimentary training. And have no fear: if you acquire one of these dogs, they will learn a new name in a week or two!

9. Value is not the same as price.
Some of the best dogs in the world can be had for a song at your local pound or shelter, while some of the most expensive and miserable genetic wrecks are sold for thousands of pounds by Kennel Club breeders. Caveat emptor! As a general rule, an "expensive breed" is one that is a genetic mess because it has a small heavily-inbred gene pool, or else it is a conformation disaster with most pups born caesarian. Oddly enough, many of the dogs found at shelters are dogs that benefit from a certain amount of hybrid vigor -- a fact reflected in lower health insurance premiums for non-pedigree dogs.

10. Money-back guarantees are virtually worthless.
If a dog dealer offers you a "money-back guarantee," be advised that such a guarantee is worthless unless you are willing to return the dog to be euthanized on the spot. No breeder will pay for a hip operation or double cruciate ligament repair on a two-year old dog that you insist on keeping.

The bottom line: purchasing any dog is a calculated risk, but if you use your head rather than your heart, you can reduce the risks and improve the odds of a happy match for owner and dog alike. Select in haste, however, and there is a very good chance you will regret in leisure.

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• This article is a "what to look for" piece written for Dogs Today.
  
  It's analog is a piece I wrote one year ago entitled Terrierman's Top Ten Tips for Avoiding Expense & Misery.

What the Hell Is a Congo Terrier?

Click to enlarge. Art work by Kevin Brockbank (note dog in a pot at right!)

This piece is from the July issue of Dogs Today.

Out of Africa

A single breed - the Congo Terrier - sums up the history of dogs.


Have you noticed that in the world of dogs, names and places never quite line up?

Look at Welsh Terriers.

I know digging men in Wales, but none that use a Kennel Club Welsh Terrier to hunt fox to ground.

I know digging men in Scotland, but none that use a Scottish terrier.

Afghans?

There are no Kennel Club Afghan dogs coursing in South Central Asia.

Show line German Shepherds?

Not too many of those herding sheep in Germany!

And in central Africa, the locals are not using "Congo Terriers" that have Kennel Club papers.

A Congo terrier?

What on earth is that?


The Kennel Club's Pariah Dog

The “Congo terrier” was discovered by explorer Georg Schweinfurth on an expedition to Africa in 1869.

He called the dogs "Niam-niam dogs," which described the tribal region where they were found, and he noted they were often quite fat, as the Niam-niam people loved dogs so much they thought nothing of tossing them into the stew pot for dinner!

The dogs themselves were spitz-like and barkless, with erect ears and curled tails, as is often the case with primitive dogs. Where the Niam-niam dogs were different was in their relatively small size, their short coat, and the fact that they often featured a white band of fur around their neck.

Though Schweinfurth called them Niam-niam dogs, similar animals were found across a wide belt of central Africa, stretching from Liberia in the West, to Sudan in the East.

Like many other primitive landrace pariah dogs, the Niam-niam dog had only one estrus a year and rarely barked, but instead vocalized with howls, yodels, and whines similar to those of the wolf, coyote, dingo, or jackal.

Of course, a largely silent dog in thick cover is not necessarily an asset. No matter; this deficit was corrected by African hunters who attached a wooden "bell" or clapper to the necks of their dogs so they could more easily drive small game out of thick cover.

In 1895, the Niam-niam dog was displayed at the Crufts dog show as the "Congo terrier."

The name did not last too long.

In the late 1930s, the Congo Terrier was formally brought into the Kennel Club and renamed the "Basenji" -- a Bantu name that meant "village dog."

The first order of Kennel Club business was to craft a narrow appearance-based "standard" for the Basenji. This was not hard to do, as only seven dogs were initially admitted.

Clearly these seven dogs were perfect specimens of their type!


Inbreeding to Failure

Seven dogs, of course, is not much of a gene pool. In fact, the gene pool of the Basenji never grew much bigger than this. Over the course of the next 60 years, no more than 30 dogs comprised the entire founding stock of the breed in the U.K., the U.S., and Europe.

Inbreeding within this small stock of foundation dogs quickly led to a crushing genetic load and a rise in disease.

The first issue to raise its head was Hemolytic Anemia. When testing was started, twenty percent of all Basenjis carried this recessive gene. What to do?

The answer: Cull.

And cull they did, with about 18 percent of Basenjis weeded out of the American Kennel Club gene pool over the course of a decade.

Of course, this deep reduction in an already narrow gene pool sped up the inbreeding merry-go-round.

Within a decade, another health problem had popped up: Fanconi syndrome, a type of kidney failure. A health survey found 10 percent of all American Basenjis had Fanconi syndrome, and of these dogs, 76 percent were being bred.

What to do?


The Outcross Solution

The solution, of course, was an outcross.

The good news was that there were was no shortage of excellent dogs in Africa. After a 1988 visit to the Congo, AKC judge Damara Bolte reported that:

"In five days and 800 kilometers of driving, we saw at least 200 dogs of which only three were not Basenjis."

Could anyone driving down the road see the same number of Welsh Terriers in Wales, or Scottish Terriers in Scotland? Impossible!

In 1990 the Basenji Club of America successfully petitioned the American Kennel Club to open the AKC registry to African dogs, and 12 were admitted.

The addition of 12 African imports helped, but it was not enough. With popular sire selection, inbreeding within the Basenji gene pool continued. And how could it not, with less than a dozen dogs comprising over 95% of the Y chromosomes in Kennel Club dogs across the U.S., Europe and the U.K.?


Form, Function and Fantasy

As noted earlier, Basenjis have always been found across a wide swath of central Africa. The early dogs came from the Sudan, Sierra Leon, Liberia, the Cameroon, and the Congo.

In 1998, an American Peace Corps worker in Benin reported the country was awash in Basenjis, and that they could be acquired for as little as a dollar.

In 2004, an American imported six of these dogs, and they were shown at the 2004 Basenji Club of America Nationals. By then, however, the AKC registry had once again closed.

The Basenji Club petitioned the AKC to reopen the registry. This was done in January 2007, with a new closing scheduled for 2013.

Will opening the AKC Basenji registry a second time really matter?

Yes and no.

It will not matter to the Basenjis in Africa, which have never needed saving.

The hunting dogs of Africa are protected by those who hunt them. In this regard, they are no different from the working terriers of Wales and Scotland, the coursing dogs of South Central Asia, or bird dogs the world over.

But the Basenji community will not be dissuaded. They insist they are "saving" a breed.

But what is it that they saving, and who are they saving it from?

One thing is clear: Basenji enthusiasts are not trying to save hunting dogs in Africa.

You cannot save dogs in Africa by removing them from the continent, and you cannot save a hunting breed by not hunting them at all.

So what are the Kennel Club enthusiasts really trying to save?

Mostly, they are working to preserve a romantic notion of their own making.

For their breed to be special, a Basenji has to be more than another village dog, even if the word "Basenji" means just that in the Lingala language of the Congo.

And so, Basenji owners tighten down on what they see as the “special essentials” of their breed.

They insist no Basenji should ever bark, and never mind if some always have, and that a barkless dog is such a liability that the Africans themselves bell their dogs when they hunt.

And, of course, all Basenjis must have a tightly curled tail, and no matter that a tightly curled tail serves no function in the field.

Function? The American and European Basenji is not about function! This dog is about form and fantasy.

Hunting? What does hunting have to do with the Basenji? Nothing!

Why should Basenjis be held to a working standard when the Kennel Club Welsh Terrier and Scotty are not? This is the Kennel Club, not the African bush. Form trumps function; everyone knows that. And form is maintained by inbreeding right up to the edge of genetic failure. Why should the Basenji be any different in this regard?

And so Kennel Club Basenji enthusiasts hold tightly to a breed standard invented in England based on seven dogs. And when shown pictures of small hunting dogs in central Africa that do not quite conform to every aspect of "the standard,” they sniff disdainfully.

“Those aren’t Basenjis. Those are nothing more than village hunting dogs."

Right. No irony there!

Just ask any Welshman with mud on his boots, calluses on his hands, and a terrier at his heels. What does he know of Welsh terriers? Not a thing!

And so we come to the ultimate irony: What are Basenji enthusiasts trying to protect their American and European dog from?

Why inbreeding within the closed registry system of the Kennel Club, of course!
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They Invented Animal Training

This article was written for the June issue of Dogs Today magazine. Illustration by Kevin Brockbank.

Who invented animal training and what can we learn from them?

The question may seem silly. Animal training is older than the hills. For certain, it is as old as the dog.

That said, most of what we call animal training today fits into the folder of "operant conditioning," a term first coined by American psychologist B.F. Skinner in the early 1930s.

Chase it around the room, and operant conditioning is simply learning from consequences.

Skinner codified the basic principals of operant conditioning, and he invented a laboratory-based mechanical-training machine which rewarded animals with food when they pulled levers and pecked at spots.

Skinner's real claim to fame in the world of dogs, however, is that he hired Keller and Marian Breland -- two young assistants who more or less invented the modern art of animal training.

Teaching Pigeons to Bowl

The Breland's made their first big discovery while working with Skinner in 1943.

As odd as it sounds, the goal on this occasion was to train pigeons to "bowl" a ping-pong ball down a short alley to knock down a few pins. Keller Breland decided to use a hand-held switch to trigger a food reward, rather than a purely mechanical device. A small problem was that the pigeons had no interest in pecking at the ping-pong ball! Though Keller waited for hours for the right behavior to express itself, it never happened. In frustration, Keller decided to give the pigeons a reward for doing anything approximating movement in the right direction. To his amazement, the pigeons caught on pretty quickly, and the completed trick was learned in short order.

Thus was born "shaping," or progressive rewards based on approximating a task.

The second big development occurred in 1945. By this time, B. F. Skinner had left the University of Minnesota, and the Brelands had decided to strike out on their own as professional animal trainers.

While shaping tricks, the Brelands noticed that the animals themselves seemed to be paying attention to the noises made by the hand-held food-reward switches.

Keller and Marian Breland soon discovered that an acoustic secondary enforcer, such as a click or whistle, could communicate to an animal the precise action being rewarded, and it could do so from a distance.

The Brelands called this a "bridging stimulus," (now generally called a bridge) and it dramatically sped up animal training by increasing the amount of information going to an animal.

Thus was born clicker training.

The Rise of Commercial Animal Acts

By now the Brelands had created their own animal training company -- Animal Behavior Enterprises. Their first contract, with General Mills, was so successful that other contracts with movies, circuses, museums, fairs, and zoos soon followed.

Over the next several decades, the Brelands trained more than 15,000 animals representing more than 140 species. At one point, the Brelands had more than 1,000 animals under training at a single time -- a jaw-dropping level of production.

The Brelands did not just train animals; they also trained other animal trainers who went on to work at such venues as Busch Gardens, Disney World, and Sea World. The Brelands themselves signed contracts with such major amusement parks as Marineland of Florida, Marineland of the Pacific, Parrot Jungle, and Six Flags.

Rewards-based clicker training worked so well that in 1951, the Brelands authored an article in American Psychologist, in which they said they thought rewards-based clicker training might work on any animal to train just about anything.

And then something happened. They noticed that clicker training was, in certain circumstances, beginning to fail in ways they could no longer overlook.

When Clicker Training Failed

In a 1961 paper entitled, The Misbehavior of Organisms, Keller and Marian Breland described their first experience with the failure of reward-based operant conditioning.

It seems that when working with pigs, chickens and raccoons, the animals would often learn a trick and then begin to drift away from the learned behavior and towards more instinctive, unreinforced, foraging actions.

What was going on?

Put simply, instinct was raising its inconvenient head.

Though Skinner and his disciples had always maintained that performance was driven by external rewards or punishments, here was clear evidence that there was an internal code that could not always be ignored.

The Brelands wrote:

These egregious failures came as a rather considerable shock to us, for there was nothing in our background in behaviorism to prepare us for such gross inabilities to predict and control the behavior of animals with which we had been working for years.... [T]he diagnosis of theory failure does not depend on subtle statistical interpretations or on semantic legerdemain - the animal simply does not do what he has been conditioned to do.

The Brelands did not overstate the problem, nor did they quantify it. They simply stated a fact: instinct existed, and sometimes it bubbled up and over-rode trained behaviors.

Clearly, every species had different instincts, and just as clearly, a great deal of animal training could be done without ever triggering overpowering instinct. Still, the Brelands noted,

After 14 years of continuous conditioning and observation of thousands of animals, it is our reluctant conclusion that the behavior of any species cannot be adequately understood, predicted, or controlled without knowledge of its instinctive patterns, evolutionary history, and ecological niche.

The Problem with Dogs

What does this have to do with dogs?

Quite a lot. You see a small, but vocal and militant group of clicker trainers believe everything a dog does is learned by external rewards, and internal drives are "old school" fiction.

While the Brelands argued that a species could not be adequately controlled without “knowledge of its instinctive patterns, evolutionary history, and ecological niche," the most extreme militants in the world of clicker training now seek to minimize and disavow the very nature and history of dogs.

Dog packs? There are no such things, we are told.

Dominance? It does not exist in feral dogs or in wolves, and never mind the experts who disagree.

Prey drive? Not too much said about that!

Of course, instinctive behaviors and drives do not disappear simply because they are inconvenient.

As Keller and Marian Breland put it,

[A]lthough it was easy to banish the Instinctivists from the science during the Behavioristic Revolution, it was not possible to banish instinct so easily.

Of course, one must be careful to qualify the role of instinct.

Yes, dogs have instincts, but the history of dog breeding has largely been about reducing instinctive drives. As a consequence, most breeds have instinctive drives that are sufficiently attenuated that they are not much of an impediment to basic rewards-based training.

That said, not all dog breeds are alike. Not every dog is a blank slate, as the owner of any herding dog or game-bred terrier will tell you. Prey drive does not disappear because you want it to. Many problematic behaviors in dogs -- especially behaviors in hard-wired working dogs that are being raised as pets -- are self-reinforcing behaviors that express themselves without any external reinforcement at all!

Clicker training, the Brelands remind us, cannot solve everything.

Is rewards-based training the most important tool in any trainer’s box of tricks and methods?

Absolutely. There is not much debate there.

But the Brelands remind us that dogs do not come to the trainer as a tabula rasa, nor should we think of all dog breeds as being more or less the same, or that all responses are equally conditionable to all stimuli.

Dogs and other animals, it turns out, are a bit more complicated that white rats, and the real world is not a laboratory.

In the wild and on the farm, animals have managed to learn, all by themselves, since the Dawn of Time and long before clickers came on the scene. How did they do that? Does the real world have as much to teach us as the lab? Keller and Marian Breland thought it did.

• Related Links:** Your Dogs are a Mess (and your kids are no prize)
  ** Clickerless Clicker Training
  ** Clicker Training Does Not Require Empathy
  ** The Three Parts of Operant Conditioning
  ** Dominance Creates and Maintains Wolf Packs
  ** Cesar Millan: The Secret Is Human Training
  ** The Devolution of Dog and the Training of Man** A Short History of Dog Training** Are Useful Tools Ever Out of Date?
  ** How to Train a Cheetah
  ** How to Train a Scent Hound
  ** Catching a Mexican Wolf With a Y Pole
  ** Are You an Old School Dog Trainer?
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When Breeds are Failures

Art by the ever-astounding Kevin Brockbank for Dogs Today (May 2010 issue)

Is it time to thin the herd?

It's been said that the dog is the most successful wolf in the world -- the wolf that got man to adopt it, house it, feed it, and protect it.

Relatively docile wolves were fed and bred until, slowly, imperceptibly, they evolved into something different -- the domestic dog.

For 12,000 years, that's about as far as it progressed.


An Explosion of Breeds

Two hundred and fifty years ago, there were only about a dozen broad types of dogs.

Breeds, as we know them today with narrow written standards, were not yet known.

Your breed claims an ancient lineage?

Unless it's a greyhound, I can assure you it's almost certainly nonsense.

The Pharaoh Hound? Invented in the 20th Century to look like the dogs found on the side of the Egyptian tombs opened at the time of Carter.

The Chinese Crested? Not Chinese! Invented in America in the 1930s and popularized by burlesque stripper Gypsy Rose Lee.

Terriers? Retrievers? Setters? Spaniels? Pointers? Shepherds?

Analysis of Mitochondrial DNA shows that while the type may be old, the breed is -- almost invariably -- of relatively modern origin.

It's not like we created just a few breeds in the blink of an eye, is it? No, we created hundreds.

How did we do that? Mostly by selecting for odd types and then inbreeding to "fix" those types until they bred true.

The first breeds, of course, were created by merely tweaking Mother Nature's process. Herding dogs, for example, were selected because of function rather than looks. Ditto for running dogs, pulling dogs, bird dogs, guarding dogs, and terriers.

Dogs that were best adapted to function prospered, while those that did poorly were culled from the pool. The only difference was that the hand of man was now engaged in unnatural selection -- replacing Mother Nature, which had previously been employed in the task of natural selection.

Form Trumps Function

With the rise of dog shows, however, function took a back seat to form. Now the primary value celebrated was variability. And, of course, to get maximum variability, you had to green-light more and more breeds that were extreme, and in many cases maladaptive, including dogs that were brachycephalic (flat faced) and could not breath well, and dogs that were achondroplastic (dwarfs) and had joint and heart problems.

Added to these dogs were other extreme examples -- massive giants that had weak hearts and intestines prone to twist and bloat, tiny tea cup breeds prone to hydrocephalia and broken bones, hairless breeds prone to dental and skins issues, dogs with extreme skin wrinkles, ear length, and coats, and dogs with various spinal oddities such as over-long backs, roached backs, and spines that ended in a tight mass of twisted vertebrae.

And, of course, through it all you had to inbreed and line-breed in order to set type, and you had to invent ancient histories in order to speed the sales of these new creations.

The result has been a mixed bag. Some breeds have managed to stay healthy, and a few have even managed to be useful for work.

Most, however, have come down with one or more serious health problems, and most have devolved from working dog to mere pets.

There is nothing wrong with pets. There is, of course, something wrong with breeding dogs with serious health problems. Even here, however most genetic problems are manageable and most breeds are salvageable

But is that always the case? Are there dog breeds that are not salvageable?

This is not a small question.

When humans began breeding dogs, we began to act as Gods, but we failed to accept the full mantle of the Gods.

God culls misfits; man puts his in the Kennel Club.

Canine Failures

Let's talk about canine failures. They are not hard to find.

The Dandie Dinmont is a good example of a dog that has simply failed in the marketplace. Last year, more Pandas were born in captivity than Dandie Dinmonts were registered by the Kennel Club.

Named after a fictional character in a novel, and forced to compete head-to-head with other poodle-coated mops, this dog has found few customers due to its odd-looking sway back, poor movement, and complete uselessness in the field.

Add in the health problems suffered by Dandies -- cushings, hypothyroidism, and a narrow-angle glaucoma that is unique to Dandies -- and you stand at the cusp of a question.

Factor in the fact that more than 40% of dogs are born cesarean, and the case is made for intervention.

The old working terrier from which the modern Dandie claims descent was not a product of the Kennel Club and did not suffer these indignities.

Perhaps now is the time to release this breed from the inbreeding mandated by a tiny gene pool wedded to a closed registry system.

Perhaps now is the time to release this dog from the bondage of contrived show dog standards.

Yes, let us release this dog "back to the wild" of its working roots. It has not done well in "captivity". De-list this dog from the Kennel Club's roles, and move on.

Other breeds should also be delisted, and for much the same reason -- the Skye Terrier, the Clumber Spaniel, the Sussex Spaniel, the Glenn of Imaal Terrier, the Manchester Terrier, and the Sealyham Terrier.

None of these dogs were created in the Kennel Club -- they have only been deformed, emasculated, and inbred since their arrival. Release these dogs "back to the wild". They have not done well in "captivity", and they have failed in the marketplace.

And what about those breeds that are true genetic wrecks beyond salvation?

There are not many, but let's face the problem head on, and end the nonsense.

There is no reason to try to repair a Disney castle built on sand, with a blown foundation, rotten roof, walls riddled with termites, and a dangerous boiler about to explode in the basement.

Take the Cavalier King Charles Spaniel. This was a breed invented at the Crufts dog show in response to a prize offered up by an American by the name of Roswell Eldridge.

Thanks to a bad gene pool at the start, and the incredible inbreeding that followed, more than 80 percent of today's dogs end up with serious heart problems, while more than a third have a genetic brain disorder affecting the nervous system.

With this level of defect, and this thin history, why not sweep it all aside and start again?

Ditto for several other breeds with serious health problems -- the Miniature Bull Terrier (50% cesarean, dead at 6 years), the English Bull Dog (90% cesarean, dead at 6 years), the Scottish Terrier (60 percent cesarean, 45% cancer rate), the Dogue De Bordeaux (dead at less than six years).

Are there other breeds that might be "returned to the wild" through delisting and/or delisting and recreation (i.e. starting again with a healthy gene pool, scientific breeding, and a commonsense standard)?

Sure, but I think I have been controversial enough for one day, don't you?!

The question stands: Is it time to thin the herd? Is it time to end the Kennel Club's preservation of defect and failure?
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Between Two Lies, Lost Opportunity for Pit Bulls

Art by Kevin Brockbank, courtesy of Dogs Today.

From the April issue of Dogs Today.

When it comes to Pit Bulls, two lies are commonly told.

The first lie, exemplified in the U.K.'s Dangerous Dog Act, is that Pit Bulls are as dangerous as wild lions.

Because of this patent falsehood, Pit Bulls can only be kept in Britain with specific permission from a court, and can only be walked when muzzled.

The second lie, told by Pit Bull aficionados, is that Pit Bulls are no different than any other dog. If you disagree with this statement, be prepared to be called a "breed bigot".

Here's the truth: both claims are lies.

In the United States, where Pit Bulls are a common dog, more people are killed by lightning strikes than by Pit Bulls. In fact, more children are killed by their parents than by Pit Bulls.

Does this mean Pit Bulls are just like every other dog in the world?

No. That too is a lie.

In the U.S., where Pit Bulls account for 2 to 3 percent of all dogs, this breed type (it is not a formal breed) accounts for over 50 percent of all serious dog bites.

And while Pit Bull-related fatalities are low (about 10 a year), for every fatality there are thousands of hospitalizations and emergency room visits. Those who focus solely on the low number of Pit Bull fatalities are lying by omission when they fail to mention the physical and emotional scars left by Pit Bulls attacks.

So, does this mean that Pit Bulls are a problem?

Yes it does.

And part of the problem is that this breed -- like most others -- comes with a code inside it.

Of course, we all know that dogs come with a genetic code.

When we talk about Pointers and Setters, everyone knows these dogs are particularly "birdy."

When we talk about retrievers, everyone agrees this breed is particularly biddable, loves water, and has a desire to bring things to hand.

When we talk about Jack Russell Terriers, everyone agrees they hate rats, and have a natural inclination to go to ground.

But Pit Bulls?

The Pit Bull community wants us to think these dogs are just like any other! Never mind the illegal kennels here in America that crank out line-bred fighting dogs like Pez from a dispenser. Never mind the history of this dog as feral hog hunter, pit fighter, and junkyard protector.

To even suggest that Pit Bulls might have a different genetic code inside them than Pugs, Standard Poodles, Pointers, or Salukies is heresy among many breed-blind Pit Bull defenders.

Of course, canine genetics is only part of the equation. Along with nature comes nurture. In the right hands, even a Pit Bull with a lot of drive can end up being a happy, docile, and extremely playful family dog.

The sad truth, however, is most Pit Bulls in America do not end up in the right hands. This is a breed that tends to attract "the wrong types" to the point that research has shown that U.S. Pit Bull owners are far more likely to have criminal records than other dog owners.

The predictable result of too many boisterous Pit Bulls meeting up with too many ill-prepared and unstable owners is that the dogs suffer.

And in America, Pit Bulls suffer terribly.

Nearly a million Pit Bulls were euthanized in American shelters in 2009 -- more than the sum of all dogs of all breeds registered by the American Kennel Club last year.

In the last decade, about 8,000,000 Pit Bulls were euthanized in U.S. animal shelters -- approximately four hundred million pounds of dead Pit Bull.

What makes this particularly distressing is that Pit Bull euthanasia rates in the U.S. have been on the rise for 30 years, even as all other canine impounds and euthanasias have been on a steady and steep decline.

What's going on with Pit Bulls?

The problem is not Pit Bull haters.

Ironically enough, the problem is Pit Bull lovers.

After all, it's the Pit Bull "lovers" that are breeding these dogs.

It's the Pit Bull "lovers" that are acquiring these dogs.

It's the Pit Bull "lovers" that are too often abusing the dogs through ignorance and neglect before abandoning them to their death a year or two after acquisition.

You mean Pit Bull "haters" are not the problem?

No, they are not.

The problem is young numbskulls who acquire these dogs in ignorance and haste, discover that they are too much dog to handle, and who then abandon them at leisure.

So what to do?

One of the most obvious ways forward, is to do with Pit Bulls what we have done for hawks, guns, and and cars in the U.S.: require a license conditional upon passing a basic training course.

When "hunter safety" courses were mandated in the U.S., accidental shootings fell to the point that golf and tennis are now deemed to be more dangerous than hunting.

When falconers were required to serve two-year apprenticeships, the longevity of captive birds soared, and concerns about raptor abuse plummeted.

And, of course, driving courses and driver's licenses have been in place since the beginning. Do accidents still happen? Sure, but no one argues that driver's license enforcement is not Step One to improved highway safety.

With dogs, however, the assumption is that everyone knows everything they need to know about dogs at birth -- and never mind if that is demonstrably wrong, especially for large game-bred breed like Pit Bulls.

And the consequence of this crazy idea?

Millions of dead dogs.

What is bizarre here, is that you would think there would be a natural constituency for a simple Canine Safety and Responsibility Course.

After all, teaching such a course could be a small money-maker for sponsoring groups such as the Kennel Club, Dogs Trust, the RSPCA, and dog-activity clubs.

Would a Canine Safety and Responsibility Course solve every Pit Bull (or dog) problem in the world?

No, of course not.

But it would solve a lot of them, and it would also serve as the "edge of the wedge" when it comes to tackling the human problems that too many dogs face -- ignorance about costs, responsibility, health, and training.

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• Shortly after I wrote this, the Labour government in the U.K. moved to require all dog owners to carry liability insurance on their dogs. This idea does not have strong legs so far as I can tell.
  
  
• As for abandonment of Pitbulls in the U.K., while is not quite as common as it is in the U.S. (thanks to a virtual ban on the breed), it still occurs in numbers large enough to get newspaper coverage.
  
  
• Finally, there is a nascent move here in the U.S, to mandate a kind of "Canine Safety and Responsibility Course." The first tripping effort seems to have occurred at Camp Pendleton and other Marine Corps bases where existing Pitbulls, Rottweilers, Wolf hybrids (and crosses of the same) and are now required to pass an AKC "Canine Good Citizen" test or some other behavioral evaluation if they are to stay. Liz Palika notes that as the April 1 deadline looms at Camp Pendleton, not all dogs may make the grade. She says: "Now we’re seeing the dogs who have known — to their owners — behavioral problems. Far too many owners tell us their dog never leaves the house or backyard because they can’t control him. We’ve had a few walk into our training yard so aggressively we can’t deal with them at all."
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Will Patrick Bateson Lead the Way Forward?

The latest issue of Dogs Today arrived in the mailbox, and the two lead articles are on: 1) Whether the Dalmatian outcross will be allowed in The Kennel Club (article by Claire Horton-Bussey) and; 2) What has occurred in the last year since the BBC documentary Pedigree Dogs Exposed blew the doors off the dog world last August (article by producer Jemima Harrison).

I also slip in a small piece on dog food, noting that the quality of the dog food matters far less than the quantity, as more dogs are wrecked by obesity than any single cause, while no study has ever shown than one dog food is better than another.

Jemima Harrison's article about the Kennel Club is excellent (I have not yet gotten to the Dalmatian article - that is for tomorrow's read). I especially liked it where she compares problems at The Kennel Club to the problems faced by the old London Zoo "which not so long ago was down on its knees, a relic of the Victorian age, run by people in the entertainment business, not conservation."

She goes on to note that the London Zoo is now a completely changed place. And what changed? The leadership at the top! Ms. Harrison goes on to note that:

"Coincidentally, it is the president of the [London Zoo], Sir Patrick Bateson, who is heading the most critical review into dog breeding prompted by Pedigree Dogs Exposed. This is the review commissioned by The Kennel Club and Dogs Trust, and so they are likely to take heed and act on its findings."

On a personal note, I have to give a huge hat tip to Dogs Today illustrator Kevin Brockbank. His art work is absolutely smashing. Jemima Harrison's piece has Kennel Club Chairman Ronnie Irving crying at his desk as he reads the Crufts press headlines following the BBC documentary. A border terrier (Irving's own breed) is chewing on his cuff, and there is even a Kennel Club logo on his coffee cup! Perfect! My own article is illustrated with a very nice homage to the breeding (and painting) of enormously fat "square" cattle during the era of Robert Bakewell, albeit with a dog as the subject of the portraint, instead of a cow. Nice!

Now let's see what Kevin can do with next month's article, tentatively entitled Counterfeit Collies and Transvestite Terriers. There's a lot of potential there!

To read that article (and see the art that will come with it), however, you are going to have to subscribe to Dogs Today.
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