The Pressure of Being a Working Dog

A young sheltie ties to convince a much larger sheep that it is serious and up to the task.

When a working sheep dog moves sheep, he is said to be exerting "pressure" on the sheep by using body language, movement and voice.

If the dog puts too much pressure on the sheep, they may scatter in several groups or bolt off stampeding in the wrong direction. If the dog is too aggressive or too timid, a protective ram may decide it can bluff the dog into submission or that it must charge the dog in order to protect the ewes. Under either scenario, the dog can end up being chased by the sheep.

Herding is difficult because every flock is different, and so too is every pasture. A working collie cannot afford to make too many mistakes, and that is especially true in a timed herding trial.

If the dog is too amped up, it may press the sheep too hard and they will bolt and remain spooky for the rest of the run. If the dog does not put enough pressure on the sheep, however, they will be slow to lift and valuable seconds will be lost on the clock.

While things are a bit different in the world of working terriers, the concept of pressure is the same, and the same kind of see-saw is at work, only it is all done underground.

If a terrier does not put enough pressure on a groundhog or badger, it may dig away and soon be lost to both dog and digger.

Conversely, if a terrier puts too much pressure on a groundhog, fox, raccoon or badger, the animal may decide it has no other option but to stand and fight. If that occurs, the dog may be injured.

Intelligence and balance are treasured and valued in working collies. As Patricia B. McConnell notes in her very good book, The Other End of the Leash:

"A good, steady dog with an innate sense of pressure is worth his weight in gold, because he can move sheep or cattle without causing a fight or a stampede, smoothly moving the herd where you want them. The brilliant ones make it look so easy, you wouldn't know what all the fuss was about, until you watch a dog with no finesse, who moves in too fast, and panics the flock."

The same can be said about a working terrier. When a really experienced and well-balanced dog goes to ground, they do not rush in full of fire and belligerence, but creep in listening. They are not trying to move anything yet -- they are simply trying to locate, and they are trying to get a sense of how much pressure will be required to move whatever is in the hole.

When the dog does locate and opens up to a bay, he will be using his voice -- and probably his voice alone -- to move the quarry to a bolt or a stop-end of the den pipe. While a young and inexperienced dog may rush in with grabbing teeth (and get the muzzle bites to prove it), an older and more useful dog will know the easier way to get the job done.

The quarry in the hole is not the only thing under pressure, of course -- the dog is too. The pressure felt by the terrier is directly proportional to: 1) the amount of experience it has had underground; 2) the size of the hole it is working, and; 3) the mood of the animal it is facing.

I think this is the proper ranking of the main pressure-builders within a working terrier. An experienced dog is comfortable underground and knows enough tricks and ways of working that it is pretty confident that it can get the job done no matter what is found down there. An inexperienced dog, however, is not battling the quarry so much as its own fears.

Whether the dog is experienced or not, frustration rises and falls in direct proportion to the size of the hole. Even a confident and experienced dog feels pressure and frustration in a very tight hole where it cannot move forward or backward without substantial struggle.

The quarry itself can exert pressure on a dog, of course. Both a raccoon and a possum can make enough noise that they can spook both dog and digger alike. Groundhog and fox, on the other hand, are less likely to voice their objections than demonstrate them with slashing teeth.

All of this take place in the pitch black, of course. While a sheep dog can receive visual cues from the sheep, the terrier must rely solely on sound and scent. And while too much pressure on the sheep may result in the flock moving too fast or breaking in two, too much pressure by the terrier may result in a rip to the muzzle that will take weeks to heal.

At the end of a dig, just as you are breaking into the pipe, is when things often go bad when you are working terriers. Emboldened by the presence of light and reinforcements, a terrier that has used his voice alone up to this point, may decided it can now go in and grab.

An experienced terrier will try to grab his quarry by the cheek or ear, since a groundhog, fox, or raccoon gripped by the side of its head cannot easily move to bite back. Not every dog is smart enough, or lucky enough, to get such a good hold, however, which is why a smart terrierman will generally step in and pull his dog as soon as he can in order to save his terrier unnecessary injury.

Bottom line: As it gains experience, a working dog learns to relax a little more and begins to develop a bag of tricks and techniques it can employ to tackle different situations. In both herding dogs and working terriers, an experienced dog learns to stay attuned to the pressure building up on the other side of the field or pipe. There is a fine line between too much pressure and too little, and the very best dogs walk this shifting line with the grace and skill of a ballet dancer.

Dogs Shows As Human Failing

Why Televised Dog Shows Are a Sham
The New Republic, 12.14.06, by Sacha Zimmerman.


As Friedrich Nietzsche once said, "The world was conquered through the understanding of dogs; the world exists through the understanding of dogs." And so it is that there is perhaps nothing more philosophical on television than the "American Kennel Club/Eukanuba National Championship" dog show on Animal Planet. For, despite its sports-competition-sounding title, the national championship is, at its heart, a theater of existentialism.

To truly understand a dog show means to shed all common notions about how an animal's greatness is measured, like speed or jumping ability. At Eukanuba, as at all purebred dog shows, the dogs are judged, not for their cuteness or prowess in catching a Frisbee, but against a transcendent idea of the perfect dog. In other words, the Belgian Tervuren is not competing against the Pembroke Welsh Corgi; the Belgian Tervuren is competing against the metaphysical ideal of a Belgian Tervuren. Whichever dog comes closest to personifying its breed's quintessence wins best in show--and becomes something like the philosopher king of the canine world. There is, underlying all of the pomp and ceremony of the competition, a kind of Platonic striving to find that dog which will epitomize the archetype so resoundingly that we humans will perhaps leave the cave for a moment and, as Nietzsche suggests, understand the world a bit better for understanding a dog. "Dog is my co-pilot," indeed!

Unfortunately, instead of conveying its philosophical nature, the dog-show world seems wedded to useless sports-world analogies. Let's start with the conundrum of the handler. Edd Bivin, who provides the color commentary for Eukanuba's TV audience beside the play-by-play of former "Entertainment Tonight" host Bob Goen, explains to us that the human handler should be invisible. The best handlers apparently allow the dog to be the main focus. There are even contests for the handlers--Goen was thrilled to announce the winner of the Junior Handler Competition. Meaning there was actually a contest to see which handler was least noticeable, a through-the-looking-glass moment where a handler was remembered, essentially, for her absence.

And yet, along with the ubiquitous sensible shoes, I saw a startling number of sequins, large-pattern prints, and gold-lamé sheaths adorning the figures of the handlers. Were it not for the tight camera shots of the dogs, I might have missed them completely, as I was staring agog at the garish trends in dog-show-handler couture. Shouldn't invisible handlers be wearing basic black to stop distracting viewers from the dogs?

Moreover, while praising the handlers who show dogs so skillfully, so invisibly, Bivin nevertheless informs us that a handler's performance is, in fact, irrelevant. This came up when a particularly inelegantly dressed woman nearly tripped over a leash (so much for not being noticed). Bivin reminds us that this is a dog show; the handler's gaffe will not affect the scoring of the dog. So, if any clod with two left feet covered head-to-toe in Swarovski crystals can march a dog around the arena without affecting the judging of the dog itself, then why all the talk of invisibility and skill, not to mention high-priced professional handlers? It's like the handlers are some kind of preternatural red herrings meant to keep us looking at the shadows instead of at the dog-gods among us, who are blithely padding to and fro with none of the angst or consternation of the humans by their sides.

Even worse, the dogs, too, are regarded as athletes in this competition, even though they are nothing of the sort. Bivin explains to the home viewers that winning is all about the dog's performance on a given day. But a dog is the same on any given day. Unless a dog's hip has shifted an inch or its color has changed from one competition to the next, the dog is either close to perfect or it isn't. The contest is about appearance, after all, not temperament. The standards are supposedly set. And what "performance" is the dog really giving? After one spirited dog, a Petit Basset Griffon Vendeen (PBGV), gave a yelp and a growl to the judge, Bivin was quick to remind the audience that the judge would not hold it against the dog; indeed, the PBGV did well in its grouping. (Though, truthfully, understanding any of the standards for judging was near impossible with Bivin at the helm. He is prone to incredible fits of tautology. For example, when asked by Goen what the judge was looking for in a dog's gait, Bivin explained that the judge was watching how the dog moved. Illuminating.)

Actually, there is some rationale for all the sports talk. After all, the dogs are divided into groups based on what they were bred to do, like hunt, guard, or herd. But, for all we know, the Siberian Husky has never set a paw in the snow or even heard of the Iditarod; perhaps the Newfoundland is terrified of water rescues; and has the Border Collie ever rounded up sheep? By ignoring the teleological nature of the dogs, how can we possibly be sure that each one is anywhere close to the breed ideal? Then there is the constant banter between Goen and Bivin about the sweetness of one breed, the appropriateness of a breed for children, or the most loyal breed, which leaves the viewer pining for a demonstration of these traits. But no dogs are released into a gaggle of children to shower them with licks, and no dog is asked to bound to the door to exhibit its joy at its master's return home. The show is as devoid of personality as any Miss America pageant; perhaps more so, as talent is not even a consideration.

"All knowledge, the totality of all questions and answers, is contained in the dog," wrote Franz Kafka, and yet we foolishly examine teeth and coats whilst ignoring the soul. Which makes this entire dog-show extravaganza an exercise in eugenics, something we generally frown upon in the human world. Besides, inbreeding for dogs with pure bloodlines designed for outdated purposes, like guarding castles, is bad for dogs (many of which suffer from genetic diseases due to inbreeding) and bad for pet owners, who want a nice, playful dog, not a ratter or a racer. The competitive canine universe is festooned with all the trappings of a love of dogs. But that is a fallacy. Breeding to "perfection" has nothing to do with the true spirit of dogs, who care not that their beloved owners wear frumpy clothes, have less than perfect posture, lack good muscle tone, or don't have a smooth gait. I don't blame the genetically superior dogs; Eukanuba is a totally human failing.

A Short History of Dog Training

People tend to think the way things are done now is how they were done forever. Not entirely so, especially in the arena of dog training.

A few key dates in the history of canine communication show that while operant conditioning is pretty old stuff, the mix of methods has changed and become better understood over time:

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1700s: Truffle hunters learn to give their dogs bread when they locate truffles, which turns out to be cheaper than using pigs which cannot be stopped from eating all the truffles they locate.

1885: S.T. Hammond, a writer for Forest and Stream magazine advocates in his columns and in a book entitled Practical Training, that dogs should be praised and rewarded with meat when they do something right.

1880s: Montague Stevens trains his New Mexico bear dogs by rewarding them with pieces of bread instead of beating and kicking them as others of that era were generally doing. Stevens is a famous bear hunter and friend of Teddy Roosevelt and the sculptor Frederic Remington.

1886: Edward Thorndike develops a theory of learning based on stimulus and response. Thorndike shows that "practice makes perfect" and that if reinforced with positive rewards, animals can learn quickly.

1899: The first canine school for police dogs is started in Ghent, Belgium using Belgian Shepherds, which had recently been established as a breed.

1903: Ivan Pavlov publishes his experiments with dogs and digestion, noting that animals can be trained to have a physical response to stimuli. Pavlov called this learning process "conditioning," and in 1904 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for his research.

1903: The Germans begin schutzhund work, a competition devoted to obedience, protection, tracking and attack work.

1907: Police begin patrolling New York City and South Orange, New Jersey with Belgian Shepherds and newly reconstructed Irish wolfhounds.

1915: Baltimore police begin using Airedales from England to patrol the streets. The police suspend use of Airedales in 1917 as the dogs had helped make no arrests. The police failed to notice that no robberies had occurred where the dogs were on patrol.

1915: Edwin Richardson trains dogs for the military during WWI using some positive reinforcement, and the dogs prove to be quick studies. Many dogs are used for communication and for guard duty.

1917: The Germans begin to formally use dogs to guide soliders blinded in mustard gas attacks. The French soon follow suit.

1918: U.S. Army Corporal Lee Duncans find an abandoned war dog station in Lorraine, France which has five young puppies in a kennel. Duncan takes one of the pups and names it "Rin Tin Tin" after the finger dolls that French children were giving to the soldiers at the time. The dog travels to California, proves easily trainable, and is soon employed making movies that are so successful it saves Warner Brothers studio from bankruptcy. The dog dies in 1932 in neighbor Jean Harlowe's arms, and is buried in Paris, but its descendents work in the movies throughout the 1950s, inspiring many people to try to train their own dogs to do simple tricks.

1925: One of the very first German-trained guide dogs for the blind is given to Helen Keller.

1926: Propelled in large part by the popularity of Rin Tin Tin, the German Shepherd population in the U.S. explodes, and by 1926 it accounts for 36 percent of all the dogs in the AKC -- 21,659 animals. Due to rapid inbreeding and poor selection, however, the American German shepherd quickly degenerates and is soon deemed inferior.

1929: Dorothy Harrison Eustis establishes the Seeing Eye Foundation to train guide dogs for the blind. Eustis goes to Switzerland to get a better stock of German Shepherds than she can find in America. This same year the AKC tries to ban the importation of foreign purebred dogs in order to protect domestic dog breeders, but the plan fails.

1930: About 400 dogs are employed as actors in Hollywood, the majority of them mongrel terriers which prove to be small enough for indoor scenes, rugged enough for outdoor scenes, and exceedingly smart.

1938: B.F. Skinner begins research into operant conditioning as a scientifically-based learning model for animals and humans. His special focus is on teaching pigeons.

1939: The AKC begins obedience competitions designed by Helen Whitehouse Walker who wants to prove that her standard poodles can do something other than eat food.

1942: The U.S. military says it needs 125,000 dogs for the war, and asks people to donate their large breeds. The military manages to train only 19,000 dogs between 1942 and 1945. The Germans reportedly had 200,000 dogs in service.

1943: In 1943, Marion Breland and her husband Keller Breland form a company called Animal Behavior Enterprises (ABE) to teach animals for shows. The Brelands had been students of B.F. Skinner (see 1938) and began teaching animals to peform tricks for shows and for commercial clients such as dog-food maker General Mills. They pioneer the use of a "clicker" to teach animals at a distance and to improve timing for affirmations and delayed rewards. The Brelands were the first people in the world to train dolphins and birds using operant conditioning.

1943: The movie "Lassie Comes Home" is filmed, featuring a purebred male collie playing the female staring role. Ironically, the U.S. military considered purebred (i.e., AKC ) collies so stupid that they were specifically excluded from military service in World War II, while herding farm collies were actively recruited.

1947: The Brelands (see 1943) begin using chickens as learning subjects with which to train other trainers, as they are cheap, readily available, and "you can't choke a chicken."

1953: Austrian animal behaviorist Konrad Lorenz writes "Man Bites Dog" and "King Solomon's Ring," books which popularize animal behaviorism.

1954: Baltimore reestablishes its police dog program, and today it remains the oldest police K-9 program in the country.

1960s: During the early part of the 1960s, Marian and Keller Breland (see 1943) were hired by the U.S. Navy to teach other animal trainers how to train dolphins. The Navy was interested in using dolphins to patrol harbors, retrieve lost gear, and guide bombs (i.e. "suicide bomber" dolphins). During their work with the Navy, the Breland's meet Bob Bailey, the Navy's first director of animal training, and they began a partnership with him. Keller Breland dies in 1965, and in 1976 Marian and Bob Bailey are married.

1962: William Koehler publishes "The Koehler Method of Dog Training" which becomes a staple of AKC obedience competitors. Though often criticized today, Koehler's methods are the core of a lot of effective dog training systems still in use.

1970s: The U.S. Customs Service begins to use dogs to detect drugs, and they are subsequently employed to sniff out explosives and fire-starting chemicals.

1978: Barbara Woodhouse publishes "No Bad Dogs" one of the first popular books on basic dog training. It relies heavily on proper use of a choke chain, and says most "bad dogs" have inexperienced owners who are not training their dogs properly by being consistent, firm and clear.

1984: The U.S. Dept. of Agriculture begins to use beagles to patrol airports for contraband food and other perishable items.

1985: Dolphin trainer Karen Pryor publishes Don't Shoot the Dog: the New Art of Teaching and Training which focuses on timing, positive reinforcements and shaping behavior, and draws heavily on the work of Marian Breland Bailey and Robert Bailey (see 1943 and 1960s). Her book promotes "clicker training" of dogs to improve timing and to allow trainers to communicate and "reward" their dogs from a distance.

1995: The U.S. Dept. of Agriculture begins using Jack Russell Terriers to locate and kill invasive brown tree snakes on the island of Guam.

2000 and beyond: Various cable television shows feature various dog training and rehabilitation methods. The notion that there are "new" and "old" dog training methods obscures the fact that ALL dog training methods involve some form of operant conditioning which is, in fact, pretty old stuff (as old as dogs). None of the dog training shows actually explain the core principles of operant conditioning or their relative worth in different training situations.
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Cracking Tired Chestnuts About Form and Function

Red fox taxidermy mannequins. There is no red fox taxidermy mannequin anywhere in the world that has a chest span of greater than 14 inches.


At the side of every show ring, there is always some well-dressed individual talking about "the standard" and how "form follows function."

It all sounds good, of course -- wonderful rhetorical chestnuts -- but it's pretty much nonsense.

I mean think about it. A working dachshund is a great little animal in the field and does the same work as a terrier, but it does not look like a terrier, does it?

By the same token, a Patterdale Terrier does not look too much like a Jack Russell, which does not look too much like a Border Terrier. Smooth coats and rough do equally well in the field, as do coats of black or white, red or brown, or any combination in between. A folded ear is the same as a prick ear, a black nose the same as a liver-colored nose. Every working earth dog breed has a different head shape, and many have different tails as well. A perfect scissors bite is not necessary for work.

So when people say "form follows function," what the hell are they talking about?

Let us hope they are not talking about movement. Movement is one of those words show people toss around with a wink and a nod as if they have the secret knowledge of a wine connoisseur.

It is pure bunk. "Movement" may be important to a greyhound, a pulling dog, or even a border collie, but it is not much of a concern as it relates to a working terrier. So long as a dog can walk well, and has decent muscle mass, it can work fine. Hocks in or out hardly matters a whit.

Which is not to say that movement is irrelevant to terrier work. In fact, it is critical. But the important movement is .... wait for it .... an owner that will move off the couch, and move out of the car, and move into a hedgerow, and move a lot of dirt while digging down to a dog that is in full voice with rising adrenaline. That's the only important part of movement that matters. After you have done that a few dozen times, you will know a little more about movement, and terriers in particular.

We hear a great deal of nodding nonsense from folks who talk a good game about "protecting" their breed. But protect it from what? And by what right or qualification do these people think they are particularly well chosen to protect the bred? And what do they intend to protect it with?

In almost every case they are people who do not dig, and who seek to "protect" the terrier with nothing but a scrap of paper proclaiming a show dog "up to the standard."

And who do these people hope to protect the breed from? Why, show ring breeders, of course!

It is all laughable nonsense. And it becomes nonsense on stilts when people begin to talk about "the standard" as if it were a sacred text delivered to Moses on the Mount.

In fact, is there anything standard about "the standard?" I defy you to find a single canine standard that is more than 20 years old that has not been changed at least once.

And then there is the little matter that the standard is not the same from one country to another, or one registry to another. So what is so "standard" about the standard?

Ironically, what is NOT part of any standard in the UK or the US, is a requirement that the dog actually be a proven worker in the field. That, apparently is not "the standard." That function is not required for the rosette. A black nose, is a "Yes," but working a dozen fox, raccoon, badger, or groundhog in the field, is a "No."

The one issue of any importance in "the standard" as it relates to "form follows function," is chest size. Yet on this point, "the standard" is awfully vague, isn't it?

We are told a chest span is a man's hands. Yes, but whose hands? We do not measure a house in cubits, so why are we measuring dogs in "hand spans"? Who but the puppy peddler profits by keeping chest measurements this vague?

The Germans are not so coy and facile about chest size. A standard working dachshund (a "Teckel" in German) has a chest of just under 14 inches. The measurement is precise -- 35 cm -- and it reflects the chest size of the average red fox. The Germans are not ones to shave dice when it comes to working dogs.

It is interesing that the same 14" chest size is named not only by fox biologists, but also by such terriermen as Barry Jones, Ken James, and Eddie Chapman. In fact, if any one thing separates the digger from the rosette chaser, it's clarity on chest size.

The rosette chaser is always a bit vague about what a "span" actually means. A digger knows it means his fingers better well overlap, and if he is working fox in a natural fox-dug earth, it is best if his fingers overlap by more than one joint!

And so we come back to the real meaning of "form follows function" as used by academics in the dog world.

For these folks the "form" being refered to seems to be a paper form showing the pedigree of the animal being displayed. And "the function" is either the rosette from a show judge, or the cash to be gotten from a prospective dog-buyer.

Form follows function, indeed!

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An Ancient Breed of Dog?

Genetic research has given legs to something most canine historians knew was true: most breeds are not very old, never mind what Kennel Club breed enthusiast may claim. The supposedly "ancient" Ibizan hound and Pharaoh hound, for example, turn out to have been made up within the last 100 years or so -- no doubt bred to look like the drawings and sculptures of sleek, slender-necked canines with pointy ears and long snouts that were seen on the Pharonic tombs whose disovery were all the rage at the time of Carter. As for the Norwegian elkhound, which supposedly dated back to Vikings dog, it turns out to have originated no farther back than the past few hundred years.

Using 96 distinct patterns in the genes called "microsatellites," genetic researchers compared dogs within breeds, and breeds with one another. In the May 21, 2004 issue of the journal Science, the team concluded that almost every breed was surprisingly distinct genetically. A few suprising gleanings:

• Ancient dogs included a very motley assortment of dogs found all over the world: the Alaskan malamute, the Siberian husky, the Samoyed, basenji, Saluki, Afghan, Lhasa apso, Pekingese, Shar-Pei, Shih Tzu and Akita.
  
  
• German shepherds, which might have been expected to be in the either the ancient group (due to their resemblance to wolves) or the herding group were found to actually be more closely related to to mastiff-type dogs, such as the bull mastiff, the bulldog and the Rottweiler.
  
  
• Herding dogs, included such obvious members as the collie and the sheepdog, but also the greyhound.
  
  
• Terriers and scent-tracking hounds, such as spaniels and setters and were deemed to be of relatively recent European origin. This should hardly surprise anyone -- almost all of the terrier "breeds" were created after 1800 and most after 1860 and the beginnings of the Kennel Club and livestock shows. For a detailed pictorial history of terriers, see A Pictorial History of Terriers.
  

For more information on canine genetic research, see the >> Genome News Network's Dog Page

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Will Not Work for Food

Back in 1946, Field and Stream's Horace Lytle wrote an article noting that Irish Setters were almost completely absent from the hunting field.

In fact, between 1874 and 1948, Irish Setters produced 760 conformation champions, but only five field champions -- a rather dismal state of affairs.

Lytle proposed that Irish Setters be rescued and returned to their working roots by implementing an outcross program.

Lytle noted that the Irish Setter once had quite a lot of white in its coat, and he thought it would not be too bad a thing for the few remaining working Irish Setters to be outcrossed to working English Setters. Yes, some white might show up in the coats, but So What? The dogs had always had that when they had actually been working dogs.

Sports Afield endorsed the call to rescue the Irish Setter from the show ring, and Ned LaGrange of Pennsylvania took up the challenge of creating a systematic outcrossing program based on breeding the few remaining working Irish Setters that were left, with the best field champion English setters.

The result was the "Red Setter" which was blessed and maintained as a working setter by the Field Dog Stud Book (FDSB), with reciprocal registration with the American Kennel Club (AKC).

The problem, of course, was that nonworking AKC Irish setters found it nearly impossible to compete in AKC field trials against Red Setters.

What to do? Well, eliminate the competition, of course!

In 1975 the Irish Setter Club of America petitioned the AKC to deny reciprocal registration to Field Dog Stud Book-registered dogs, and the AKC obliged.

As a result, the AKC Irish Setter remains, to this day, the "least likely to succeed" bird-hunting dog to be found in America, while the Red Setter is a dog that is at least sometimes found under a shotgun.

Now rumor has it that the Irish Setter Club of America has indicated it may reverse itself and grant reciprocal registrations to any Field Dog Stud Book or North American Versatile Hunting Dog Association-registered Irish red setter that has a three-generation pedigree and DNA verification for the same. Final approval awaits a vote of the Irish Setter Club of America Field Trial Committee (the same folks who voted to toss them out 27 years ago).

Of course, what the Irish Setter Club of America has to say on the matter may not matter a whit. You see, no breed club in the AKC actually controls its own registry. The American Kennel Club issues the papers and holds the trials. AKC breed clubs are not allowed to exclude pet shop or puppy mill dogs, and they cannot greenlight registerable outcrosses without the AKC’s expressed permission, nor can they agree to have an open registry or allow dual registration, nor can they require field work as a condition of winning a championship, or require OFA or CERF-testing for registration, etc.

In short, the AKC is not a democracy; it is a business and the larger business model always overrides any breed club carping about genetics, work, or canine health.

As to the business side of the Irish Setter vs. Red Setter controversy, there is a new Joker in the card deck, and that is the fact that the AKC has added the "Irish Red and White Setter" to its Foundation Stock Service roles in expectation of bringing this "new" breed into the fold.

Of course, the "Irish Red and White Setter" is not a new breed; it is simply the old generic working Setter that used to exist before the Kennel Club split the Setters into red "Irish" setters and white "English" setters, and black and tan "Gordon" setters.

Never mind: the Kennel Club split the setters into three breeds of dogs, and now they are hell-bent on splitting them into four. Extending a reciprocal registration to the working "Red Setter" (which frequently presents with white markings adding confusion and diluting the "brand" of the Irish Red and White Setter) may upset the apple cart a little too much.

Or maybe not.

After all, the AKC has not only added the "Parson Russell Terrier" to the AKC roles, but also the the "Russell Terrier" to its Foundation Stock Service. Can the "Irish Jack" be far behind? No doubt it is being penciled in for next year, or the year after that. The 10-year plan for terriers no doubt includes adding the Patterdale Terrrier, the Plummer Terrier, and the Fell Terrier to the mix. Business demands a diversified product, after all, and the business is not canine health or work (things the AKC affirmatively hurts through a closed registry system) but registration money to underwrite the money-loser called dog shows. (For more on that see >> HERE).

One does not need to be a weatherman to guess which way the wind will eventually blow with some breeds. I think it's only a matter of time before the AKC splits the Labrador Retriever into the Black Lab, the Yellow Lab, and the Chocolate Lab, and the various dachshunds into coat types, as well as size. The Parson Russell and Russell Terriers may get split based on coat type as well. Look at what has already been done with bull terriers, collies, and fox terriers, to name just three examples.

Ah well, there's nothing to be done about it. Sleep with dogs, expect fleas. And the Kennel Club is the kind of flea-bitten dog that just keeps giving, and giving and giving in that regard. I expect more breeds to be carved out of old breeds, and working breeds to be continually gobbed up and ruined by the Kennel Club. Some things never change, even if the dogs do.

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- Working Terriers -

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The Kennel Club Wrecks More Than Terriers

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The Cocker Spaniel was once a fine pocket-sized bird dog, but the show ring emphasis on exaggerated coats has created a dog that cannot get through a hedgerow even if its life depended on it.


Mark Derr, the author of Dog's Best Friend: Annals of the Dog-Human Relationship wrote the following paragraphs in a March 1990 Atlantic Monthly article entitled "The Politics of Dogs":

The cocker spaniel, along with the poodle, the perennial favorite of American pet buyers, has not competed in field trials since 1965, having lots its ability to hunt. Elizabeth Spalding, a leading breeder of Cavalier King Charles spaniels, says, "Most people don't know it, but up until the 1970s a sentence in the cocker-spaniel standard stated that a dog could be penalized for excessive coat. But for twenty years cockers had been bred for long coats, which brought them championships." The long-haired little hunter has developed a reputation as a foul-tempered, possessive, and nervous creature.

In the 1950s show people turned the German shepherd into a weak-hipped animal with a foul temper and bizarre downward-sloping hindquarters. A few breeders are trying to restore the dog to its former dignity. The Monks of New Skete, a religious order in the Orthodox Catholic Church, near Cambridge, New York, have for twenty-two years worked to produce dogs without those problems. "We stopped using American dogs and turned to German ones, because breeding there is better controlled," says Brother John, a member of the order, which has a waiting list of more than a year for its dogs.

Many of the toy breeds are so small and fragile that they cannot live outside artificial environments. The bulldog and the Boston terrier have difficulty whelping naturally, because of the breeds' exaggeraged heads, and bitches are regularly subjected to cesarean sections. Hetherington says, "The bulldog is a man-made dog, and man has to be responsible for it. The dog hasn't come out perfectly, but that's reason to keep trying to improve the breed , not to abandon it."

The problem exists throughout the world. In Australia the kelpie, which is considered a rival to the border collie in the management of sheep, became the darling of the show ring in the 1930s and within three decades had nearly lost its herding instinct. In the 1960s the Working Kelpie Council of Australia began to rescue the breed, by establishing a registry for working stock. In the United States the Australian kelpie has been in the AKC's miscellaneous class since 1941, and Susan Thorp, the secretary of Working Kelpies, the American breed club, wants to keep it there. "In the AKC," she says, "the dog becomes an object. People get dogs, don't use them, and then selectively breed them for characteristics other than work."

Peter Borchelt, an animal behaviorist in Forest Hills, New York, says that springer spaniels, mostly the males, born of a particular show line frequently develop dominance-related behavioral problems that lead them to become aggressive toward their owners, while those from field stock don't manifest that tendency. Among labrador retrievers there are as many as three distinct varieties with different characteristics--show dogs, somewhat large and slow afoot; dogs adept at AKC field trials, smaller and more high-strung; and working dogs, varying in appearance but bred for their ability to swim and retrieve.

Among other AKC-recognized hunting breeds--including the German shorthaired pointer, the Chesapeake Bay retriever, the pointer, the Brittany, the Gordon setter, and the English setter--are dogs that can point, retrieve, or flush birds as well as any every have. People work hard to preserve those traits, and they don't intend to stop. (Many register their dogs not with the AKC but with American Field, an organization in Chicago devoted to field dogs.) But the trend among people who want breeds unspoiled by an overemphasis on appearance is toward animals the AKC doesn't deign to register, such as the Catahoula leopard dog, Australian and English shepherds, the beauceron, and European pointers (including the English).

The trend has not escaped the notice of the AKC. Kenneth Marden, the AKC's president, says, "We have gotten away from what dogs were originally bred for. In some cases we have paid so much attention to form that we have lost the use of the dog." Marden has supervised the establishment of herding tests, which are scheduled to begin this winter and are subject to a great deal of controversy among people with working stock dogs, who argue that AKC animals like the collie and the Old English sheep dog will prove unable to complete them. Marden has also expressed interest in terrier tests to measure the dogs' ability to flush game from underground dens, and in lure coursing for sight hounds and whippets.

He has publicly recognized the need to emphasize function as well as form, despite strong opposition from the AKC's powerful traditionalists, who argue that he is denigrating shows. They have nothing to fear. In some European countries dogs must excel both in the field and in the ring, and be judged physically sound, before they can become Champions. But an AKC dog can become a Champion in the show ring alone.

The above post is a repeat of a post from this blog from June 4, 2005.

Breed Clubs Do Not Run the AKC: Money Does

[Permission to cross post. Also see: this related story ]

Following the signing of a contract with puppy-mill distributor Petland, the American Kennel Club has begun to feel the heat.

Odds are still 7 to 3 that nothing will come of the protests (the AKC staff does not give a rat's ass what the breed clubs say), but there have been some small bursts of eloquence, nonetheless.

Former AKC Board member and current AKC judge Patricia Laurans (an eight-time Westminster judge) told the AKC Board (click on link for PDF of AKC Board Meeting minutes):

"I would like to call attention to every single Parent clubs’ that I know of code of ethics that says we will not sell to pet stores.

"I would like to call attention to the fact that, from my humble belief, we are selling our birthright for a few shekels.

"I would like to call attention that this is a club of clubs and that we are your constituency. We are the groups that are asked to help out with medallions, to work at shows, to educate the public, to make our clubs and our events more friendly so we can help increase registration on a volunteer basis.

"I would like to make note of the fact, and pardon me, I feel we are prostituting some of our values, I feel we are going against what I believe most of the members and member clubs would want to see happen, and I feel that we should have at least had some sort of way to give you our thoughts before contracts were signed, sealed and delivered. You said, and I supported the fact, that we don’t want to let the enemy in. I question the fact right now if the enemy is already here."

What was the reaction of the AKC hierarchy to this speech? Basically, they patted Ms. Laurans on the head, told her she was a naive fool, and asked her to shut up.

For example, Steven Gladstone, who is on the current AKC Board, said:

"With all respect, Pat, we have been taking their money for 75 years and cashing their checks....we have got to accept the fact, we are taking their money; and, yes, ... we are endorsing them with our papers. We are telling the world these people meet AKC standards. Now, you may not like that, but the fact is that we have lived off of that for the last 60 years."

David Merriam, Vice Chairman of the AKC Board of Directors, said:

"What has changed is that we have competitors, and these competitors now are in the pet stores. They’re in the commercial channels. And they say, 'Okay, it costs $15 to register a puppy, XYZ Registry will do it for $12, and we’ll kickback three dollars to the pet shop.' That’s the competition we’re in, and don’t believe that it hasn’t had an effect on our registration.

Every meeting, Jim Stevens relates the decline of our registration. If we are going to address this in a serious, honest and a realistic way, we have got to address that segment of the registration. That is the commercial. And that’s simply the answer.

If you want to tell the Board and your fellow clubs that we are willing to go inward, support ourselves, pay the price, then that’s a direction you can go. But I think if we go that direction, the American Kennel Club will not exist 100 years from today."

Bottom Line:What the breed clubs think has as much chance of shaping the AKC as rain water on a stone.

And besides, what are the breed clubs going to do, resign?

It would not matter to the AKC if they did. Look at the Border Collie and the Jack Russell Terrier to see what the AKC does if an existing breed club will not drink the toxic Koolaid being offered up. In both cases the AKC simply went out and recruited an ego-hungry group of fools to start a new breed club that was more than ready and willing to follow AKC staff direction.

At this point in the game, registrations and money wag the dog in the AKC, and the breed clubs have little or no control over what the AKC does.

And from the AKC staff's perspective, why should they? After all, it's not like the AKC breed clubs are a major financial engine within the organization.

In fact, from a purely cash-and-cost point of view, the breed clubs are revenue calfs sucking money out of the AKC -- a lot of money

The folks paying the bills -- the cash cows producing most of the milk -- are the dog breeders who are not members of breed clubs, and whose canine philosophy can be boiled down to two short sentences: "Puppies are cute," and "I clear $3,000 a litter."

Of course the AKC is no better than these a cash-and-carry dog breeders. For them too, a litter of dogs is nothing but a profit center.

As for the Board of the AKC, they appear to be led by idiots. Business plans are not supposed to be 100 years long -- not even the Chinese think like that. Nor is the "Big Box Store" the best business plan model for the AKC. When people purchase a dog, they are not supposed to think of the animal as a bulk commodity, like beans and rice, but as a one-off purchase of a thing of quality. But that point of view is apparently not shared by the current Board of the AKC which voted 12-to-1 in favor of the Petland contract.

In truth, the AKC has fallen down a manhole. For as long as I can remember, their focus has not been on doing the right thing for dogs, but on keeping the money flowing.

Mr. Merriam, it appears, is more than willing to sacrifice principle and prestige to keep the Club going, but he is not willing to remake the AKC so that it is an organizaton identified with high-quality healthy dogs able to engage in performance functions. And above all, he is not willing to tender the idea of the AKC ever going out of business.

It seems that in the struggle to keep the doors open at the AKC, certain things can be discussed (like endorsing puppy mills), but others cannot (like moving out of their Madison Avenue digs in New York City in order to save millions on rent and salaries). The AKC Board of Directors and staff are willing to sacrifice dogs for cash, but they are not willing to tuck in the belt or pack up the bag for a move to Minnesota.

This is not to say that the AKC staff and Board of Directors do not have a clear view on some things. They are clearly right when they say the folks in the breed clubs are naive. After all, the AKC has been sucking on the puppy mill teat for more than 60 years - - on this point, nothing has changed.

Nor has this information been closely held: just "google" AKC and "puppy mill" and see how many hits you get.

Nor is the only AKC problem the "big wink" of puppy mill money. No one in the world of dogs can have possibly missed the genetic decline in dogs that has occured over the course of the last 60 years. The causal reason here is that the AKC and show ring afficionadoes continue to embrace the failed eugenics theories of the 19th Century (see Inbred Thinking for more on this topic).

And so we get down to it now, don't we? Will the AKC representative of the Border Terrier Club of America resign in protest and will the Border Terrier Club disenthrall itself from the AKC? Will it matter if it does? How about the representatives of the Parson Russell Terrier Association of America? What will it do? How about all the other breed clubs?

My bet is that the Board of Directors and staff of the AKC are betting right in their calculations.

In the end, most breeders and show ring enthusiasts in AKC breed clubs will lower their heads and shuffle forward like cattle. They have always done so in the past. A few dozen may bawl and mew, and one or two may even jump the fence, but it's a big country and the AKC will replace them quickly and move forward.

In truth, I think very few people will make a stink.

And why should they? After all, the AKC is simply doing what it has always done. In for a penny, in for a pound.

It would be silly for anyone in the AKC quit over the Petland deal because, as AKC Boad of Directors Chairman David Merriam notes, all the AKC is doing now is telling the truth and putting their ethics in the front window for all to see. Anyone who quits now is quiting not because of the practice of taking cash and doing business with puppy mills, but because they are embarassed at being seen as part of the deal.

To which I can only advise: "Don't do things you are ashamed of." But then, I am a bit of a Puritan, aren't I?.

As for the AKC, their longterm business plan is not much of a secret. The AKC has teamed up with the Humane Society of the United States and PETA to push for legislation mandating the microchipping of all pets. This is a great idea as far as the AKC is concerned, as they happen to own one of the most popular microchip products around. PAWS legislation would, in effect, be a multi-million dollar subsidy for the AKC.

The AKC is also getting into the heath care and insurance business -- two notoriously crooked arenas. The AKC figures it will be able to make many millions of dollars in kickbacks from veterinarians, while the veterinarians will get a steady supply of gullible customers -- a win-win for everyone but the consumer.

Gilding the lilly is the fact that the AKC will have a steady stream of veterinarians willing to speak up and testify on the AKC's behalf should a reporter come poking around asking hard questions. The veterinarians, in turn, will give the AKC their "seal of approval" (doctors are generally trusted by the public), while the AKC will give the veterinarians their seal of approval (after all, who is better qualified to "certify" a veterinarian than the AKC?).

At the same time that all this is going on, the Humane Society, PETA and other lunatic fringe "animal rights" groups have been successfully pushing legislation that would require all non-show dogs to be neutered or spayed. These laws are ostensibly designed to reduce the number of "unwanted" puppies in America, and mandatory spay-netuer laws have already been embraced in Los Angeles and San Francisco, and are under consideration in places as diverse as Sacramento, New Jersey, and Virginia.

Is it just a coincidence that these mandatory spay-neuter laws will have a very positive benefit for the AKC? After all, if enough of these laws are passed, the end result will be that almost every dog in America will come from a show breeder (most of whom will be affiliated with the AKC) or a commerical breeder (with whom the AKC will have a licensing contract). How perfect is that?

The AKC says it opposes mandatory spay-neuter laws, but their opposition has been pretty tepid as far as I can see. In truth, I suspect the AKC is simply on the road to another "Big Wink" in which they profess to oppose something (like puppy mills) even as they maneuver to make more money from the "inevitable" (like puppy mills).

Like Brer Rabbit they warn, "Don't throw me into that briar patch."





Why are all of these shenanigans necessary? To put it simply, this puppy-mill seal of approval scheme is necessary because the American Kennel Club is producing a product fewer and fewer people are willing to buy. The secret is out that Kennel Club dogs are no better than any other kind of dog.

In fact, due to the Kennel Club's long embrace of inbreeding and line breeding, AKC dogs may be less healthy than a cross bred dog collected from the pound.

Failing businesses are insidious places because owners and managers are so often willing to do unethical things in order to try to stay afloat. In a failing church the pastor may torch the building for the insurance money. In a failing dry cleaning business, the proprietor may report only a portion of his income to the IRS. At a failing construction company, the owner might stop making OSHA-required safety improvements or stop paying into the pension fund. And, of course, at the AKC you end up endorsing the puppy mill industry and price-gouging veterinarians.

From the point of view of the AKC Board of Directors, of course, "something" had to be done to bring in more money. After all, the Club is only running a net profit of $5.7 million a year. Clealy what is needed is more money, more money, more money.

The problem is that while are a thousand and one ways to spend money at the AKC (an expensive building on Madison Avenue, an expensive New York City staff, a magazine that no one reads, lawyers and lobbyists, lots of travel, etc.), there are precious few ways to raise revenue.

Forget the dogs shows -- they consume money (a $10 million loss in 2005), they do not produce it. Behind every AKC rosette is puppy mill dog making that rosette possible. Say what you will, but the AKC is not givng up those rosettes. The show must go on.

Which leaves us with the central dilemma faced by the AKC Board: How to "make the nut" from year to year.

A core element in the AKC solvency scheme has always been to mass-produce registrations for mass-produced dogs. And really, the AKC is not doing anything different now than what it always has.

Sure it's a bit of a leap in the dark and a calculated risk that there will not be a mass exodus of dog breeders from the AKC's roles.

But the AKC has done the math, and they know their audience and their business. That audience is human, not canine, and the business is ego, not better-bred dogs.

And so, when the day is done, I expect a small flury of outraged mewing and bawling from the cattle, but in the end most will march smartly through the gate at their next AKC show.

Sure a few old cranky's will walk away in a huff, but so what? The AKC is a business, and the bottom line is the bottom line.

In a few years the Petland deal will be seen as a "normal" thing, and the new cattle coming into the feed lot will pay it no mind, while the AKC itself will be able to "keep on keeping on" -- Madison Avenue offices, inflated salaries, and puppy mills profits as usual.



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Give That Clone a Bone

Back in 1998 John Sperling decided to clone his dog. Sperling was, at the time, the 79-year old founder of something call the "University of Phoenix," which can best be described as a very-for-profit continuing education system married to a huge internet-based correspondence school.

The University of Phoenix is now the largest private university in the United States, with more than 140,000 students attending classes at 41 campuses, and it is supported by over $1.6 billion in U.S. Government sanctioned-student loans. Sterling became a billionaire in less than 15 years by simply marrying the old correspondence-school idea to the internet.

All of this is by way of introduction to John Sperling's dog cloning project, which is one of the ways Mr. Sperling is spending his considerable fortune.

It seems Mr. Sperling used to have a cross-bred border collie by the name of Missy. Sperling got the idea it might be possible to clone Missy whom, he decided, was a very special genetic combination.

And why not clone a dog? Sperling's brain storm occurred just two years after Scottish scientists had cloned Dolly the Sheep. How hard could a dog be?

And so John Sperling put up millions of dollars to create the "Genetic Savings and Clone" company with the "Missyplicity Project" at its heart.

Missy died at age 15, in 2002, before efforts to clone her had succeeded, but her tissue has been well-preserved and she will, no doubt, be cloned within a few years.

Meanwhile, the "Genetic Savings and Clone" company is moving along apace. The company was the first in the world to clone a cat, creating a kitten called CC (Copy Cat), and in February of 2004, the company launched the world's first commercial cat cloning service.

On the canine front, the company is offering genetic banking of dog tissue in anticipation of the commercial viability of a stable and reliable canine cloning procedure. For $900 to $1,400 per pooch, the Genetic Savings and Clone company will collect and store biopsy samples of your beloved dog in anticipation of that Great Day when dead dogs will rise out of the ground and stand at the right hand of Jesus ... or at least until you are willing to have it cloned.

In 2005, the first dog was supposedly cloned in Korea (an Afghan of all things). Though genetic testing supposedly confirms the validity of this clone, the scientist doing the research has faked other research data and some doubts remain.

What is not in doubt is that cloning a dog is harder than cloning a cat and a reliable and stable procedure and protocol have yet to be worked out.

But it is clearly only a matter of time.

In 1998 the Ishikawa Prefectural Livestock Research Center produced Noto and Kaga, the first cows cloned from adult cells, and the next year the University of Hawaii produced the first male clone -- a mouse. In 2000, Chinese researchers produced the first cloned goat, and the next year Advanced Cell Technologies cloned "Noah," a rare gaur (a type of wild cow). In 2002, researchers at Trans Ova Genetics and Advanced Cell Technologies produced the first banteng (another ungulate), born to a surrogate domestic cow, with the genetic material taken from a donor that had died 23 years earlier and whose cells has been preserved in the "Frozen Zoo" at the San Diego Zoo's Center for the Reproduction of Endangered Species.

In 2003, Italy produced the first cloned horse, and that same year the University of Idaho produced a pair of cloned mules, while the University of Texas cloned a whitetail deer. Everyone was getting into the act!

In 2005, researchers at the Audubon Center for Research of Endangered Species in New Orleans (not related to the National Audubon Society) naturally breed unrelated African wildcat clones, resulting in the birth of African wildcat kittens -- the first time unrelated clones of a wild species had produced offspring.

What's next?

Well, another dog or two, for sure. A human being or two is a pretty safe bet, as are gorillas and chimpanzees for medical research. Millions of genetic mice and other small test animals are an eventual certainty. A cloned mammoth (from frozen cells gleaned from long-frozen Siberian carcasses) is not beyond imagination.

But what of cloned dogs? Let's assume that the health issues associated with cloning are worked out (about a quarter of all animals born through cloning have some kind of cloning-related health problem). Who is going to buy these cloned pups?

It may not be the market you think. The racing horse industry has already banned clones, and I think it's safe to say the Kennel Club will follow suit.

Hunting dogs may be a very real canine cloning market. Who wants the risk of a working terrier that is too big, or a pointer with no interest in birds? For the lurcher man, a baying dog is a nightmare, while for the houndsman a dead-mute dog is a serious nuisance. Everyone wants a dog with gameness, tractability, brains and a nose. If you've hunted with a "one-in-a-million" dog, you may want to pass that dog on to your kids 50 years from now.

On the pet side of the equation, there will always be a demand for "guaranteed-healthy" dogs that are going to be"just so" in terms of size, coloring and temperament.

Look for "clone shops" to advertise terriers and beagles that do not bark and border collies that are entirely apathetic. After all, it is the prey-drive of these animals that make them "problem pets" for so many urban and suburban owners. A defective border collie is just what some people want.

That said, I suspect that most people just want a dog, and are not going to spring for a test tube pup-ciscle hatched out in a lab. In fact, a cultural aversion to such fetish perfectionism may develop.

It is a fac, however, that technology and biology tend to creep -- and sometimes gallop -- on to the human stage. It is entirely possible that, in just 50-years time, cloned dogs will be passed down from father to son (or daughter) and on to human clone.

Yes, yes, that is exactly what I am saying. Your cloned self (it's never too early to bank a little tissue) may one day hunt with your cloned dog (cryonic technicians are standing by) in genetically modified fields and forests.

The game may be a natural animal or perhaps a clone (what species would you like to hunt today, Sir?) or perhaps even a chimera with just enough exotic genes spliced into its double-helix that it provides an entirely different kind of hunting sport -- a faster flying duck, a larger whitetail with elk-like antlers, or a 10-pound European rabbit entirely immune to North American rabbit diseases.

I know I am supposed to be terribly concernd about all this, but I find it increasingly hard to get terrified. Having grown up in the shadow of The Bomb ("duck and cover little children") and news stories about chemicals in the air and water, mass extinctions, global warming, AIDS and avian flu pandemics, I no longer scare easily.

Besides, what are you going to do? If people want cloned dogs, they will get them, never mind that they reduce genetic variability.

You will have more success holding back the ocean with sand castles than you will trying to stop those seeking a quick profit or instant gratification.

In the end, you have to bet that Mother Nature and Father Time will work it all out. It's always a good bet they will bat last in this game. They always do.

No, this is not a real ad. But it might be
part of the real market for cloned pets.

Canine Genetics Made Easy?

First we had artificial insemination, then we had artificial insemination with frozen sperm ("pupcicles"), and then we had dogs being cloned ("Clone, clone on the range, where the dogs and the puppies all play ..."

Now scientists have mapped almost the entire canine genome. The article below, from The Boston Globe, gives the details:

Team of Scientists Maps Out 99% of Dog Genome

Scientists have finished a sophisticated map of a dog's genes, providing new insights into the deep links between humans and one of their most treasured animals, as well as creating a unique tool for studying a range of diseases, from cancer to blindness, that affect people and their dogs.

The team of scientists, led by the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, determined virtually the entire genetic code, or genome, of the dog, making the achievement the canine equivalent of the completion two years ago of the Human Genome Project, the scientists said yesterday. Rough drafts of the dog genome have been released over the past several years, but the new work represents the first highly accurate version and also includes, for the first time, a detailed library of common genetic variations seen in dogs -- making possible a new generation of fast, accurate genetic studies of diseases and other traits.

Biologists have taken up the genetics of many animals, but the dog is uniquely interesting and useful, the scientists said, because of its history. The modern dog, including several hundred breeds, is the product of thousands of years of careful breeding, aimed at drawing out specific behaviors, such as the obsessive herding of the Border collie, or appearances, such as the hairless Chinese crested. By applying the modern tools of genetics to these breeds, it is now easy to find the small genetic variations responsible for the differences, with applications from dog breeding to human psychiatry. The genetic map of the dog announced yesterday should also accelerate the search for the genetic causes of diseases that plague certain breeds, perhaps leading to cures for dog and man alike.

''It is a historic day in the relationship between man and dog," said Eric S. Lander at a press conference yesterday, as a pug and an Akita tussled in the back of the room at the Bayside Exposition Center, where a dog show was being set up. Lander is the director of the Broad Institute and the owner of two golden retrievers.

Scientists said that the dog also stands as a testament to the power of evolution -- and its importance -- at a time when some are challenging its teaching in public schools. Looking for the genetic causes of human diseases in dogs makes sense only if humans and dogs are close evolutionary relatives that share a common ancestor -- a fact that is strongly supported by the genetic map Lander and his colleagues found.

''Biomedical research today depends on evolution," said Lander. ''It is hard to say that it is 'just a theory.' "

The research, which is reported today in the journal Nature, was led by Kerstin Lindblad-Toh, co-director of genome sequencing and analysis at the Broad Institute. Using a blood sample from a boxer named Tasha, the team determined about 99 percent of the sequence of DNA that makes up the dog genome.

The team, which included researchers across the United States as well as in France and the United Kingdom, also compiled a list of 2.5 million places in this sequence where there are common differences among dogs. This was done, according to the Nature paper, by comparing Tasha's DNA with DNA from a poodle and a number of other breeds -- enough, the scientists said, to record many of the most common variations in dogs.

Having this list of common differences will make it far easier for researchers to do genetic studies involving large numbers of dogs, because they can focus on the places in the genome where dogs are likely to have differences that might explain why one dog gets bone cancer and another does not. For example, scientists who are interested in why some greyhounds get bone cancer, and others do not, can look at these places to see if there is a pattern, without having to determine the entire genetic code of each dog -- about 2.4 billion molecules long. ''This is really the big thing," said Gregory M. Acland, a senior research associate at the Institute for Animal Health at Cornell University.

Many ailments -- including cancer, epilepsy, and heart disease -- are thought to be similar in dogs and humans, but it will be easier to identify the genes involved using dogs, said Acland, who studies genetic diseases that affect vision. In contrast to humans, dog breeds are highly in-bred, making two dogs in the same breed more similar genetically than two humans. Thus, for example, scientists could compare Dalmatians that are deaf with those that are not deaf, and there would be fewer random genetic differences between the dogs clouding the picture than if the same study were done in humans.

The work described yesterday, and follow-up work planned to study specific diseases, were made possible by the efforts of the American Kennel Club and dog owners who agreed to send in blood samples from their pets. (Owners of pure-breed dogs who are interested in participating can find more information at www.dogdna.org.) The research was funded by the National Human Genome Research Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health.

Dogs themselves are a human creation, thought to have begun when people domesticated the wolf in East Asia. The new analysis suggests that this happened about 30,000 years ago, said Lindblad-Toh.

The researchers also compared the DNA of dogs with completed genomes for humans and mice, and what they found challenges one idea about what makes humans special. When the human genome was first compared with that of the mouse, several years ago, scientists found evidence that the genes that are active in the cells of the brain seem to have evolved more quickly in humans than in mice, hinting that this might explain the intellect of humans. The new analysis casts doubt on this theory, because it shows that the brain-related genes in dogs have been evolving just as fast as those of humans, according to Tarjei S. Mikkelsen, a scientist at the Broad. The dog has about 19,300 genes, slightly fewer than humans, who have about 20,000 genes, according to Lindblad-Toh.

The researchers also identified a portion of the genome, about 5 percent, that is shared by dogs, humans, and mice -- meaning this portion is apparently essential to mammals. Yet less than half of that is devoted to genes. What the rest of the genetic material does is a mystery, but it is thought that some of this material may regulate when the genes turn off and on in particular cells. Still, the fact that the function of this crucial part of the genome is unknown underlines how much there is to learn.

For those who have been involved in dog genetics for years, there is hope that the new work will put the dog on the same footing as other favorite research organisms, such as the fruit fly and the mouse. In a way, it is a logical next step for the dog, which has done so much for humans -- guardian, hunter, companion. Yet there is also irony in discovering the scientific potential of dogs, noted Mark W. Neff, a scientist at the Center for Veterinary Genetics at the University of California, Davis. ''We are so close to our pet dogs, that we stop thinking of them as this incredible, unique species," Neff said.

The AKC Embraces the Jack Russell

Conformation for people as well as dogs!

Sometime in the late 1990s, following the appearance of Jack Russell Terriers in a host of TV and Hollywood productions ranging from “Wishbone” and “Frasier” to “My Dog Skip” and “The Mask,” the American Kennel Club decided to add the Jack Russell Terrier to its roles.

As they previously had done with the Border Collie, the AKC ignored the strong and vocal opposition of the large existing breed club, and quietly assembled a covey of show-ring breeders to serve as the nucleus of a new AKC-friendly breed club.

The “Jack Russell Terrier Breeders Association” (later called the Jack Russell Terrier Association of America, and now called the “Parson Russell Terrier Association of America”) petitioned for the admission of the Jack Russell Terrier into the Kennel Club and, despite the objections of the JRTCA, the breed was admitted in January of 2001.

The admission of the Jack Russell Terrier into the American Kennel Club was a contentious affair, with the JRTCA standing firm on its long-held rule that no dog could be dual-registered.

What this meant is that breeders had to chose whether to remain in the JRTCA or to “get in early” with the AKC in order to get their dogs registered before the breed registry closed.

Some of the breeders that chose the AKC did so because they thought they could then sell their puppies for more money, others were eager to be “big fish in a small pond” at the beginning of a new AKC-registered breed. Still others were anxious to attend more dog shows and performance events, arguing that individual dogs were the same no matter under whose auspices they were registered.

On this last point, those pushing for dual registration were correct as narrowly defined, but wrong in every way that mattered.

While it is true that individual dogs were not changed by admission to the Kennel Club, the AKC goal -- right from the beginning -- was to get rid of the wide sweep of variation that existed in the working world of Jack Russell Terriers.

Towards that end, the American Kennel Club breed standard stipulated that an AKC Jack Russell terrier could not be under 12 inches in height or over 15 inches in height, and that the “ideal” dog was 14 inches tall and the ideal bitch was 13 inches tall. Ironically, this breed description effectively eliminated about 40 percent of all the American Jack Russell terriers that had worked red fox up to that time!

More importantly, this narrow standard eliminated the small dogs necessary to “size down” a breed — something absolutely necessary in order to keep working terriers small enough to work.

Of course the American Kennel Club has never been interested in working terriers, and the breed club they created has shown no interest in work either.

Under pressure from the working Jack Russell Terrier community in England and the U.S., the British and American Kennel Clubs eventually decided to jettison the “Jack Russell Terrier” name to more easily identify the non-working show dog they favored.

Now called the “Parson Russell Terrier,” the AKC dog is quickly getting too big in the chest to work — not that many of the dogs are actually taken out into the field to try.

After just three years in the Kennel Club, the “Parson Russell Terrier Club” tried to modify the show ring standard so that the AKC dog no longer had to be spanned at all. Though this move was defeated, it was an early and ominous sign that the Parson Russell Terrier is more likely to end up as a show ring dog than the honest hunting dog from which it is derived.

AKC: Wrecking More Dogs Than Terriers

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The Cocker Spaniel was once a fine pocket-sized bird dog, but the show ring emphasis on exagerated coats has created a dog that cannot get through a hedgerow even if its life depended on it.


Mark Derr, the author of Dog's Best Friend: Annals of the Dog-Human Relationship wrote the following paragraphs in a March 1990 Atlantic Monthly article entitled "The Politics of Dogs":

The cocker spaniel, along with the poodle, the perennial favorite of American pet buyers, has not competed in field trials since 1965, having lots its ability to hunt. Elizabeth Spalding, a leading breeder of Cavalier King Charles spaniels, says, "Most people don't know it, but up until the 1970s a sentence in the cocker-spaniel standard stated that a dog could be penalized for excessive coat. But for twenty years cockers had been bred for long coats, which brought them championships." The long-haired little hunter has developed a reputation as a foul-tempered, possessive, and nervous creature.

In the 1950s show people turned the German shepherd into a weak-hipped animal with a foul temper and bizarre downward-sloping hindquarters. A few breeders are trying to restore the dog to its former dignity. The Monks of New Skete, a religious order in the Orthodox Catholic Church, near Cambridge, New York, have for twenty-two years worked to produce dogs without those problems. "We stopped using American dogs and turned to German ones, because breeding there is better controlled," says Brother John, a member of the order, which has a waiting list of more than a year for its dogs.

Many of the toy breeds are so small and fragile that they cannot live outside artificial environments. The bulldog and the Boston terrier have difficulty whelping naturally, because of the breeds' exaggeraged heads, and bitches are regularly subjected to cesarean sections. Hetherington says, "The bulldog is a man-made dog, and man has to be responsible for it. The dog hasn't come out perfectly, but that's reason to keep trying to improve the breed , not to abandon it."

The problem exists throughout the world. In Australia the kelpie, which is considered a rival to the border collie in the management of sheep, became the darling of the show ring in the 1930s and within three decades had nearly lost its herding instinct. In the 1960s the Working Kelpie Council of Australia began to rescue the breed, by establishing a registry for working stock. In the United States the Australian kelpie has been in the AKC's miscellaneous class since 1941, and Susan Thorp, the secretary of Working Kelpies, the American breed club, wants to keep it there. "In the AKC," she says, "the dog becomes an object. People get dogs, don't use them, and then selectively breed them for characteristics other than work."

Peter Borchelt, an animal behaviorist in Forest Hills, New York, says that springer spaniels, mostly the males, born of a particular show line frequently develop dominance-related behavioral problems that lead them to become aggressive toward their owners, while those from field stock don't manifest that tendency. Among labrador retrievers there are as many as three distinct varieties with different characteristics--show dogs, somewhat large and slow afoot; dogs adept at AKC field trials, smaller and more high-strung; and working dogs, varying in appearance but bred for their ability to swim and retrieve.

Among other AKC-recognized hunting breeds--including the German shorthaired pointer, the Chesapeake Bay retriever, the pointer, the Brittany, the Gordon setter, and the English setter--are dogs that can point, retrieve, or flush birds as well as any every have. People work hard to preserve those traits, and they don't intend to stop. (Many register their dogs not with the AKC but with American Field, an organization in Chicago devoted to field dogs.) But the trend among people who want breeds unspoiled by an overemphasis on appearance is toward animals the AKC doesn't deign to register, such as the Catahoula leopard dog, Australian and English shepherds, the beauceron, and European pointers (including the English).

The trend has not escaped the notice of the AKC. Kenneth Marden, the AKC's president, says, "We have gotten away from what dogs were originally bred for. In some cases we have paid so much attention to form that we have lost the use of the dog." Marden has supervised the establishment of herding tests, which are scheduled to begin this winter and are subject to a great deal of controversy among people with working stock dogs, who argue that AKC animals like the collie and the Old English sheep dog will prove unable to complete them. Marden has also expressed interest in terrier tests to measure the dogs' ability to flush game from underground dens, and in lure coursing for sight hounds and whippets.

He has publicly recognized the need to emphasize function as well as form, despite strong opposition from the AKC's powerful traditionalists, who argue that he is denigrating shows. They have nothing to fear. In some European countries dogs must excel both in the field and in the ring, and be judged physically sound, before they can become Champions. But an AKC dog can become a Champion in the show ring alone.

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A Terrible Beauty: The Ugly Side of Show Dogs

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It would be nice if I could report to you that everything is different at the AKC, and that the Time magazine article, below, is some sort of historical anachronism, but it's not.



The AKC is still in their big building in downtown New York City (260 Madsion Avenue), working tests for working dogs are still not allowed as a requirement for a championship, the AKC is still registering pet store puppies, and genetic tests for soundness -- even in deeply messed up breeds -- is still not required. The AKC still registers entire litters of dogs, and there are still no limits on in-breeding.



The only major change, as far as terriers are concerned, is that Jack Russells have been pulled into the AKC fold under the name of "Parson Russell Terrier." Go to the AKC "Parson" Russell web site and not a single mention is made of working the dogs.



The first thing the Pasron Russell breed club did was set a size standard that excluded nearly half the working dogs in America. They then dictated an ideal size for a dog that guaranteed that within a decade most "Parson" Jack Russell Terriers will be too big to work (exactly what they did with the Fox Terrier 100 years earlier). And, of course, they closed the registry, guaranteeing that in time, and with popular sire selection, the genetic pool would get narrower and inbreeding coefficients would soar.



Once again, we find an AKC breed Club dominated by people who are more interested in chasing rosettes and breeding (and selling) puppies than in preserving the characteristics of the breed they profess to admire.



Whatever the AKC is about, it is certainly not about dogs!



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Time Magazine, December 12, 1994,



A TERRIBLE BEAUTY

An obsessive focus on show-ring looks is crippling, sometimes fatally, America's purebred dogs



Cover Story by Michael D. Lemonick with Ann Blackman/Washington, Dan Cray/Los Angeles and Wendy Cole/Chicago



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Four years ago, Amanda and Bob Metzger of Exton, Pennsylvania, saw an ad for golden retriever puppies in the local newspaper and went to have a look. "Once we saw them," says Amanda, "we fell in love. We couldn't have left the place without one." They decided on a dog they named Jake -- but being careful consumers, the Metzgers made sure the breeders had a solid reputation, insisted on an American Kennel Club certification of Jake's pedigree and got assurances that his parents were free of health problems before they handed over $ 325 for their dog.



Their troubles started three months later. Jake began to limp on his left front leg; the vet diagnosed osteochondritis, an inherited bone condition, and had to operate. The bill came to $ 650. Six months later, Jake went lame again, and X rays showed severe dysplasia, a hereditary weakness of the joints, in both hips. A $ 750 operation relieved his pain, but even with a dose of aspirin almost daily, Jake still walks stiffly. On top of that, he has severe allergies, dry skin and a poor coat. He has recently started having seizures as well. "He's a medical mess," says Amanda Metzger. "It just breaks my heart because he wants to play like a puppy, but he can't."



It would be tempting to put Jake's problems down to plain bad luck -- but in fact the odds were against him from the start. While most golden retrievers are healthier than Jake, a shocking 60% of them end up with the dysplasia that may yet cripple him, according to the University of Pennsylvania's School of Veterinary Medicine. Many are born with an undescended testicle, another hereditary condition vets say can cause the gland to become cancerous.



Yet even if they had chosen another breed, the Metzgers would have been taking a chance. The appalling truth is that as many as 25% of the 20 million purebred dogs in America -- 1 in 4 animals -- are afflicted with a serious genetic problem. German shepherds, for example, run an even higher risk of hip dysplasia than do golden retrievers. Labrador retrievers are prone to dwarfing. At least 70% of collies suffer from genetic eye trouble, and 10% eventually go blind. Dalmatians are often deaf. Cocker spaniels tend to have bad tempers. Great Danes have weak hearts. English bulldogs have such enormous heads that pups often have to be delivered by cesarean section. Newfoundlands can drop dead from cardiac arrests. Chinese Shar-Peis, the wrinkly dogs that don't seem to fit into their skin, have congenital skin disorders. And Irish setters, laments veterinarian Michael Fox, a vice president of the Humane Society of the U.S., "are so dumb they can't find their way to the end of the leash."



The list goes on and on, running to more than 300 separate genetic disorders that subject dogs to enormous pain, roil the emotional life of their owners and, estimates Dr. William Schall, a genetic specialist at Michigan State University, cost almost $ 1 billion in vet bills and lost revenues from stillborn pups, which cannot be sold.



Bad genes are a universal hazard of life, of course; practically every species suffers from inherited diseases. But golden retrievers and other purebreds are not like most other animals. They are in a very real sense artificial, molded over thousands of years through selective breeding to satisfy human needs. For most of that time, those needs have largely been companionship and labor, and dogs have prospered.



Within the past century, though, and especially over the past 50 years, the most popular types have been bred almost exclusively to look good -- with "good" defined by breed-specific dog clubs and the American Kennel Club (AKC).



"Form has been separated from function," says Brian Kilcommons, a dog trainer in Middletown, New York. "Styles come in vogue. The competition at dog shows is geared almost exclusively to looks." This focus on beauty above all means that attractive but unhealthy animals have been encouraged to reproduce -- a sort of survival of the unfittest. The result is a national canine-health crisis, from which few breeds have escaped.



The astonishing thing is that despite the scope of these diseases, veterinary researchers know next to nothing about what causes them or how to cure them. Only 23 of the hundreds of known disorders can currently be picked up by genetic lab tests. Biologists know far more about the heredity of the fruit fly, in fact, than they do about canine genetics. That is because there are fewer than 100 canine geneticists in the world, working at just a handful of major universities -- and they are constantly scraping for funding.



The lack of research money is especially disconcerting when one considers that dogs are the nation's most popular pets. Almost 36 million households have them, compared with the 29.2 million that keep cats, according to the Humane Society of the U.S. More Americans spend more than $ 8 billion a year on their dogs, not counting the initial purchase.



The AKC alone raked in $29 million last year, about three-fourths of it from the $ 25 or more it charges to register each pedigreed pup and provide a copy of its family tree. But the AKC annual report shows that the club cut its grants for education and research into the health of dogs from $ 1.675 million in 1992 to $ 575,000 in 1993.



Who is to blame for the shabby treatment of humanity's best friend? The AKC, with its focus on pedigrees and beauty pageants rather than canine well-being? Legitimate breeders, who supply customers with beautiful but sometimes damaged puppies? Puppy mills, which do the same but at much higher volume and in search of greater profits? Or the public, more insistent with each passing year that a mutt -- a "randomly bred dog," to be politically correct -- simply won't do?



They are all partly at fault. But it is hard to avoid putting the AKC high on the list. While the club is not the only dog registry in the country, it is certainly the biggest, best known and most powerful. It is because of this power that the AKC has been largely unchallenged over the years. "Criticize the AKC, and there will be retribution," says one New York dog trainer. "Judges may find they are no longer getting assignments. Breeders might discover their dogs are no longer winning prizes." The AKC acknowledges that it is perceived as overbearing. "I think it's a fact of life that people have that fear, and it's unfortunate," responds John Mandeville, the club's vice president for planning.



The AKC does not need to resort to intimidation, however, to have an overwhelming influence. It sponsors most of the nation's dog shows, events that reinforce the insidious notion that beauty is a dog's paramount virtue. It also keeps track of purebred pedigrees, yet it requires no proof of good health to certify an animal. All it takes to get AKC certification is proof of pedigreed parentage.



Says Fox: "The best use of pedigree papers is for housebreaking your dog. They don't mean a damn thing. You can have an immune-deficient puppy that is about to go blind and has epilepsy, hip dysplasia, hemophilia and one testicle, and the AKC will register it."



No one at the kennel club denies this. AKC certification "is absolutely not a Good Housekeeping seal of approval, unfortunately," says Mandenville. "It's acquired a lot of these trappings because the idea of 'AKC-registered' is so widely known."



Or, to be blunt, because it has such snob appeal. The American Kennel Club was founded 110 years ago by a group of American bluebloods who pledged "to do everything to advance the study, breeding, exhibiting, running and maintenance of purity of thoroughbred dogs." At the time purebreds were status symbols, owned exclusively by the wealthy and prized for their strength, skill and intelligence as much as for their looks.



But during the 1940s, as the middle class sucked in vast numbers of new members with aspirations of gentility, these Americans began to insist on purebreds too, and their popularity took off. In 1944 the AKC registered 77,400 dogs; that jumped to 235,978 in 1949, and by 1970, the club was issuing papers on a million dogs a year. (The total last year: 1.4 million.)



The number of AKC-sponsored dog shows has increased just as dramatically. In 1894 there were a mere 11 all-breed shows. By 1954 there were 384, and last year a total of 1.3 million dogs competed in 1,177 different exhibitions. Then as now, the idea was to show off the owners' prize breeding stock.



But the concept of what makes a dog valuable for breeding has changed. While obedience and field trials were once considered at least as important as beauty contests, the canine equivalent of the swimsuit competition has all but taken over. Historians have yet to explain this ideological shift, but the AKC has one idea: "You could almost say this venerable institution with its great credibility and history has been infiltrated slowly by the type of people it was not intended to deal with," says Wayne Cavenaugh, the group's spokesman.



Whatever the reason, animals with names such as Rainbow's Maggie Rose O'Koehl and Jrees Buddy Holly are brushed, hairsprayed, beribboned and otherwise tarted up before going in front of the judges. Says Buddy Holly's owner, Jan Smith of Wichita, Kansas, a longtime exhibitor of Great Danes (and herself the runner-up for Miss Congeniality in the 1965 Miss Arkansas pageant): "When the ears are too flat, we use cement to make them perky. We use chalk to color the legs, which is fine as long as you don't use copious amounts."



That's just the final polish, though: no dog can hope to be a champion without conforming to a very narrow standard of physical perfection set by individual dog clubs and ratified by the AKC. And customer-conscious breeders have obliged by creating prizewinning dogs with specific traits, such as long ears in cocker spaniels or sloping hips in German shepherds.



Biologically, this is just asking for trouble. For one thing, the characteristics judges and clubs have decreed to be gorgeous can themselves be bad for the animals' health -- huge heads on bulldogs that make it difficult for them to be born naturally, for example, or the wrinkled skin on Shar-Peis that sets them up for rashes. For another, the best way to produce a puppy with a specific look is to mate two dogs who have that same look. As with any species, though, the closest resemblances are found among the closest relatives.



So breeders often resort to inbreeding, the mating of brothers and sisters or fathers and daughters. Or they "line-breed," having grandparents mate with grandchildren or cousins with each other. "If we did that in humans," says Mark Derr, who wrote a scathing indictment of America's dog culture for the March 1990 Atlantic Monthly, "we'd call it incest."



Both practices increase the likelihood of genetic disease. It is not that purebreds have more defective genes than other dogs, or that inbreeding somehow causes healthy genes to go bad. Most hereditary disorders in dogs are caused by recessive genes; as long as an animal has a good copy of the gene from one parent, it will override a bad copy from the other parent. But if both parents pass on the same bad gene -- which is more likely if mother and father come from the same family -- the puppy has a problem.



The problem intensifies with what experts call "the popular sire effect," the result of a single desirable male's being used to sire a large number of litters. Says Michigan State's Schall: "If it is later determined that the male that looked perfect has a genetic disease, he will have dispersed it widely before it gets discovered."



Hereditary weakness can be introduced even when there is no underlying genetic defect at all. The biological interplay between individual genes can be extremely complicated, and breeding to enhance one characteristic can have unintended consequences. Vets believe the retinal disease that afflicts most collies may fall into this category. The gene responsible may lie very close to the one that gives collies their long noses and closely set eyes -- traits that have been deliberately emphasized by breeders. Says Dr. Donald Patterson, chief of the medical genetics section at the University of Pennsylvania's School of Veterinary Medicine: "Many people have bred dogs for desired traits, but in the process of doing this they have also got undesirable ones. The objective should be to combine breeding for good traits with more careful planning to get rid of genetic defects. Unfortunately, not much attention has been paid to that."



The AKC insists that it is not at fault: the breeders are. Asked why club-sponsored shows put much more emphasis on appearance than health, Mandeville responds that "this is America. If this size is good, this size is better. We reflect, unfortunately, the breeding of dogs [that] people register with us. Are there genetic problems? Absolutely. Are there temperament problems? Absolutely. Are there people making poorly informed breeding decisions? Far too many."



The club is just a registry, he says, so "don't rely on a registry to make an informed decision for you."



Why don't AKC registrations carry health and temperament requirements -- as comparable certification does in Germany and Sweden? Says Mandeville: "It's the Big Brother argument. At what point does regulation of the individual for the greater good step on the individual's toes?"



Mandeville also claims that any attempt by the AKC to limit registration would trigger government sanctions. "We would like to be able to say, 'I'm sorry, we're not registering your dog,' but we would be in court faster than your head would spin. The Federal Trade Commission has rules and regulations in this country about restriction of trade."



Plenty of dog owners reject this sort of reasoning -- and shun the blessings of American Kennel Club membership as well. The U.S. Border Collie Club is vigorously resisting AKC efforts to add border collies to the 137 breeds it formally recognizes (there are more than 300 breeds worldwide). The border-collie owners and breeders are convinced that AKC recognition would create pressure to breed the dogs for their looks at the inevitable expense of their intelligence and herding instincts. "We are concerned that the working ability of our dogs would be completely lost," says Donald McCaig, a breeder in Williamsville, Virginia, and a spokesman for the club.



The Cavalier King Charles Spaniel Club voted overwhelmingly last May to reject AKC recognition for another reason: their conviction that the AKC values its own revenues over a dog's welfare.



Cavalier breeders do not allow the dogs to be sold in pet stores, which are infamous for buying animals from shady sources, including puppy mills. In fact, most dog experts routinely warn buyers not to deal with pet stores at all.



The AKC insists, though, that the Cavalier club drop its prohibition as a condition of affiliation. Why would it take such a position? Perhaps because some 7% of the group's $21 million in dog-registration earnings comes from pet-store sales. "They simply want to gain as many registrations as possible because money is power," says the Humane Society's Fox.



Greed cuts both ways, of course. Six Labrador retriever breeders say they have filed a class action against the AKC and the Labrador Retriever Club Inc. for changing the breed standard to favor slimmer, longer-legged animals over the traditional stockier, shorter ones -- thereby devaluing the out-of-date model. And some owners of a relatively rare dog called the Havanese, which arrived in this country from Cuba in the mid-1970s, are actively seeking AKC recognition, despite worries by other owners that they are inviting overbreeding and genetic problems.



"It's a competitive world, and money talks," says one Havanese breeder. "For many people, winning dog shows is a thrill and makes them proud, and the AKC has a lot of shows." Perhaps more to the point, once the Havanese join the high-profile AKC fold, the going rate for puppies, according to some breeders, could go as high as $ 2,000, up from about $ 750 now. On average, registered puppies go for 10 to 20 times the price of paperless dogs, and champion purebreds can sell for as much as $ 50,000.



Most of these genetic problems would disappear if Americans could somehow be persuaded to abandon purebreds in favor of mutts. While individual mixed-breed dogs have problems, the animals on average are a lot healthier than their high-class cousins. "Mutts are the Hondas of the dog world," says syndicated animal columnist Mike Capuzzo of the Philadelphia Inquirer. "They're cheap, reliable and what nature intended in the first place. They are what you would get at a canine Club Med if you left them alone for six years." There are "breeds" in the mutt world, just as there are among purebreds. The most popular: a cross between a Labrador retriever and a German shepherd.



But even if the U.S. cannot be cured of its addiction to purebreds -- probably a safe assumption -- there is plenty that can be done to improve overall canine health. One factor that is forcing breeders to pay closer attention to genetic problems is the emergence of puppy lemon laws in a dozen states, including New York, Massachusetts, California and Florida. If a dog is found to have a debilitating defect, owners can get a refund or a healthy dog in exchange, or they can force the breeder to pay the vet bills to repair a problem.



The laws are not entirely fair to breeders, though, says George Padgett, a veterinary pathologist at Michigan State University. "Some may be penalized unfairly because no one has taught them about genetic defects." Agrees Penn's Dr. Donald Patterson, founder of the genetic section of the University of Pennsylvania's School of Veterinary Medicine and widely acknowledged as the dean of canine genetic research, "The common misconception is that breeders are cavalier." The real problem, he says, is that they have not had the scientific information to detect hidden defects and thus avoid bad breeding decisions.



That is starting to change. One new tool that should prove helpful is a computerized genetic-disease data base developed at Patterson's lab that lists more than 300 genetic problems plaguing dogs. Another is the university's PennHIP program, a hip-disease-detection system that took 11 years and $1 million to develop. It involves taking detailed measurements of hip X rays to grade the severity of dysplasia. The program is being marketed by International Canine Genetics Inc., a research company based in Malverne, Pa., which is already training vets to use it. "A tighter-fitting hip joint is better, and we now have the technology to determine which hips are tighter," says Dr. Gail Smith, an engineer and veterinarian who developed the test. "This will help people select the best breeding dogs."



Lists and detection systems are not the same as cures, but Patterson points out that veterinary researchers are finally beginning to have some insight into the causes of these disorders. "Canine genetic diseases," he says, "are now being defined at the molecular level, and the mapping of the canine genome is at last under way." Scientists have located the genes that cause muscular dystrophy in golden retrievers, and "shaking pup" syndrome in Welsh springer spaniels. They're working on identifying the genes responsible for failure-to-thrive metabolic problems in giant Schnauzers, bleeding disorders in Scottish terriers and Doberman pinschers, and the hereditary deafness that affects about 30% of Dalmatians. And they believe hip dysplasia, the crippling condition that afflicts Jake the golden retriever and his kin, may be the result of several defective genes working in concert -- not an unusual situation with hereditary disorders.



On the supply side, critics of the AKC argue that the kennel club should follow the lead of its European counterparts by imposing health standards as part of its registration process. Rather than wait for that step, individual-breed clubs are taking their own action. At least three Rottweiler clubs have ruled that dogs missing more than one tooth, which can be a sign of a genetic defect, may not be bred. English springer spaniel owners are encouraging one another not to breed dogs with temperament problems; they want to eliminate what they call the "rage syndrome," a type of brain seizure that makes some dogs lose control. And the Portuguese Water Dog Club requires breeders who advertise in its magazine to submit copies of hip, eye and heart clearances to prove that their dogs are not suffering from genetic defects.



The Portuguese Water Dog Club is perhaps the most active organization in policing genetic defects. Water dogs tend to suffer from progressive retinal atrophy, which causes blindness, and from an enzyme deficiency that can kill dogs by storing toxins in the nervous system. The club offered in 1987 to finance several researchers at major veterinary schools to develop screening tests for the diseases. The result is a blood test that found 16% of the dogs to be carriers in 1990. Club members stopped breeding the afflicted animals, and by 1993 the incidence had dropped to 7%.



With such grass-roots pressure, and perhaps a bit battered by bad publicity and lawsuits, the AKC has lately shown some interest in promoting this kind of research itself. In October it sponsored its first-ever canine-genetics conference, where 25 leading researchers gave talks to an audience of some 150 veterinary scientists from around the world. And during the past month there have been discussions within the club about setting up a scientific advisory panel that would recommend research projects the club might support. If the ancient American Kennel Club is finally thinking of altering its culture, there may yet be hope for the family dog.

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Note: The last line was hope over experience. In fact, the Board of Directors of the AKC moved to sign a contact with Petland to codify and regularize the registration of puppy mill puppies sold at pet stores. See >> Here for what happened -- and what did not happen.