The dogs that win prizes often disturb me. I feel like there must be a bunch of inbreeding going on, and maybe for features that look interesting but aren't necessarily good for them.
Is this concern misplaced? Not a dog show expert so maybe I'm just revealing my ignorance.
The genetics of inbreeding are extremely well-understood. Dog pedigrees are well tracked, and there are tools you can use to assist in preventing inbreeding. Irresponsible breeders give responsible breeders a bad name. Some breeders are even focusing on making breeds healthier as their goal.
How many hundreds of thousands of individual unhealthy dogs must be forced to life a life of suffering to make the “breed healthier as a goal” even if that laughable idea is successful?
Why not just not breed unhealthy dogs, adopt the many stray dogs that persist and only once we have empty shelters consider breeding healthy breeds?
To answer your question honestly, the reason is because "healthy" isn't a binary. There certainly are dogs that are so unhealthy they should not be bred. But on the other hand, there is no world in which all dogs are 100% healthy: if your goal is to say animals should not be bred unless they are 100% healthy, they'll go extinct! Making progress reduces suffering.
Efforts to breed healthier dogs should not be mutually exclusive with efforts to empty shelters. I envision a world where the shelters are empty too: I don't believe it's necessary to stop the efforts to have healthier dogs until after the shelters are empty. You can make progress on two fronts at once!
When you say dogs are beings, not toys or decorations, you run the risk of sounding accusatory. I believe we have goals in common and could learn from each other without resorting to villainizing.
There are bitter and heartstrong arguments on this topic. Brachycephalic breeds with flat faces or short snouts (for example pugs, bulldogs, boxers, Boston terriers) cause anger among some and devotion among others. (We are a three-pug family.) Pugs have an average lifespan of 12 to 15 years, as compared with the overall average dog lifespan of 10 to 13 years. We have also had (and loved) boxers, which have an average lifespan of 10 to 12 years. Boxers seem to be genetically prone to cancer, which is how we lost our most recent boxer.
There's a classic cartoon showing two wolves in the bushes at the edge of a campfire, looking at the leftovers being thrown around by the humans. One says, "Look, what the heck, let's cozy up to these two-legged creatures that seem to have lots of food. What could go wrong?"
Next frame is a picture of an unhappy-looking pug wearing a birthday hat..
I think the reason take so much offense at e.g. pugs is because they don't need to be bred that way. Where I'm at a law was passed making it illegal to breed dogs with congenital conditions. As a result basically all the pugs you see here have a bit of a snout as do all the boxers. Crucially this didn't change the breeds personality perceptibly, and it only changes the look the tiniest of bit. In trade you get dogs that are visibly happier and have more energy.
A neighbor in particular previously had two french bulldogs with no snout. They'd spend all day panting and snoring. Once they passed away they got new ones, now with snout. They spend all day running and jumping instead.
Every child should have a dog. It gives them valuable life lessons about responsibility, fidelity, unconditional love and to always turn around three times before you lie down.
I grew up around dog show people and breeders and can confidently say that I learned a lot more about negative qualities in people than positive ones in dogs. Moreover some types of dogs are just by disposition, awful.
Alternative viewpoint: separating a dog from its natural social life and forcing its integration into a human world, even if done out of a concept of affection, is morally wrong. I suspect future generations will liken the domination of many species, such as dogs and cats, to slavery.
You’re thinking of the wolf pack that dogs came from millennia ago to be its “natural social life”. But the dogs around today are the result of myriad generations bred to be social with humans.
Indeed. A year ago I purchased a working/field line golden retriever from a reputable breeder (pm me if interested) and embarked on training my first gun dog. We've done a few hunting trips this season and I found myself telling my father the other day something along the lines that I don't really care for the _hunting_ so much as I find something primal and natural about the symbiotic relationship that I've formed with this dog, especially when we hunt together. It's like he knows his chances of survival are better if we work this out together. I fail to articulate the feeling well.
And as a parent comment suggested a slavery relationship... I don't know.. If so, I've got a pretty well pampered and happy slave dog.
Dogs have orbital muscles above their eyes that wolves lack. The sole purpose of these muscles is to enable the dog to emote better... to humans. Dogs also cooperate with and interpret physical cues from humans the way wolves might with their packmates only. This also means that dogs can interpret uniquely human physical cues, such as pointing with a finger, which wolves cannot.
The natural social life of the dog is the human world. Humans and dogs co-evolved to live and work together. No other species enjoys this kind of symbiosis with us to this level; the horse probably comes the closest.
Hmm. Not one single bit of information about "natural dog/cat life" is encoded into a shelter kitten's brain. All the data used to train their brain came from humans and their human environment. Cats even learn to talk human (as best as their vocal apparatus and GPU allows). Whether they're better off or worse off I don't know, but any given cat only knows it's historical environment. They're not "taken" from some other place. That happened tens of thousands of years ago and no brain content from that time has been propagated to present day cats.
Fwiw my cats have friends that are deer, by virtue of there being deer in their environment, and their curiosity. And deer are quite curious too. Actually we have magpies that are friends with deer too. If cats were somehow pre-wired to only want to associate with cats, why are they associating with deer?
I always wondered if there was some genetic factor related to mutations, perhaps, that was stronger in dogs than cats, horses, cows, sheep, etc. There's such morphological variety.
The dogs that win prizes often disturb me. I feel like there must be a bunch of inbreeding going on, and maybe for features that look interesting but aren't necessarily good for them.
Is this concern misplaced? Not a dog show expert so maybe I'm just revealing my ignorance.
The genetics of inbreeding are extremely well-understood. Dog pedigrees are well tracked, and there are tools you can use to assist in preventing inbreeding. Irresponsible breeders give responsible breeders a bad name. Some breeders are even focusing on making breeds healthier as their goal.
How many hundreds of thousands of individual unhealthy dogs must be forced to life a life of suffering to make the “breed healthier as a goal” even if that laughable idea is successful?
Why not just not breed unhealthy dogs, adopt the many stray dogs that persist and only once we have empty shelters consider breeding healthy breeds?
Dogs are beings, not toys or decorations.
To answer your question honestly, the reason is because "healthy" isn't a binary. There certainly are dogs that are so unhealthy they should not be bred. But on the other hand, there is no world in which all dogs are 100% healthy: if your goal is to say animals should not be bred unless they are 100% healthy, they'll go extinct! Making progress reduces suffering.
Efforts to breed healthier dogs should not be mutually exclusive with efforts to empty shelters. I envision a world where the shelters are empty too: I don't believe it's necessary to stop the efforts to have healthier dogs until after the shelters are empty. You can make progress on two fronts at once!
When you say dogs are beings, not toys or decorations, you run the risk of sounding accusatory. I believe we have goals in common and could learn from each other without resorting to villainizing.
There are bitter and heartstrong arguments on this topic. Brachycephalic breeds with flat faces or short snouts (for example pugs, bulldogs, boxers, Boston terriers) cause anger among some and devotion among others. (We are a three-pug family.) Pugs have an average lifespan of 12 to 15 years, as compared with the overall average dog lifespan of 10 to 13 years. We have also had (and loved) boxers, which have an average lifespan of 10 to 12 years. Boxers seem to be genetically prone to cancer, which is how we lost our most recent boxer.
There's a classic cartoon showing two wolves in the bushes at the edge of a campfire, looking at the leftovers being thrown around by the humans. One says, "Look, what the heck, let's cozy up to these two-legged creatures that seem to have lots of food. What could go wrong?"
Next frame is a picture of an unhappy-looking pug wearing a birthday hat..
I think the reason take so much offense at e.g. pugs is because they don't need to be bred that way. Where I'm at a law was passed making it illegal to breed dogs with congenital conditions. As a result basically all the pugs you see here have a bit of a snout as do all the boxers. Crucially this didn't change the breeds personality perceptibly, and it only changes the look the tiniest of bit. In trade you get dogs that are visibly happier and have more energy.
A neighbor in particular previously had two french bulldogs with no snout. They'd spend all day panting and snoring. Once they passed away they got new ones, now with snout. They spend all day running and jumping instead.
Every child should have a dog. It gives them valuable life lessons about responsibility, fidelity, unconditional love and to always turn around three times before you lie down.
> turn around three times before you lie down.
It's not a laughing matter. How else will you repel bugs from your bed?
I grew up around dog show people and breeders and can confidently say that I learned a lot more about negative qualities in people than positive ones in dogs. Moreover some types of dogs are just by disposition, awful.
Alternative viewpoint: separating a dog from its natural social life and forcing its integration into a human world, even if done out of a concept of affection, is morally wrong. I suspect future generations will liken the domination of many species, such as dogs and cats, to slavery.
> separating a dog from its natural social life
You’re thinking of the wolf pack that dogs came from millennia ago to be its “natural social life”. But the dogs around today are the result of myriad generations bred to be social with humans.
> such as dogs and cats, to slavery.
Cats famously domesticated themselves though. More of a symbiosis than subjugation
Same applies to dogs really
Indeed. A year ago I purchased a working/field line golden retriever from a reputable breeder (pm me if interested) and embarked on training my first gun dog. We've done a few hunting trips this season and I found myself telling my father the other day something along the lines that I don't really care for the _hunting_ so much as I find something primal and natural about the symbiotic relationship that I've formed with this dog, especially when we hunt together. It's like he knows his chances of survival are better if we work this out together. I fail to articulate the feeling well.
And as a parent comment suggested a slavery relationship... I don't know.. If so, I've got a pretty well pampered and happy slave dog.
What do you mean its natural social life? Dogs are not wolves. Their natural social life is being with humans.
Dogs have orbital muscles above their eyes that wolves lack. The sole purpose of these muscles is to enable the dog to emote better... to humans. Dogs also cooperate with and interpret physical cues from humans the way wolves might with their packmates only. This also means that dogs can interpret uniquely human physical cues, such as pointing with a finger, which wolves cannot.
The natural social life of the dog is the human world. Humans and dogs co-evolved to live and work together. No other species enjoys this kind of symbiosis with us to this level; the horse probably comes the closest.
Hmm. Not one single bit of information about "natural dog/cat life" is encoded into a shelter kitten's brain. All the data used to train their brain came from humans and their human environment. Cats even learn to talk human (as best as their vocal apparatus and GPU allows). Whether they're better off or worse off I don't know, but any given cat only knows it's historical environment. They're not "taken" from some other place. That happened tens of thousands of years ago and no brain content from that time has been propagated to present day cats.
Fwiw my cats have friends that are deer, by virtue of there being deer in their environment, and their curiosity. And deer are quite curious too. Actually we have magpies that are friends with deer too. If cats were somehow pre-wired to only want to associate with cats, why are they associating with deer?
My first dog taught me how to love animals, and that is a gift for which I'll forever be grateful.
I recommend this extraordinary book, The First Domestication the coevolution of Humans and Wolves, charting the possible events.
https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300226164/the-first-dome...
I always wondered if there was some genetic factor related to mutations, perhaps, that was stronger in dogs than cats, horses, cows, sheep, etc. There's such morphological variety.