There are a lot of ethical questions about dog breeding. I
don’t have many answers, but I wanted to share some of the things that I’ve
learned as I’ve tried to understand more about the ethics of keeping and
breeding dogs. I’ve gone through my personal history with dogs and some of the
research I undertook when I started becoming interested in breeder
ethics and genetic implications, so that others who love
dogs and are interested in learning might have a few more points to ponder in
order to come to their own conclusions about dog ethics and the future of dog
breeding.
My Life in Dog Years
Dogs were always part of my life. My earliest memories
include Curly, some sort of poodle-like mix who adopted my mother when she most
needed a friend. Curly hated children in general and me in particular, and it’s
surprising I went on to care for dogs so much.
When I was around seven, our
family bought a dachshund to be a family dog and a breeder. Frankie (named
because she was shaped like a frankfurter, but on her papers she was known as
Francine Von Valentine) soon became part of our family. We made friends with a
local dachshund breeder and had a bit of a relationship with her. Soon raising
dachshund puppies became a part of my life. At times I loved it, especially
when I got to name one of the pups from each litter. At others, usually right
after Frankie had eaten one of my hamsters or some other pet that had escaped
its cage, I was certain that all dachshunds were spawn of the devil and the
most awful, ruthless creatures on earth.
The local breeder (let’s call her
Karen) had a large piece of property on the outskirts of town with kennels full
of show dogs. When I was older, I would sometimes work a day or two at her
place. I would fill water and food bowls, and go into each run with a special
pooper-scooper. It wasn’t nearly so bad as it sounds, and I enjoyed playing
with each dog when its kennel was clean. I decided which colors and shapes were
my favorite, and had secret pet names for my favorites, which I would imagine
Karen suddenly becoming generous and giving to me. In middle school, I told my
job counselor that I wanted to be a dog breeder when I grew up, sometimes
dachshunds, but more often some other breed I was researching at the time.
The year I started high school, I got my first dog, one of
Frankie’s pups we had sold that the new owner no longer wanted. She was from
Frankie’s last litter, born on Christmas day as all of our visiting relatives
looked on. We had given her a Christmas name, perhaps Jingle Bell or Angel, but
her new family had called her Gidget. When she came to me, my daydreams had
been filled with a puppy, younger than her, but the same color and hair-length,
and I gave her the name of that imaginary pup: Dawn. We had babysat a dog with
the same name earlier that I had bonded with, and I chose the long name New Day
Dawning, assuming that once I got my new special dog it would be like a new
beginning to all things bright and beautiful. While not quite as amazing as my
daydreams, we did develop a close relationship—one of my high school friends
told me that I had told her I preferred my dog to human company. I do not
remember saying such a thing, but it doesn’t surprise me. I worked at Karen’s
to pay off stud fees so that I could breed Dawn, and earned money for my first
digital camera, and extra put away for college.
Leaving for college began my first dogless years. Dawn remained at home with my family
and their other dachshunds. I continued to research different breeds and pined
away for a dog of my own. Finally, after I graduated, with husband and new
daughter, we moved to a trailer park and were able to get a family dog. I
decided that some sort of spaniel would be a good family dog, so we chose a
cocker spaniel- basset hound mix named Buster. Things did not go well. I became
pregnant not long after, and suddenly I had no more patience for stinking
floors, chewed belongings, or leashes yanked out of my hands. We moved, and
Dawn, now elderly, came to live with us and was little more than a quiet shadow
behind Buster. Then Buster bolted past me one day, and I, a brand-new mom, did
not have the strength to chase after him. He came back, but died a few hours
later from anti-freeze poisoning. My husband and daughter mourned him, and I
felt sad for their sakes. Dawn, who had always been an outside dog with many
canine companions, became an only pet, and the transition has been difficult
for all of us. We struggle with puddling indoors and yapping whenever we leave
her outdoors, but we are working on our relationship and she will remain with
us until her natural death or until her aging prevents her from enjoying life
as a dog. We hope to try again in the future, which I will explain later on.
Discovering Breeder
Ethics
When I went to college I also began spending more time
online. I soon found out that other people, especially those who haunt pet
forums and who write library books, have very defined ideas on the subject. The
only accepted means of getting a dog are from a rescue or from a “reputable
breeder”, which is someone who fulfills a huge list of requirements, from
winning dog shows to genetic testing to absolutely never making a profit but
working tirelessly to “improve the breed”. My family were called “backyard
breeders”, the scum of the earth, terrible greedy thugs who made money out of
their innocent pets and caused the deaths of hundreds of dogs in animal
shelters.
I certainly did not think of my family in that way, but some
of their points made sense to me. There is a pet overpopulation, and there are
perfectly good pets in the shelters. It seemed to me that the registration should
mean something more than an elevated price tag. On the other hand, I still
wanted dog breeding to be part of my life, and a part of my children’s lives. I
didn’t think it was right either, that the only people influencing the future
of dog breeding were supposed to be either the independently wealthy breeders
or the hap-hazard ignorant masses whose dogs end up in the shelters, or that
the only dogs available were supposed to be the extremely expensive show
winners ($800 is considered cheap) or the gamble with a shelter or rescue. In
any case, I decided that maybe jumping the hoops and trying to be a reputable
AKC breeder was the answer.
AKC Dog Shows
Popular opinion holds that the only purebred dog worth
looking at comes from the AKC (other registries such as the CKC and APR, we are
told, are simply ways for backyard breeders or worse, puppy mills, to claim
that their dogs are worth more money). The AKC, the American Kennel Club, focuses on conformation
shows, where dogs are compared to their breed’s standard of perfection and
judged by how close they resemble that perfect dog. Perfection is impossible,
and if it ever is reached, the standard will be readjusted so that over time
the breed will be “improved”. Conformation shows are not beauty pageants, the
AKC folks stress. The dogs are judged on their personalities as well as looks,
and the standards were written originally with traits that made them better fit
to their purpose. For instance, the shape of a dog’s legs might mean it is a
better runner, which makes it better able to hunt or herd sheep. The dog’s
color proves that it is a pure dog and has not been outcrossed with some other
breed that show different features. Dog shows were originally intended as a way
to evaluate breeding stock—only the best dogs, the winners of the shows, are
supposed to be bred.
The UKC (United Kennel Club) is something of a gray area.
Some consider it another “scumball registry”, while others find it legitimate. It registers more
breeds than the AKC and places more emphasis on working abilities. The AKC sponsors
shows besides conformation shows, from herding trials to agility to obedience,
but the UKC places much more importance on those competitions. Its conformation
events are more low-key (partly because they ban hiring professional handlers
to show your dog for you), which make them more enjoyable for newcomers to
visit.
I went to several shows, both AKC and UKC, and I checked out
books and tried to puzzle out the complicated point systems. I was proud of my
new knowledge, and I thought it would be exciting to use it to prove myself and
the dog I might get were champions, but there was one big draw back: money. The
entry fees are not huge, but they add up. It is not possible to get a
championship without winning at least three shows, but that would be
ridiculously lucky—ten to twenty wins would be more likely, and even the greatest
dogs do not win every show they enter. In the area I lived at the time, there
were two shows a year. In order to “finish” a dog, I would need to travel
across the country, week after week. Besides travelling costs, you need
grooming equipment, crates, leads, travelling equipment for dogs. This path, I
found out, is not an option for those who are not independently wealthy, or for
those who have priorities besides dogs such as family, friends, work, religion,
or other activities.
Farm Collies
While at college I also started researching homesteading and
hobby farming. I loved the idea of raising and making most of our own products
and becoming truly independent. What could be more satisfying than raising
sheep, spinning the wool into yarn, and crocheting it into finished products, I
wondered. With my interest in farming, I naturally started to turn toward
herding dog breeds. At first this meant the usual AKC breeds, the Belgian
shepherds or perhaps an Australian shepherd. Then I stumbled onto a different
dog breed, one that was regesterable only with the UKC but not the AKC—the
English shepherd. This was the dog that worked on farms in the olden days, the
dog that would herd the sheep, guard the fences, kill the vermin, and babysit
the children on his days off. This was certainly the dog for my someday farm, I
decided.
The English shepherd folks are quite critical of the AKC.
You can’t tell a dog’s worth by its appearance, they say. The AKC is just a
bunch of judgmental aristocrats. It’s cruel to put a dog through all the stress
of a conformation competition in order to judge them on looks alone. My dog
would have been disqualified because
the white mark on his neck touches the white mark on his head, and that
two inches of white fur might have scared the sheep, a dog owner says
sarcastically. I remembered some of the people at the AKC shows I met who
snapped at me because I brought a stroller that might distract their dogs, or
because I extended my hand toward a dog and might have petted it and mussed his
fur. Aristocratic jerks indeed, I agreed.
When I moved to a new state, a search for dog breeders in
this area lead me to discover another branch of farm dogs—the Scotch collie.
The Scotch collie and English shepherd folks don’t get along very well—the
English shepherd people say that the Scotch collies are a recent attempt to
recreate a breed that is already extinct, while the collie folks pull out their
pedigrees and insist that their founders were truly the original collie dog of
Lassie fame. In any case, the Scotch collie people claim to be the true collie,
the collie that lived on old farms before people turned away from “regular
dogs” and started focusing on show animals. It was while looking at the
difference between these dogs that
I began to realize what purebred dogs really are.
The Problem with
Purebreds
The AKC, as I’ve stated already, believes in “improvement”.
They took the working collie and began to emphasize some of his physical
features, such as his long coat and pointed nose. They did this over and over,
always improving, until they obtain the modern collie. Some animal experts call
this dog a “brainless ice-pick”, a dog with such a long pointed face that it
has no room for brains, eyes so small that many are born blind, and a huge coat
that takes hours to comb. This is improvement. Their hunters can’t hunt. Their sheep dogs can’t even see the
sheep through the fur on their faces. Many of their smaller dogs, intended to
be pets, take more hours to groom than a bride on her wedding day. Some dogs
have such strange shapes that they cannot breed unless their handler holds them
in place, while others cannot give birth without C-section because of the shape
of their heads. This is the “reputable breeding” that our popular culture
commends. When diseases started springing up, caused by this improvement, the
AKC began genetic testing, filtering out the dogs that carry certain defects
and reducing the gene pool even further.
The AKC accelerates these kind of problems by emphasizing
extreme physical characteristics, but all purebred registries have inherent
problems. If you look at the genetics, over time all populations tend to become
more and more uniform. This means that any genetic defects will become more
common over time, especially those that can be carried on recessively, so that
a healthy individual can have children with these problems. In nature, this is
overcome by having such a large population that random changes in genetic
information happen as fast or faster than the uniformity, creating a constantly
changing, constantly balanced, ultimately healthy population. Purebred registries
create difficulties by shrinking the population size, which means that the
uniformity (especially when dogs are selected to be more and more alike) will
happen faster than changes, and defects become more and more common.
In her fascinating book, Animals
in Translation, animal psychology expert Temple Grandin explained,
People probably put
much more constructive selection pressures on mutts. A mutt who bites people,
or who destroys the house by chewing everything in site, has an excellent
chance of being sent to the pound or put to sleep. That means his genes will be
removed from the gene pool. Just about the only mixed-breed dogs who get to reproduce are the ones who are well adapted
to living with people—and good at getting out of the yard… With purebred dogs
the selection pressures are completely different, and a lot of them are
negative… This is just a theory, but there’s plenty of evidence on the emotional
and behavioral problems of purebred dogs versus mixed breeds to support the
hypothesis that the selection pressures on mutts are more constructed. For one
thing, mutts are physically healthier…Mutts are also more likely to be
emotionally stable…Purebreds were responsible for the large majority of fatal
dog bites, not mutts. “Animals in Translation”, Temple Grandin, pp. 82-83
I would like to see more dog breeders who use practical
traits more than pedigrees and physical appearances to mold their ideal dogs.
Chickens and a few other livestock breeds have an open registry, which means
that individuals are registered by their traits alone and not by their
pedigrees. As of this writing, Scotch collie breeders have an open registry.
Another good group is the American Working Farmcollie Association, which will
register dogs based entirely on their herding, hunting, and guarding abilities.
Other working associations have other groups.
Solutions
I don’t have all of the answers. A lot of times, finding new
information brings more questions than it does solutions. I think I’ve come up
with some resolutions for myself, but I cannot claim to have the answers for
the entire species, or for the entire culture. My hope is that I can share what
I have learned and let others continue their own research and come to their own
conclusions.
