We were away for the weekend, so I’m a day behind in reading the Sunday Times. This week’s magazine section has a story about the controversy over “hybrid” dogs:
Bob Vetere, president of the American Pet Product Manufacturers Association, told me, “You’re going to have a real battle here” between hybrid dog breeders and “the purists who say this is all 25th-century voodoo science.” The rift seems to epitomize a peculiarly American tension: between tradition and improvisation, institutions and fads. The American Canine Hybrid Club, one of a growing number of hybrid dog registries, will soon recognize its 400th different kind of purebred-to-purebred cross. There are meanwhile roughly only 400 pure breeds of dog in the world, and the American Kennel Club, the world’s largest purebred registry, has recognized only 155 of them so far in its 123 year-history. It will not be registering Poovanese or Cavoodles any time soon. “What would our registration stand for then?” a spokeswoman told me. “Anyone could make up a dog and say, ‘This is a dog!’ “
Really, the main thing I learn from this is that purebred dog people creep me out. This is a dog:
and she’s the best dog in the Capital Region, even though we don’t have the foggiest idea what her parents were. Attempting to impose any other definition on the world is tacky, bordering on immoral.
Which is not to say that the “hybrid” breeder profiled for the piece comes off looking great. His operation sounds like a puppy mill in all but name:
Havens was recently suspended by the A.K.C. for 10 years after refusing a follow-up kennel inspection. He claims that the A.K.C. inspector cited him for things long deemed acceptable, to punish him for his promotion of designer dogs and his increasing use of another registry service, thus no longer paying the A.K.C. thousands of dollars in registration fees. The A.K.C. denies any such motivation, saying that it has stepped up enforcement of a care-and-conditions policy over the last decade and is glad to go without registration income from breeders unwilling to comply. Recent U.S.D.A. inspection reports show many incidences of dogs kept with inadequate bedding in near-freezing temperatures at Puppy Haven or with excessively matted hair or insufficient veterinary care. Havens retired 75 adult dogs, no longer useful to him as sires or dams, to the Wisconsin Humane Society over the last year. According to the humane society, many of the dogs had to be treated for debilitating fears of noise or people before they could be adopted. Some animal-welfare advocates, while noting that most large kennels kill older, unproductive dogs, also condemn shipping them off to shelters, seeing it as a shifting of responsibility. In response, Havens says that he prides himself on his unwillingness to put his dogs down and that there is a tremendous demand to adopt the smaller purebreds he uses.
But, really, it would take a whole lot of creepy to come off worse than the purebred dog owners:
Jutta Beard described how years ago, while she was breeding Rottweilers, one of her bitches was accidentally impregnated by a dog of another breed. Great effort had been taken to segregate the bitch, and how the intruder got in and out of the Beards’ kennel was a mystery. His identity couldn’t even be discerned in the gangling, alien faces of the resulting puppies. Beard had them euthanized.
I asked if no one would have wanted them as pets. “I didn’t want them,” she said decisively.
I’ll admit to not being entirely rational on this subject– we adopted Emmy from a local Humane Society shelter, and she’s a wonderful dog. And the dog we had when I was a kid (who keeps Emmy from the title of Best Dog Ever) was a Collie-Lab mix adopted from a local vet. Neither would’ve made it out of Beard’s kennel alive, and I’m frankly appalled by that.
There’s a lot to hate there, though. Back when we were first thinking about getting a dog, we read a couple of books about different breeds. the best of the lot made the very sensible point that dogs are basically tame wolves. The farther you try to get from the proto-dog– fifty-ish pounds, long nose, long tail– the more problems you’re likely to encounter. By the time you get to something like the pug dogs whose “purity” various people are defending in the article, you’ve got a dog that’s so warped from the norm that they can’t even mate– prior to the charming little anecdote about killing unwanted mixed-breed puppies, there’s a bit describing the artificial insemination of a pug, whose “ideal” stature is such that they can’t physically complete the act without human assistance.
That’s just wrong, and it’s wrong basically because it breaks the Granny Weatherwax rule:
“It’s not as simple as that. It’s not a black and white issue. There are so many shades of gray. . . .”
“There’s no greys, only white that’s got grubby. I’m surprised you don’t know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.”
“It’s a lot more complicated than that–“
“No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.”
Dogs aren’t people, but any dog owner can tell you that they’re certainly not things. Shaping dogs to some wholly unnatural “breed standard” to the point where they can’t even reproduce themselves (let alone all the other health and behavior issues that come with generations of inbreeding) loses sight of the fact that they’re living beings in their own right, and deserve to be treated with a little more dignity. Not to mention that fretting over the fact that someone else wants a Pug with a less smashed-in face involves a total loss of perspective.
Anyway, the article is well written, and worth a look. None of the people in it come off particuarly well, but it does raise some interesting questions about our relationship with dogs. And makes me appreciate my mixed-breed dog even more– because of her personality, not her ISO-9001 compliance with standards.
All hail the Queen of Niskayuna:
