How come "improvement" in dog breeds always seems to mean taking physical features to the extreme while minimizing health and longevity?
If the highest and best goal of eugenics is to improve the genetic composition of a breed, what–if anything–can we say has been improved in the pedigree dog in the last 100 years?
What breed lives longer today than a century ago? Where do we find evidence of larger litter sizes and increased vitality? Has any insurance company lowered their rates for coverage of any breed because the breeding community has successfully created a healthier animal? What breed has fewer total health problems in number and incidence today versus the past?
What breed is more capable? What breed does its job better now than in the past? What new job can dogs do well now that they couldn’t do before? Has anyone founded a breed that meets a new working or sporting need driven by demand?
Do our dogs even look better on the most shallow of aesthetic measures? Are consumers flocking to buy more dogs with excessive hair, excessive skin, or insufficient length of limb or depth of face? Do the dogs that win in the show ring really win in the open market? Are people more nostalgic for the dog of their childhood that no longer exists due to changing show fads or are they more impressed with the improved models and wonder how they ever got along with the less improved versions?
If there are tens of thousands of breeders creating millions of dogs every year in this country, where are the results?
100 years ago the human life expectancy was 50 years and in those five short decades you were likely to have lived without anything electronic or digital, no drip coffee or band-aids, no animation motion pictures, no quartz clocks, no disposable diapers or electric guitars, no internet, no TV, no bras.
We’ve lifted and separated humans in the last century, have we elevated and distinguished our dog breeds?
* * *
Comments and disagreements are welcome, but be sure to read the Comment Policy. If this post made you think and you'd like to read more like it, consider a donation to my 4 Border Collies' Treat and Toy Fund. They'll be glad you did. You can subscribe to the feed or enter your e-mail in the field on the left to receive notice of new content. You can also like BorderWars on Facebook for more frequent musings and curiosities.
* * *
One little quibble,
I would say that dogs as whole do live longer now than they did a century ago. We vaccinate them and have sophisticated medical procedures to keep them alive, even if their own breeding as screwed them over.
However, I do know that there were several top sires in golden retrievers that were siring puppies well into their teens as early as the 1920’s and 1930’s.
Retrieverman recently posted..Head desk!
I’d question if that’s even the case actually. Our medical ability to treat some diseases and do preventative care is certainly increasing as a byproduct of the human medical research and innovation curve, but I don’t see the tangible results. This suggests to me that the pace at which medical science is improving lifespans is being outpaced by the degree to which malgenics is decreasing them.
For example in humans we see the “oldest living human dies” stories nearly every other year or so, and the trend there is almost always increasing. If we look at average lifespan across all humans we also have a nice steady line that is increasing rapidly. The stories of the oldest living dogs, however, are decades ago and they are hardly being challenged by any current dogs as you’d expect with even a modest improvement in care and treatment.
I wonder if that’s the case with crossbreed and mongrel dogs.
It would be very interesting to see.
The longevity record for a golden retriever is 19.5 years, and he died just a few years ago.
I know that cats live a very long time now– probably because they haven’t been split up into breeds.
And cats have much less genetic diversity as a population than dogs do.
Retrieverman recently posted..Head desk!
I have dogs like that. They double as lumpy rugs.
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Zz39lIHAfQA/Shm6boELqwI/AAAAAAAABXw/5plKngXuZps/s1600-h/Flatdogs052409.jpg
Embedding the picture won’t work for me.
I downloaded a paper on cancer in dogs recently, published in the forties, and a lot of the dogs in it were pretty old, with multiple cancers. I’ll try to attach it.
Jess recently posted..Your Words for the Day
I believe some of the scent detection dogs (including the newest breed using jackal/dog crosses) would be “better” in that role than 100 years ago. It’s hard to say if dogs bred for military/police role are better than those of 100 years ago since what’s wanted has altered, but probably they are. For one thing, there are DNA tests for some problems and tests like OFA/Penn hip for others. The “Dutch” police dog may not be purebred by kennel club definition, but it is certainly a pedigreed breed with the better breeders very careful indeed to research those pedigrees. Seeing eye dogs are improved since their inception — the development of tests for performance as well as health has resulted in far more successful percentage than when “Buddy” was the first lady of the Seeing eye. Even the lab/shepherd crosses are again, carefully selected by pedigree. It’s not just any lab x any GSD.
I know what you meant was the conformation folk and, to some degree, the performance competition folk — it’s hard to say if herding dogs of today are really better at herding than those of 1910. Are they better than those of 1810? hard to say — competitions in 1810 were informal and “local” — the USBCHA national just finished is hardly that. Are the dogs healthier? again, hard to say, since the failures of 1810 were not recorded like the failures of 2011 are. How many dogs were simply killed as not good enough herders in 1810 or who succumbed to disease or illness? Ulf the Herdsman didn’t record it.
We can certainly document the problems of exaggeration and lack of concern for disorders that start with the “kennel club” mentality (including ISDS), particularly the geometric progression evident post 1920 when functionality in the real world became less important than success in an artificial conformation (or field ) venue. On the other hand, there is also the continuing creation of new breeds (Mi-Ki, Hangin’ tree cowdogs) and the umpteen trillion “designer dogs”, some of which are well on their way to becoming a fully recognized ‘breed’. Are most Great Danes able to function as boarhounds or even protective mastiffs? nope. Do most of them need to? nope. Would they be better off without harle coloration and other exaggerations so they are more like the dogs of 1910? probably physically. Tempermentally? maybe not so much.
We need to deal with the damaging exaggerations without being so enamored of the past that we delude ourselves that it was a “golden age” of perfect pooches. We can “fix” this. We only need to decide that some flexibility regarding “registry” (the rigidity does not occur in most livestock registries) and more attention to health is important enough.
Peggy Richter
thought you folk would enjoy the fact that CBS news has a video of a Search and Rescue rough collie who made a successful find in CA —
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7381825n&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+cbsnews%2Ffeed+(CBSNews.com)
So there are at least some collies that have decent eyes, brains and the temperament & structure to do this kind of work. Hopefully this dog has relatives who are equally talented and sound.
Peggy Richter.
I agree with a lot of what you have said Christopher. Although I’m no genius when it comes to dogs and health, I do have common sense.
The Kennel Clubs all seem so focused on looks over health. As long as the dog looks the part, who cares what’s going on inside him/her. It will still receive it’s ribbon and go on to produce more pretty little puppies who look horrid on the inside.
I guess that’s just society as a whole for you though.. where not only the strong, the weak survive as well.
Pennypup recently posted..Dilated Cardiomyopathy (DCM) Genetic Mutation Testing
Pedigree dogs are more likely to have health problems than mutts because they are more in-bred. The bad health traits are magnified. We tend to bring dogs to the vet more often for preventative care so it offsets this issue. Pedigree dogs tend to live the same amount of time as before because this. A mutt will live longer.
http://www.DazzleDogDelight.com
http://www.facebook.com/DazzleDogDelightFanPage
Joy Randel recently posted..Crates Expectations
The dogs we see today are very different from the dogs a 100 years back. But one thing is for sure, in early times dogs were solely used for work but now they are also part of our lives, living a healthy life. They live longer and even if their breeding has changed they retain the core qualities of each breed. Excellent read!