GCH Afterall Painting The Sky
Breed: Fox Terrier (Wire) Sex: Bitch
AKC: RN 17023004 Date of Birth: June 18, 2008
Breeder: A J Pertuit Jr & Betty Seton
Owner: Victor Malzoni Jr & Torie Steele & S & M Olund & D Ryan
Sire: Ch Fyrewyre Fast And Furious Dam: Fyrewyre Forget-Me-Not
A lot of fair criticism can be leveled at the Wire Fox Terrier winner of Westminster 2014, and not for any specific faults of the nice looking bitch Afterall Painting The Sky that took home Best In Show.
She’s a fox terrier that’s probably never seen a fox, never dug to prey or bolted anything more than a squirrel from a tree in her back yard. This is a distinction that can likely be said of all of her ancestors back 100 years and is a simple reality of what dog showing is. Dog shows don’t select “working” dogs and really, there’s not much demand for a fox hunting dog anyway. Certainly less demand than there is for a pampered dog that LOOKS somewhat like a dog that hunted fox a century ago in a country thousands of miles away. This, too, is a simple reality of the modern era. Moan all you want, the fru-fru fox terrier hasn’t doomed working terriers, lack of real work has.
The win wasn’t a big surprise. The Westminster Kennel Club has awarded more BIS wins to Fox Terriers than any other breed and when they first started giving out “Best In Show” awards in 1907 they awarded them to a Smooth Fox Terrier for the first four years. Thereafter the Wire Fox Terrier, an artificial breed division based solely on the type of coat, reigned supreme. They took home BIS in 1915, 1916, 1917, 1920, 1926, 1928, 1930, 1931, 1934, 1937, 1946, 1966, 1992, and now in 2014. That’s 14 wins for Wire Fox Terriers, more than any other breed by a wide margin, the next best performer coming in at 8 wins for the Scottish Terrier.
It’s a rather common criticism that Westminster is a “Terrier” show, and really has been since the start. The Terrier group has won 46 times, Sporting 19, Working group 15 (3 wins for what are now Herding group dogs), Toy 11, Non-sporting 10, Hound 5, and Herding 1.
These distorted numbers invalidate the promise of what a dog show is supposed to determine: comparing individual dogs against their breed standards. The odds are just astronomical that such a strong bias would exist if there were a level playing field. And heck, if we believed the farce that the entire point of breeding to these standards is to produce animals fit for work, I’ll point out that the Herding group, which clearly has the greatest claim on animals still being used for their original purpose, has but 1 win and that comes from a German Shepherd Dog owned by a Firestone heiress: a breed that’s never actually been used widely for shepherd work!
One breed has won more than twice of any other breeds and the Terrier group has won more than twice any other group. Now, count how many people you know who USE a terrier for some sort of work. Sure, there are people who find excuses to exercise their pet terriers in work-like-things that are better called hobby sports (and recall that fox hunting used to be a sport for the rich aristocracy and the terrier men were there as paid help, it wasn’t a sport for them, they were on the clock). Do know even a single person who needs a terrier as a tool for doing a work activity that is not done simply to pantomime what other people did in the past? Do they get paid for this work? File a tax return as a business? Didn’t think so.
Adding to the superficial nature of the breed, the “Wire” Fox Terrier is an example of a breed that was created for no other purpose than to divide an already fine breed into separate breeds, crush diversity (we can’t have two different coat styles in one breed!), and award more ribbons. It’s perfectly acceptable to show types to create a new breed by dividing a gene pool on some superficial metric, creating two smaller gene pools and driving up the background inbreeding and further limiting the sorts of matings that can take place and diversity that can exist in a breed. It’s NOT acceptable, apparently, to create a new breed by mixing two older breeds.
The dog world is full of these rather arbitrary splits: Rough and Smooth Collies are divided by a coat length, Smooth and Wire Fox Terriers are divided by a coat length, Great Danes are divided into “families” by coat colors and few breed between families creating de facto breeds, Belgian Sheepdogs are divided into the Groenendael, Tervuren, and Malinois over coat and superficial characteristics, etc.
Despite the new claims that the breeds were developed separately (the same has been claimed of Corgis which has been disproven by DNA), the Smooth and Wire Fox Terriers were once the same breed and the division by coat style is actually ill conceived as the ideal wire coat was only maintained by admixture between smooth and wire haired dogs. It was a moderately wire coat versus the rather abundant and long softer wire coat we see today.
By placing an artificial barrier between the two varieties, the ability to keep the wire coat in check was lost and much like what happened with the Rough Collie, an over-abundant and high maintenance coat has replaced a moderate and effective working coat, and there’s really no means to rein that back in, as breeders can now only help but doubling down on more and more coat.
Not that it matters, though, it’s just another affect of the show world creating high maintenance hairballs out of once moderate and rough and ready dogs. But it’s not like there are gussied up equestrians in blood red coats bemoaning their lost fox terriers.
One small consolation, which might come as a surprise as I have often criticized the carefree and wanton use of continued inbreeding to produce winning dogs, Afterall Painting The Sky is not very inbred at all in her recent pedigree. In fact, decidedly less so than both of the Border Collies who won at Westminster this year.
I’ve filled in a pedigree complete to 6 generations (and a bit further when I could find the information) and found the COI to be only 3.84%
Sky’s first sign of inbreeding comes in on the great grandparent level. Where an outcrossed individual would have 8 unique great grandparents, Sky has 7.
While it’s almost certain that looking at more generations would result in much higher COI numbers, this dog’s recent breeding is not overly tight and focused on a small number of dogs.
It would most certainly be healthy and productive to remove the barriers from breeding Smooth to Wire Fox Terriers, and it would be even more healthy and diversity supporting to open the stud books and allow breeders the freedom to use modern knowledge and possibly a small but steady stream of other breeds to keep the Fox Terrier gene pool healthy and large. Closed stud books and closed gene pools are toxic. But until that day comes, at least the people behind this winning bitch didn’t give in to the lure of kennel blindness and mindless devotion to the inbreeding cult to produce their winning bitch.
And it’s very sad that both of the Border Collies at Westminster had higher COIs.
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If you could have seen her ancestors, they would look like Jack Russells, because a Jack Russell is just an old variant of fox terrier.
I hate the shoulder carriage on these kinds of fox terriers though. And the gait is terrible.
The thing is you even get these shoulders in Jack Russells, even in Russell Terriers that occasionally throw long-legged pups
Like Rhodie here: http://retrieverman.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/rhodie-all-legs.jpg
retrieverman recently posted..My dad and my uncle at a foxhound show, early 1960′s
Sky’s ancestors, going quite a way back, would look much like she does. The fox terrier is one of the breeds that have changed the least over the years. The original bitch in Parson Russell’s kennel was a SMOOTH fox terrier – but looked more like today’s Jack Russell than other smooth’s – either then or now. She was smaller with a dense broken coat, etc.. Apparently, he didn’t like the direction the terriers were going in (he felt they couldn’t work) and started his own line with the one that could. Today we see the result.
The two coats of the fox terrier were thought to be two varieties of one breed. Several years ago that changed. I don’t know the circumstances but it’s now believed they are separate breeds and although they were interbred for a number of years ( while they were thought to be varieties) they don’t have the same origins. That’s when AKC changed their designation from varieties to breeds. BTW, the smooth is the older of the two.
Full of shit.
The the two breeds are derived from the same type of dog- the white hunt terrier.
They are one in the same breed. If you go back far enough, they all look like Jack Russells, even the wire-haired ones.
Stop smoking the Kennel Club pot.
retrieverman recently posted..Is Prince Harry a wildlife hypocrite?
https://archive.org/details/historydescripti1902leer
https://archive.org/details/foxterrier00hayngoog
“Belgian Sheepdogs are divided into the Groenendael, Tervuren, and Malinois over coat and superficial characteristics, etc”
You forgot one Belgian Shepherd, the Laekenois 🙂
I agree with Retrieverman, shoulder carriage is disturbing.
True. I didn’t feel like typing out Laekenois! And at that point I also realized that there are so many superficial breed splits that I am going to do an entire post on it. The list is really long. And disturbing.
Looking forward to it.
I find it odd that in some breeds, such as the Belgian Shepherds, certain countries allow the types to interbreed and others don’t. I thought the Kennel Clubs went off the country of origin’s standards but perhaps not.
I know of one recent working Malinois litter that have a few “fluffy” pups and a “fluffy” sire. The breeders said in some European countries they would be classed as Tervs (albeit shorter haired than your normal showline Tervs), but here in Australia, as the parents of the sire are Malinois he is a Malinois, therefore his pups are a Malinois.
Heh, this “do not cross the streams!!” mindset is pretty much a given within what should be one breed — can’t have the type that has been so carefully set get taken away….it’s bad breeding practice….
A few years back I got roundly chastised way on a Border Collie group page by a lady who does sport as well as some AKC herding and who accused me of being completely irresponsible.
My crime? We selected to female Border Collies from strictly trialing/working kennels to breed with our male — his breeders had a nice local reputation for producing dogs that did better in sport and had more of the show dog looks, but they bred for just plain working farm dogs, as they didn’t trial.
The quote: “Those bitches are NOT dogs bred for obedience and agility! Those dogs only know how to herd sheep and can’t be tamed! Those puppies will be mutts who don’t know their jobs! And if they are like their mothers’ lines they’ll be ugly, wispy things with scant coats and bad ears (our girl’s ears do the up/down thing; I find it cute — guess not everybody does)..How daaareee youuuu!!! (ok, that’s not verbatim). By the same token she branded me a VBP (very bad person) for diluting pure herding/trialing lines with our male, thus “how daaaareeee ewwwwweeee!”. Thus
At which point I became, my dogs became, well, black sheep, vpb/vbd, a race mixer! ….obviously one of those horrid BYBs (cue garlic and wooden stakes, maybe a silver bulltet) — I crossed the streams…all of them were papered, pedigreed Border Collies who looked and acted pretty much alike and had pretty much the same propensities (admittedly the females are a bit more zoomy and could herd a lot more speedily, intensely, and flashily, but our male was better in a stockyard setting and didn’t stress flightly animals out as much), but…the streams got crossed (which of course makes me want to breed in a show collie and an outcross just to piss off everyone)
Same thing happened to a GSD owner I know who (gasp) crossed a DDR/Czech line male with W.Ger. working line females (one of which also had some unique and long forgotten, old school Anglo-American lines in her, which isn’t even German! the horror!). All are German Shepherds, but she’s obviously a VBP, a BYB…because she crossed the lines and thus the purity has been sullied…the puppies cannot be show dogs (they look too old fashioned) but they aren’t zingy enough for the schutzhund purists in this country either (oh, and some of them get little patches of white on their chests, verrrry verrrrry baaaad).
I notice her dogs are actually pretty damn healthy and have pretty good hips, a very nice temperment…
The first time I contacted someone from the Laekenois club I was discouraged from pursuing the Lakes. I was told they “already have a lot of health issues.”
That was years ago.
Years ago I contacted the Laekenois parent club and whomever answered the phone told me not to pursue them, as they “already have too many health issues.”
The lady sounded terribly upset.
Good for them in regards to not falling for the inbreeding thing — maybe there is some hope.
Awful shoulders (and they are pretty substandard — which beggars the question: judges? quo vadis here?) aside (I’m not sure I much care for her back legs all that much either, maybe it’s just the stack but for a working dog I’d like to see the legs more up underneath them — wish they’d put the dogs in a more natural stance, but I digress), I will say that at least the fox terriers aren’t so outlandishly extreme in their looks as to make it a major health concern, and the modern dog at least looks quite a bit like the ones in old photos, which is better than many breeds are doing now. This has probably helped them quite a bit.
3.84%… That’s gotta be a record low.
Sorry if I’m a bit off course here, but I’m fascinated by your swell pedigree/COI form. Is that something you came up with/built yourself or does it live anywhere on the interwebs where I can find it? Thanks in advance.
Both the pedigree form and the chart were created with the excellent “Pedigree Explorer” or PedX software from BreedMate. http://www.breedmate.com/
” Do know even a single person who needs a terrier as a tool for doing a work activity that is not done simply to pantomime what other people did in the past? Do they get paid for this work?” Yup! Plenty of people….all the terriermen in the UK where the PRTs (the original fox terriers) are, among other “breeds”, still used in foxhunting, and plenty of people here in Austria, Germany andmost of the rest of Europe, who work their PRTs on fox, boar and even on lowland game and for finding injured prey.
What I’ve seen on the continent is the Jagdterriers (and all their variants) and the dachshunds are more common than English dogs. Jagds really impress me, but I doubt they could be canine ferrets with smaller subspecies of red fox.
The hunt terrier, as in the one that bolts the fox to the hounds, is finished. The ban has changed what can be done.
I’ve had a lot of experience with an earthdog JRT from JRTCA lines. It was my grandfather’s dog. She was good for only earth dog work– way too small to hunt other things– and she did not tree.
If a terrier doesn’t tree around here, it’s considered useless. Our native terriers– feists and rat terriers– are natural treeing dogs.
I don’t think earthdogs have a future in the US. We have too many guns to justify them.
retrieverman recently posted..The hunt terrier
I think you should be able to breed Fox terriers to Jack Russells.
It’s the same dog bred to a different standard.
retrieverman recently posted..The hunt terrier
just a quibble that you know very well comparing a COI(6) to a COI(11) isn’t appropriate 😉
No way of knowing (without further pedigree data) if the COI(11) of the terrier would bear out the comparison to the BCs, but presumably you could run a COI (6) on the BCs.
Sure, but you can see the source of the inbreeding on the pedigrees I posted. Kelso is ~10% at that level, so it’s clearly a serious spread.
I share concern about inbreeding, but find it hard to decide what is low enough.
If this question has been hashed through before, a link would be much appreciated: What are COI’s like in the wild? I know there’s evidence that in canids, inbreeding avoidance usually prevents mating of close relatives. But how strong is that avoidance when the common ancestor is five or seven or nine generations back? Is it possible that wolves commonly had COI’s of, say, 5 or above?
Can COI’s be calculated from looking directly at DNA?
p.s. the foxie that won Westminster doesn’t look all that natural to me. The coupling looks unnaturally short. (ie, the butt is too close to the rib cage).
You’re on the right track, but with wild populations and with dogs, the better measure is actually looking at how heterozygous they are on a genetic level.
This trumps COI which is a model of breeding patterns that gives us an estimate.
I mean, theoretically if you did a COI with enough generations, the two would converge.
But if we have DNA we can actually look at the level of allele matching across wide swaths of the genome. We don’t look at every site yet (at least cheaply) and there is both the genomne and exome to consider… But still, the technology is within reach to actually get a good idea about your dog’s level of heterosis directly.
That’s the future and will be the superior method soon. COI was just a tool before we even knew about directly sampling alleles.
So yes, we can compare wild populations and dogs.
In fact I have had my dogs tested and know their heterozygosity levels.
One day we’ll all have this information and even more detail, because there are some areas of the genome that are much more susceptible to damage in a homozygous state, such as the MHC where the immune response genes are located.
I agree, homozygosity measures trump COI, and it matters where the homozygosity is. (I expect, and hope, my dogs are homozygous for some genes, like the dominant K-locus genes for solid color, and the ‘clear’ allele for PRA. And some breed characteristics, like the golden in golden retriever, require homozygosity).
But it would be interesting to know how much inbreeding of distant relatives occurs in the wild . . . if wolves kept pedigrees what sort of COIs would they have? Given likely geography of dispersion, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a fair amount of mating between 3rd and 4th cousins, removed or not removed by generations.
The biggest difference is that wild populations are not artificially selected for mating. Dog breeds are not only closely inbred, but are also selected by humans for recessive traits — a double no-no.
Perhaps a good way to look at it (until we have the ability to test these things better) is to consider purebred domestic animals in light of island populations observed in nature.
Nature will select for recessive traits and homozygous genetic patterns — we see this most clearly in animals cut off from outside populations. It may be a benefit to that particular animal at that particular time/space location — whether it works out over the long haul seems to hinge upon how “plastic” the orginal population’s DNA is, which appears to tie back to how large an original base population was present, how genetically varied it was to begin with, and how many occurences of outside influence have happened along the way.
At this point it would also probably be good to consider, that, while Nature/the Universe doesn’t necessarily stop homozygous populations with their recessive traits a flying, it also doesn’t care if said populations go extinct — as it has after all, the building blocks of creation in its ownership….something else is there to take that population’s place over space/time.
We humans don’t really have that at our disposal — and we seem to care a great deal.
Okay …
http://www.lakesuperior.com/the-lake/natural-world/isle-royale-ice-bridge-climate-change-and-wolves-140217/
I don’t think that “nature” selects for recessive traits– individuals do; and if the offspring are not able to survive, then those traits are abolished naturally.
Well, if it isn’t a case of artificial (human domestication) selection — then what’s doing it?
I think one of the things people don’t consider is just how free and easy Nature is with throwing up different combos of traits; it is rational and logical in its prolifigacy, and a lot of them fail. The thing is, that we consider this sort of failure to be bad, but Nature is pretty neutral about it — it can always create something new.
Or it can let life go extinct completely — on a universal scale Nature does not appear to give two cares whether or not a certain planet has life forms on it.
So of course Nature can and will select for recessive traits If you could call it so, natural selection demands will throw up all manner of combinations in order to meet the need. I don’t think we should approach it with the same mindset that we consider human breeding programs of domestic animals — the philosophy, if you will (does Nature even engage in such a thing?) is quite different.
The best we can do is take what we see happening in nature and apply it to how we’re going about things — because we don’t own the patent on creating life, thus we can only follow the blueprints that nature lays out for us (even our ability to create new life forms through genetic engineering does not get us out of the natural paradigm).
Island biogeography and genetics is another topic. Of course you end out with high COIs when a population is founded by a single pregnant female who drifts to an island of some sort . . . or a founder population of a few individuals. You also end out with balancing selection. Over time some populations go extinct, some seem to persist with narrow gene pools.
Mainland animals? As best as I can figure with limited access to academic literature, recent science is questioning the assumption of inbreeding avoidance. See, eg., Marta Szulkin, Katie V. Stopher, Josephine M. Pemberton, Jane M. Reid, 2012, Inbreeding avoidance, tolerance, or preference in animals? Trends Ecology & Evolution, Volume 28, Issue 4, 205-211. I suspect the empirical work that has been done mostly uses rodents and drysophila (sp?). No mention of carnivora in the abstract of this or related recent publications.
I merely throw that out there, because that’s probably the closest, easiest natural parallel that readily comes to mind.
To an extent, by creating a studbook we split animals up into further and further genetic “islands” if you will — so we can assume that there was already a high level of COI and homozygosity, which is further blostered by increased breeding population isolation. This will give rise to more recessive traits being expressed (and allowed to flourish due to the artificial conditions of domestication).
This state can go on quite successfully, as is seen in wild populations of animals, but at some point there is a law of diminishing returns balance that gets tipped (in the wild it’s seen as extinction due to inability to adapt readily to ever changing conditions). Due to the unnatural conditions of domestication, animals can likely go further along than in the wild, but eventually the balance gets tipped.
With dogs, they’ve been incredibly lucky, because their original genomes were incredibly plastic and well suited to change…but we can’t take that for granted indefinitely I think.