Friday, December 10, 2010

You Can Blame Garrison Keillor's Grandfather


The Minnesota WTCD may have gotten its distinctive coat pattern
from the American Barbet, a Special Breed intended for Very Special People
.


In the past I have written a bit about the lost histories of the "Kill Devil Terrier" and the "Shenandoah Mountain Cur."

More recently I got a note from Sara at the Lessons from Layla blog.  

Would I support her push to get the Minnesota White-Toed Chipmunk Dog into the AKC?

Of course!   I clicked over to her blog and found an excellent breed description, but sadly it was short on  history.

Being a famous researcher, I flipped through the historical record and found a volume, printed in 1934, which had what I was looking for. 

I encapsulted a short thumb-nail history of the breed in the comments:

A rare dog, and a find!

I believe they were first bred by Garrison Keillor’s grandfather who wanted a Lutheran hunting dog. The dog was not designed for big game, as Lutherans are a modest people who only need enough meat for the Powdermilk Biscuit gravy, and the dog could not be too flashy because, well, Lutherans are not flashy people like the Episcopalians.

Hard to believe you found a pure Minnesota White-Toed Chipmunk Dog!

Terrific news and new hope for the breed!

A few minutes more, and I found a bit more of the story (and an illustration, see below) in a book entitled Famous Dogges and Dogge Men printed in 1923 by Alexander Ruttridge.

I did some more research and it appears this dog, while initially created by Garrison Keillor’s grandfather, was brought into an intensive breeding program funded by the Powdermilk Biscuit Company which, at one time, had 600 dogs and 10 kennel maids to take care of them.

As you may recall, the slogan of Powdermilk Biscuits is “Made from whole wheat raised in the rich bottomlands of the Lake Wobegon river valley by Norwegian bachelor farmers, so you know they’re not only good for you, but also (mostly) pure.”

It turns out the “mostly pure” line came to be after two dogs escaped their kennel and were found rolling in the flour and licking the edges of the bagging equipment at the Washburn A Mill where the flour for Powdermilk Biscuits was once ground.

They threw out the ruined flour, of course, and hosed off the bagging machinery too, but being Lutherans they figured they had to qualify the purity thing after that, and hence the modifier phrase.

Tragically, all but two of the Minnesota White-Toed Chipmunk Dogs were destroyed in a horrible flour mill fire at the Washburn A Mill. 

This was the 1928 fire, not the 1878 explosion at the same mill.  Some more history can be found here.

Clearly a gene pool worth preserving!

Exhausted from my research, I forgot about the Minnesota White-Toed Chipmunk Dog until, earlier today, when I was reminded of this lost breed while reading another friend's blog.

You see, among some of the readers of this blog, dogs like the Minnesota White-Toed Chipmunk Dog are NOT SPECIAL because they are not registered with the AKC and they do not carry a fancy provenance that can be read in an AKC all-breed book or on a breeders web site.  

And so they are not suitable companion animals.

I get it. 

Special people have special dogs, and common people have common dogs, and who wants to be common? 

No one!

When it comes to companion dogs, so many of us are "Special Needs."

And so the Minnesota White-Toed Chipmunk Dog has fallen out of favor because no one knows their story, and it has been deemed not a special breed suited for Very Special People.

This seems a tragic shame to me, and quite unfair.

You see what makes a dog special is not its size or its temperament. 

After all, every size and temperament of dog under the sun is available within an hour or two of your house.  Just check Petfinder if you don't believe me.

And of course it's not what the dog actually does either. 

I have checked around, and none of the AKC Rhodesian Ridgebacks are actually hunting lions, and none of the Portugese Water Dogs are actually herding fish into nets as some claim they once did.  No one who owns a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel is actually a royal person named Charles.  The Irish Wolf hounds are not racing down Irish wolves -- or even Minnesota wolves for that matter.

But it does not matter.  These dogs have provenance.  They have story. 

The poor rescue dogs at Petfinder are not special dogs suitable to be companion dogs for Special People because they do not have provenance.  

They have no fabled story.

To be a special companion dog for a Very Special Person, you have to have come from somewhere special, and have a little mystery and romance attached to you.  

A geographical region should be given a nod, and perhaps a specialized or arcane task, and maybe an odd color. 

And, of course, it never hurts to have a once-famous, but now-obscure person attached to the breed as well.

And so we have the French Bulldog and the Irish Terrier, the Parson Russell Terrier and the Gordon Setter.

We have the Chinese Crested and the Neopolitan Mastiff, the Inca Orchid Dog and the American Pit Bull Terrier. 

We have the Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, and the West Highland White Terrier, the Rhodesian Ridgeback and the Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever. 

Not a common dog among them, and never mind if not one of them actually works for a living or does a single thing better than any dog down at the pound.   

No, a special dog does not actually have to DO anything special; it is enough to claim that some ancestor, lost in the mists of time, might have done something special (at least once).

What makes these AKC dogs special is not what they actually ARE or what they actually DO, but what people SAY they are, and what they say they might be able to do.  

It's a bit like art.  

The major difference between a painting you can get for free from the art therapy room in a mental ward, and the high-class stuff they sell for thousands of dollars in the fancy galleries in New York, is that the latter is featured in a catalogue and has a few notes written about it in an obscure book about modern neo-fascist impressionism. 

What a world of difference that seems to make!

And so it is with dogs. 

It's all about the provenance

It's all about making people feel special so that someone else can charge them more for the priviledge. 

Then the newly-made "special person with a special dog" can go to the local dog park and make other people feel less special because their less-exclusive dogs probably do not have as interesing a story and as cool a provenance as this new dog which this new owner drove over three states to acquire. 

Nice!

But, of course, none of this is new.  

Some years back I wrote about the early dog shows of the late 19th Century:

[T]he attraction of dog shows was that people who themselves were as common as a turnip top could now fancy that they were among the social elite. They did not have to have real knowledge of animals, or have an important job or title or large estate -- they just had to purchase a dog from a "reputable" show breeder and put on airs.

And that's still true today!

For it all to work, of course, there must be "standards" to help keep the market up and the riff-raff out.

The standard says that the dog has to registered, and the dog can only be registered if it is racially pure. 

"Not one drop of foreign blood" is the rallying cry of the Kennel Club as well as the Ku Klux Klan. 

The breed has to have a history, and that history should be gilded pretty thickly.

The dog must have both a Call Name and a Kennel Name, because one name is simply not enough.

And, of course, the dog must have a pedigree with five generations of multi-syllable names typed in, each with their own registration numbers afixed below. 

Which brings me to where we are today.  

You see, Garrison Keillor's grandfather made a serious mistake when he did not rush to get the Minnesota White-toed Chipmunk Dog on to the rolls of the Kennel Club as soon as the breed was created. 

If Olaf Keillor had registered his dogs with the Kennel Club (and if the Washburn A Mill had not caught fire) then the Minnesota White-Toed Chipmunk Dog might be a Top Ten AKC breed right now.

But it was not to be.  

The breed was never registered, the provenance was broken, the history lost, and the luster tarnished. 

Today only a handful of Minnesota White-Toed Chipmunk Dog exist at all.

And so Minnesota, while inhabited by many good Norwegian bachelor Lutheran farmers, remains a state without a state dog.  

Maryland has the Chesapeake Bay Retriever, Massachusetts the Boston Terrier, Texas the Blue Lacy, Virginia the American Foxhound, Louisiana the Leopard Dog, and South Carolina the Boykin Spaniel.

But Minnesota?

Minnesota has nothing.   And that, my friends, is a shame.

So please join with me today in pushing for belated AKC registration of the Minnesota White-Toed Chipmunk Dog and, also please join with me in asking that this dog, above all others, be declared the State Dog of Minnesota.  

Sara and Layla are asking for our support..

Not Layla, but another MWTCD dog discovered near Bemidji.

15 comments:

grapfhics said...

Can we say these dogs are above average?

PBurns said...

Definitely.

So far as I can tell, I have the only average dogs on the Planet.

P

Wicked Yankee said...

Massachusetts has the Boston terrier. Nice little dogs mostly, but its too bad they can't breathe.

I respdonded to a post a few months ago concerning the Boston terrier and what some are calling the "Olde Boston Bulldoge." I wrote that I liked the BT's because of their size and temperment, but I wanted a running companion, so a Boston would never work for me. In your response you made some suggestions, which I appreciated.

Since that time I adopted a small spotted mix from a Petfinder rescue. He's so mixed it is really hard to tell what might be in his background. He's young and he is a handful, but he has what I was looking for. He has long enough legs and enough snout to breathe, plus he has energy to spair. When he is mature, he'll make a good running/hiking buddy.

I have to admit, before reading this blog and other pieces of information, I was the person you have mentioned who looked trough breed books for the right dog, probably for all the reasons you have mentioned in the past. I still like a lot of different breeds and would even choose to buy one in the future if certain things change. At the moment, I'm happy with the choice I made.

What is odd is that when I go out with the dog and people ask me what kind he is, they don't like when I tell them he is a mutt. They always want to know what kind of mutt. People are uncomfortable with the fact that I just don't know.

aficat said...

Considering how many dogs I see with the Batsignal on their bums, I propose that the White Butt Mutt be the representative of our fair state. This would have nothing to do with the three in my backyard, no sir. Then again, I don't think I want to get into arguments about the shapeliness of heiny hair whorls...

(The Mill City Museum is a lot of fun, if you've never been there. The eight story elevator interactive history lesson is pretty awesome. We've got some sweet museums in the cities.)

HurricaneDeck said...

As always, both horrified and amused. :-)

I will have to tell you sometime about the Yellow-bellied Three Legged Wyoming Mountain Cur some time.

Seahorse said...

The dog in the last two photos is weak in toe coloration. So sad for a breed of such nobility.

Though provenance is obviously essential, you neglected to mention patina (pat-tin-uh, please, not the oafish pat-TEEN-nuh). Used in a sentence: "My terrier ran under the parked truck and acquired some patina this morning." I'm happy to report, that that is a true story from today, so YAY, ME!

Seahorse

PBurns said...

Tim, congratulations on the rescue, and I am thrilled it worked out! Yahoo!

Patrick

PBurns said...

Yes, Seahorse, I think you are right -- the last photo shows some cross breeding. Very hard to find a pure Minnesota White-toed Chimpmunk Dog these days. I think it's at least 7/8 pure though, as it turns around four times (rather than three) before it lies down, as the very best ones will do. MWTCD are very industrious!

P

seeker said...

Tim, your dog is an American Dog and just as mixed blooded as the American human. He sounds like he could be an American Terrier. But there are American Spaniels, American Shepards etc. too.
That's what makes Americas great. To quote Bill Murray in Stripes.
"We're Americans, with a capital 'A', huh? You know what that means? Do ya? That means that our forefathers were kicked out of every decent country in the world. We are the wretched refuse. We're the underdog. We're mutts! Here's proof: his nose is cold! But there's no animal that's more faithful, that's more loyal, more loveable than the mutt."

And aren't we all.

Debi and the TX JRTs

Stacy Able said...

Just wanted to note there is no such thing as an "american barbet" just a website about Barbet in America

On another note on the satire of the post.. people are plum crazy.. I'm all for rescues but annoyed when special people want a special purebred rescue so they can tell their special friends how wonderful they are they rescued a 100% whatever... And/or people go get a dog at a pound and spend money on DNA tests to tell what their average pooch is and then happily tell everyone they have a "part whatever" instead of just proudly saying it's a mutt

PBurns said...

WHAT??!!!

What do you mean there's no American Barbet? Of course there is. I have sold dozens.

I also have Spanish Barbets, German Barbets, French Barbets, Portugese Barbets, Lithuanian Barbets, Congo Barbets and even miniatiure Barbets. All very storied dogs, same as all Barbets.

I also have a source for Scarlett Point Terriers, the prick-eared version of the Jack Russell terrier named after the Scarlett Point Radar Station on the Isle Of Man where they were first bred. Very rare, and sourced from a Welshman in Belgium who is part Rwandan. I can hook up anyone who wants one. Solid dogs from a Good Man!

P.

Daniel Gauss said...

I'm disappointed that you made no mention of the Appalachian Corn Hound, which I profiled on an early April day several years ago.

PBurns said...

I consider the Appalachian Corn Hound a fairly established breed -- so established, in fact, that they are given 5 pages in Jim Webb's book, "Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America."

As you have noted (see http://shotonsite.blogspot.com/2007_04_01_archive.html): "Corn Hounds, were first created in the North Georgia mountains at the turn of the last century by mountain men who needed sturdy guard animals to protect their "corn likker" stills. Borrowing heavily from the French Great Pyrenees, for size, American Pitbulls for tenacity, and an occasional greyhound for speed in pursuing the hated 'Revenoors' out of the mountains, these ingenius mountain dwellers produced a hound whose only vice was a taste for fine French wines and cognacs. Alas, this was to lead to the ultimate demise of the breed, even though it guaranteed that they would stay out of the moonshine. Because of their expensive tastes, these poor hill folk were unable to afford to keep this handsome dog. Additionally, the Corn Hound was able to somehow maintain beautiful strong, white teeth throughout their lifespans."

As they still say here in Virginia, "Them's who say 'Likker is quicker' never met a Corn Hound at the still."

A fine American breed, and now in the UKC I believe.

P.

Unknown said...

A new kind of Service Dog: a friend says his dog had a real value for keeping his arthritis in check: by being a restless sleeper in his bed, the dog prevented him from staying in one position all night and seizing up in his joints. Hmmm...could we market this function and breed some for the purpose?

Rehabbing shelter dogs to become Hearing Dogs, my coworkers and I realized that the Squattish Terrier was quite common (any dog that submissively urinates), and many were actually Box Terriers (what you get from a box in front of the supermarket), and then a guy from Alabama told me about his native state's "Sooner Dogs". I eagerly asked about them: "It's a kind of dog that would sooner crap on the carpet."

Unknown said...

My beloved Maggie May has a pedigree as well- half black Cocker Spaniel and half Heinz 57.